hich the lady has
the better of the gentleman, as in the following:

'"Wife, from all evil, when shalt thou delivered be?"
"Sir, when I" (said she) "shall be delivered from thee."'

But such things are rare. Usually the laugh is on the other side. As the
Frenchman wrote:

'While Adam slept, Eve from his side arose:
Strange! his first sleep should be his last repose!'

Everybody knows the epitaph which Dryden intended for his wife; and side
by side with it may be placed the lines by an anonymous author:

'God has to me sufficiently been kind,
To take my wife, and leave me here behind.'

So again:

'Brutus unmoved heard how his Portia fell;
Should Jack's wife die, he would behave as well.'

The story of the man who, at his spouse's funeral, deprecated hurry, on
the ground that one should not make a toil of a pleasure, need only be
alluded to.

The chief charge against the wives is that they will insist upon being
the heads of the households. That is the refrain of many a flout hurled
against them. To marry--such is the moral of some lines by Samuel
Bishop--is to lose your liberty. The lady will have everything her way:

'For ne'er heard I of woman, good or ill,
But always loved best her own sweet will.'

So says a seventeenth-century writer; and the complaint is general.

'Men, dying, make their wills--why cannot wives?
Because wives have their wills during their lives.'

'Here,' wrote Burns--'here lies a man a woman ruled; the Devil ruled
the woman.' And Landor makes someone say to a scholar about to marry:

'So wise thou art that I foresee
A wife will make a fool of thee.'

That wives are talkative is a venerable commonplace. The historic
husband thought that the fact of his spouse's likeness not being a
'speaking' one was its principal merit. And Lessing makes a man excuse
himself for marrying a deaf woman on the ground that she was also dumb.
We all remember Hood's particular trouble:

'A wife who preaches in her gown,
And lectures in her night-dress.'

And so with those who are more than merely talkative--who are positively
scolds; while sometimes the conventional helpmeet is as active with her
fists as with her tongue--as in the case of the lady whose picture, her
husband thought, would soon 'strike' him, it was so exceedingly like
her.

It is, however, unnecessary to carry the tale further. This mocking at
matrimony has always been a feature of life and lit