and graces, give ear to their siren tunes, see them dance, &c., we think their conditions are as fine as their faces, we are taken, with dumb signs, in amplexum ruimus, we rave, we burn, and would fain be married.  But when we feel the miseries, cares, woes, that accompany it, we make our moan many of us, cry out at length and cannot be released.  If this be true now, as some out of experience will inform us, farewell wiving for my part, and as the comical poet merrily saith,

[5768] “Perdatur ille pessime qui foeminam
        Duxit secundus, nam nihil primo imprecor! 
        Ignarus ut puto mali primus fuit.”

[5769] “Foul fall him that brought the second match to pass,
        The first I wish no harm, poor man alas! 
        He knew not what he did, nor what it was.”

What shall I say to him that marries again and again, [5770]_Stulta maritali qui porrigit ora capistro_, I pity him not, for the first time he must do as he may, bear it out sometimes by the head and shoulders, and let his next neighbour ride, or else run away, or as that Syracusian in a tempest, when all ponderous things were to be exonerated out of the ship, quia maximum pondus erat, fling his wife into the sea.  But this I confess is comically spoken, [5771]and so I pray you take it.  In sober sadness, [5772]marriage is a bondage, a thraldom, a yoke, a hindrance to all good enterprises, ("he hath married a wife and cannot come”) a stop to all preferments, a rock on which many are saved, many impinge and are cast away:  not that the thing is evil in itself or troublesome, but full of all contentment and happiness, one of the three things which please God, [5773] “when a man and his wife agree together,” an honourable and happy estate, who knows it not?  If they be sober, wise, honest, as the poet infers,

[5774] “Si commodos nanciscantur amores,
        Nullum iis abest voluptatis genus.”

       “If fitly match’d be man and wife,
        No pleasure’s wanting to their life.”

But to undiscreet sensual persons, that as brutes are wholly led by sense, it is a feral plague, many times a hell itself, and can give little or no content, being that they are often so irregular and prodigious in their lusts, so diverse in their affections. Uxor nomen dignitatis, non voluptatis, as [5775]he said, a wife is a name of honour, not of pleasure:  she is fit to bear the office, govern a family, to bring up children, sit at a board’s end and carve, as some carnal men think and say; they had rather go to the stews, or have now and then a snatch as they can come by it, borrow of their neighbours, than have wives of their own; except they may, as some princes and great men do, keep as many courtesans as they will themselves, fly out impune, [5776]_Permolere uxores alienas_, that polygamy of Turks, Lex Julia, with Caesar once enforced in Rome, (though Levinus Torrentius and others suspect it) uti uxores quot