“Here, take my muff, and, do you hear, good man;
        Now give me pearl, and carry you my fan,” &c.

[6053]  ------“poscit pallam, redimicula, inaures;
Curre, quid hic cessas? vulgo vult illa videri,
Tu pete lecticas”------

many brave and worthy men have trespassed in this kind, multos foras claros domestica haec destruxit infamia, and many noble senators and soldiers (as [6054]Pliny notes) have lost their honour, in being uxorii, so sottishly overruled by their wives; and therefore Cato in Plutarch made a bitter jest on his fellow-citizens, the Romans, “we govern all the world abroad, and our wives at home rule us.”  These offend in one extreme; but too hard and too severe, are far more offensive on the other.  As just a cause may be long absence of either party, when they must of necessity be much from home, as lawyers, physicians, mariners, by their professions; or otherwise make frivolous, impertinent journeys, tarry long abroad to no purpose, lie out, and are gadding still, upon small occasions, it must needs yield matter of suspicion, when they use their wives unkindly in the meantime, and never tarry at home, it cannot use but engender some such conceit.

[6055] “Uxor si cessas amare te cogitat
        Aut tote amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi,
        Ex tibi bene esse soli, quum sibi sit male.”

       “If thou be absent long, thy wife then thinks,
        Th’ art drunk, at ease, or with some pretty minx,
        ’Tis well with thee, or else beloved of some,
        Whilst she poor soul doth fare full ill at home.”

Hippocrates, the physician, had a smack of this disease; for when he was to go home as far as Abdera, and some other remote cities of Greece, he writ to his friend Dionysius (if at least those [6056]Epistles be his) [6057] “to oversee his wife in his absence, (as Apollo set a raven to watch his Coronis) although she lived in his house with her father and mother, who be knew would have a care of her; yet that would not satisfy his jealousy, he would have his special friend Dionysius to dwell in his house with her all the time of his peregrination, and to observe her behaviour, how she carried herself in her husband’s absence, and that she did not lust after other men. [6058]For a woman had need to have an overseer to keep her honest; they are bad by nature, and lightly given all, and if they be not curbed in time, as an unpruned tree, they will be full of wild branches, and degenerate of a sudden.”  Especially in their husband’s absence:  though one Lucretia were trusty, and one Penelope, yet Clytemnestra made Agamemnon cuckold; and no question there be too many of her conditions.  If their husbands tarry too long abroad upon unnecessary business, well they may suspect:  or if they run one way, their wives at home will fly out another, quid pro quo.  Or if present, and give them not that content which they ought, [6059]_Primum ingratae,