Now to the meaning of the second article!  My wife will be with child, —­here lies the prime felicity of marriage,—­but not of me.  Copsody, that I do believe indeed!  It will be of a pretty little infant.  O how heartily I shall love it!  I do already dote upon it; for it will be my dainty feedle-darling, my genteel dilly-minion.  From thenceforth no vexation, care, or grief shall take such deep impression in my heart, how hugely great or vehement soever it otherwise appear, but that it shall evanish forthwith at the sight of that my future babe, and at the hearing of the chat and prating of its childish gibberish.  And blessed be the old wife.  By my truly, I have a mind to settle some good revenue or pension upon her out of the readiest increase of the lands of my Salmigondinois; not an inconstant and uncertain rent-seek, like that of witless, giddy-headed bachelors, but sure and fixed, of the nature of the well-paid incomes of regenting doctors.  If this interpretation doth not please you, think you my wife will bear me in her flanks, conceive with me, and be of me delivered, as women use in childbed to bring forth their young ones; so as that it may be said, Panurge is a second Bacchus, he hath been twice born; he is re-born, as was Hippolytus,—­as was Proteus, one time of Thetis, and secondly, of the mother of the philosopher Apollonius,—­as were the two Palici, near the flood Simaethos in Sicily.  His wife was big of child with him.  In him is renewed and begun again the palintocy of the Megarians and the palingenesy of Democritus.  Fie upon such errors!  To hear stuff of that nature rends mine ears.

The words of the third article are:  She will suck me at my best end.  Why not?  That pleaseth me right well.  You know the thing; I need not tell you that it is my intercrural pudding with one end.  I swear and promise that, in what I can, I will preserve it sappy, full of juice, and as well victualled for her use as may be.  She shall not suck me, I believe, in vain, nor be destitute of her allowance; there shall her justum both in peck and lippy be furnished to the full eternally.  You expound this passage allegorically, and interpret it to theft and larceny.  I love the exposition, and the allegory pleaseth me; but not according to the sense whereto you stretch it.  It may be that the sincerity of the affection which you bear me moveth you to harbour in your breast those refractory thoughts concerning me, with a suspicion of my adversity to come.  We have this saying from the learned, That a marvellously fearful thing is love, and that true love is never without fear.  But, sir, according to my judgment, you do understand both of and by yourself that here stealth signifieth nothing else, no more than in a thousand other places of Greek and Latin, old and modern writings, but the sweet fruits of amorous dalliance, which Venus liketh best when reaped in secret, and culled by fervent lovers filchingly.  Why