true pleasure, and she answered,—­“I will tell you, and tell you a truth which perchance ye may marvel at.  One of the greatest benefits God ever gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster.  For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it as it were in such weight, number, and measure, even so perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presently, sometimes with pinches, nips, and bobs, and other ways, (which I will not name for the honor I bear them,) so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Elmer, who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing while I am with him.  And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping, because whatsoever I do else beside learning is full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me.  And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and bringeth daily more pleasure and more, that in respect of it all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles to me.”  The Duke and Duchess of Suffolk were neither better nor worse than other parents who tormented and tyrannized over their children temp. Edward vi., and nothing but the prominence of the most unfortunate of their unfortunate daughters has preserved the memory of their domestic despotism.  Throughout all England it was the same, from palace to castle, and from castle to hovel; and father and tyrant were convertible terms.  Youth must have been but a dreary time in those old days.  Scott’s Sir Henry Lee, according to his son, kept strict rule over his children, and he was a type of the antique knight, not of the debauched cavalier, and would be obeyed, with or without reason.  The letters and the literature of the seventeenth century show, that, how loose soever became other ties, parents maintained their hold on their children with iron hands.  Even the license of the Restoration left fatherly rule largely triumphant and undisputed.  When even “husbands, of decent station, were not ashamed to beat their wives,” sons and daughters were not spoiled by a sparing of the rod.  Harshness was the rule in every grade of life, and harsh indeed was parental rule, until the reader wonders that there was not a general rebellion of women, children, scholars, and apprentices against the savage ascendency of husbands, fathers, pedagogues, and masters.