The great thing that they all chiefly like therein is that they may bear a rule, command and control other men, and live uncommanded and uncontrolled themselves.  And yet this commodity took I so little heed of, that I never was aware it was so great, until a good friend of ours merrily told me once that his wife once in a great anger taught it to him.  For when her husband had no desire to grow greatly upward in the world, nor would labour for office of authority, and beside that forsook a right worshipful office when it was offered him, she fell in hand with him, he told me.  And she all berated him, and asked him, “What will you do, that you will not put yourself forth as other folk do?  Will you sit by the fire and make goslings in the ashes with a stick, as children do?  Would God I were a man—­look what I would do!” “Why, wife,” quoth her husband, “what would you do?” “What?  By God, go forward with the best!  For, as my mother was wont to say—­God have mercy on her soul—­it is evermore better to rule than to be ruled.  And therefore, by God, I would not, I warrant you, be so foolish as to be ruled where I might rule.”  “By my troth, wife,” quoth her husband, “in this I daresay you say truth, for I never found you willing to be ruled yet.”

VINCENT:  Well, uncle, I follow you now, well enough!  She is indeed a stout master-woman.  And in good faith, for aught that I can see, even that same womanish mind of hers is the greatest commodity that men reckon upon in offices of authority.

ANTHONY:  By my troth, and methinketh there are very few who attain any great commodity therein.  For first there is, in every kingdom, but one who can have an office of such authority that no man may command him or control him.  No officer can stand in that position but the king himself; he only, uncontrolled or uncommanded, may control and command all.  Now, of all the rest, each is under him.  And yet almost every one is under more commanders and controllers, too, than one.  And many a man who is in a great office commandeth fewer things and less labour to many men who are under him than someone that is over him commandeth him alone.

VINCENT:  Yet it doth them good, uncle, that men must make courtesy to them and salute them with reverence and stand bareheaded before them, or unto some of them peradventure kneel, too.

ANTHONY:  Well, cousin, in some part they do but play at gleek—­they receive reverence, and to their cost they pay honour again therefor.  For except, as I said, a king alone, the greatest in authority under him receiveth not so much reverence from any man as according to reason he himself doth honour to the king.  Nor twenty men’s courtesies do him not so much pleasure as his own once kneeling doth him pain if his knee hap to be sore.  And I once knew a great officer of the king’s to say—­and in good faith I believe he said but as he thought—­that twenty men standing bareheaded before him kept not his head half so warm as to keep on his own cap.  And he never took so much ease with their being bareheaded before him, as he once caught grief with a cough that came upon him by standing long bareheaded before the king.