gil, Eclog., iii. 65.]

"Interdum tunica duxit operta moram."

["The hidden robe has sometimes checked love."
--Propertius, ii. 15, 6.]

To what use serves the artifice of this virgin modesty, this grave
coldness, this severe countenance, this professing to be ignorant of
things that they know better than we who instruct them in them, but to
increase in us the desire to overcome, control, and trample underfoot at
pleasure all this ceremony and all these obstacles? For there is not
only pleasure, but, moreover, glory, in conquering and debauching that
soft sweetness and that childish modesty, and to reduce a cold and
matronlike gravity to the mercy of our ardent desires: 'tis a glory,
say they, to triumph over modesty, chastity, and temperance; and whoever
dissuades ladies from those qualities, betrays both them and himself.
We are to believe that their hearts tremble with affright, that the very
sound of our words offends the purity of their ears, that they hate us
for talking so, and only yield to our importunity by a compulsive force.
Beauty, all powerful as it is, has not wherewithal to make itself
relished without the mediation of these little arts. Look into Italy,
where there is the most and the finest beauty to be sold, how it is
necessitated to have recourse to extrinsic means and other artifices to
render itself charming, and yet, in truth, whatever it may do, being
venal and public, it remains feeble and languishing. Even so in virtue
itself, of two like effects, we notwithstanding look upon that as the
fairest and most worthy, wherein the most trouble and hazard are set
before us.

'Tis an effect of the divine Providence to suffer the holy Church to be
afflicted, as we see it, with so many storms and troubles, by this
opposition to rouse pious souls, and to awaken them from that drowsy
lethargy wherein, by so long tranquillity, they had been immerged.
If we should lay the loss we have sustained in the number of those who
have gone astray, in the balance against the benefit we have had by being
again put in breath, and by having our zeal and strength revived by
reason of this opposition, I know not whether the utility would not
surmount the damage.

We have thought to tie the nuptial knot of our marriages more fast and
firm by having taken away all means of dissolving it, but the knot of the
will and affection is so much the more slackened and made loose, by