their coach, and who only
impart themselves that way. You are to examine whether your company
pleases them upon any other account, or, as some strong-chined groom,
for that only; in what degree of favour and esteem you are with them:

"Tibi si datur uni,
Quem lapide illa diem candidiore notat."

["Wherefore that is enough, if that day alone is given us which she
marks with a whiter stone."--Catullus, lxviii. 147.]

What if they eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing
imagination.

"Te tenet, absentes alios suspirat amores."

["She has you in her arms; her thoughts are with
other absent lovers."--Tibullus, i. 6, 35.]

What? have we not seen one in these days of ours who made use of this act
for the purpose of a most horrid revenge, by that means to kill and
poison, as he did, a worthy lady?

Such as know Italy will not think it strange if, for this subject, I seek
not elsewhere for examples; for that nation may be called the regent of
the world in this. They have more generally handsome and fewer ugly
women than we; but for rare and excellent beauties we have as many as
they. I think the same of their intellects: of those of the common sort,
they have evidently far more brutishness is immeasurably rarer there;
but in individual characters of the highest form, we are nothing indebted
to them. If I should carry on the comparison, I might say, as touching
valour, that, on the contrary, it is, to what it is with them, common and
natural with us; but sometimes we see them possessed of it to such a
degree as surpasses the greatest examples we can produce: The marriages
of that country are defective in this; their custom commonly imposes so
rude and so slavish a law upon the women, that the most distant
acquaintance with a stranger is as capital an offence as the most
intimate; so that all approaches being rendered necessarily substantial,
and seeing that all comes to one account, they have no hard choice to
make; and when they have broken down the fence, we may safely presume
they get on fire:

"Luxuria ipsis vinculis, sicut fera bestia,
irritata, deinde emissa."

["Lust, like a wild beast, being more excited by being bound,
breaks from his chains with greater wildness."--Livy, xxxiv. 4.]

They must give them a little more rein:

"Vidi ego nuper equum, contra