since he tells us in one of his Epigrams that to
manage the vociferations of his lady, he was compelled himself to become
a vociferator.--"Unfortunate wretch that I am, I who am a lover of
universal peace! But to have peace I am obliged ever to be at war."

Sir Thomas More was united to a woman of the harshest temper and the
most sordid manners. To soften the moroseness of her disposition, "he
persuaded her to play on the lute, viol, and other instruments, every
day." Whether it was that she had no ear for music, she herself never
became harmonious as the instrument she touched. All these ladies may be
considered as rather too alert in thought, and too spirited in action;
but a tame cuckoo bird who is always repeating the same note must be
very fatiguing. The lady of Samuel Clarke, the great compiler of books
in 1680, whose name was anagrammatised to "_suck all cream_," alluding
to his indefatigable labours in sucking all the cream of every other
author, without having any cream himself, is described by her husband as
entertaining the most sublime conceptions of his illustrious
compilations. This appears by her behaviour. He says, "that she never
rose from table without making him a curtsey, nor drank to him without
bowing, and that his word was a law to her."

I was much surprised in looking over a correspondence of the times, that
in 1590 the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, writing to the Earl of
Shrewsbury on the subject of his living separate from his countess, uses
as one of his arguments for their union the following curious one, which
surely shows the gross and cynical feeling which the fair sex excited
even among the higher classes of society. The language of this good
bishop is neither that of truth, we hope, nor certainly that of
religion.

"But some will saye in your Lordship's behalfe that the Countesse is a
sharpe and bitter shrewe, and therefore licke enough to shorten your
lief, if shee should kepe yow company, Indeede, my good Lord, I have
heard some say so; but if shrewdnesse or sharpnesse may be a juste cause
of separation between a man and wiefe, I thinck fewe men in Englande
would keepe their wives longe; for it is a common jeste, yet trewe in
some sense, that there is but one shrewe in all the worlde, and everee
man hath her: and so everee man must be ridd of his wiefe that wolde be
ridd of a shrewe." It is wonderful this good bishop did not use another
argument as cogent, and which would in th