is be
done with the utmost plainness, so as to be decent; yet it must be done,
and this calls for ready money, and that ready money by so much
diminishes his stock in trade; nor is the wife at all to be charged in
this case, unless she either put him to more charge than was needful, or
showed herself dissatisfied with things needful, and required
extravagant gaiety and expense. Secondly, servants, if the man was
frugal before, it may be he shifted with a shop, and a servant in it, an
apprentice, or journeyman, or perhaps without one at first, and a
lodging for himself, where he kept no other servant, and so his expenses
went on small and easy; or if he was obliged to take a house because of
his business and the situation of his shop, he then either let part of
the house out to lodgers, keeping himself a chamber in it, or at the
worst left it unfurnished, and without any one but a maid-servant to
dress his victuals, and keep the house clean; and thus he goes on when a
bachelor, with a middling expense at most.

But when he brings home a wife, besides the furnishing his house, he
must have a formal house-keeping, even at the very first; and as
children come on, more servants, that is, maids, or nurses, that are as
necessary as the bread he eats--especially if he multiplies apace, as he
ought to suppose he may--in this case let the wife be frugal and
managing, let her be unexceptionable in her expense, yet the man finds
his charge mount high, and perhaps too high for his gettings,
notwithstanding the additional stock obtained by her portion. And what
is the end of this but inevitable decay, and at last poverty and ruin?

Nay, the more the woman is blameless, the more certain is his overthrow,
for if it was an expense that was extravagant and unnecessary, and that
his wife ran him out by her high living and gaiety, he might find ways
to retrench, to take up in time, and prevent the mischief that is in
view. A woman may, with kindness and just reasoning, be easily
convinced, that her husband cannot maintain such an expense as she now
lives at; and let tradesmen say what they will, and endeavour to excuse
themselves as much as they will, by loading their wives with the blame
of their miscarriage, as I have known some do, and as old father Adam,
though in another case, did before them, I must say so much in the
woman's behalf at a venture. It will be very hard to make me believe
that any woman, that was not fit for Bedlam, if