ver haunt nor frequent their companies or conversations, how
frequently soever they should invocate him and call upon his name; and that
not only he should leave and abandon them to rot alone with their wives in
a sempiternal solitariness, without the benefit of the diversion of any
copes-mate or corrival at all, but should withal shun and eschew them, fly
from them, and eternally forsake and reject them as impious heretics and
sacrilegious persons, according to the accustomed manner of other gods
towards such as are too slack in offering up the duties and reverences
which ought to be performed respectively to their divinities--as is
evidently apparent in Bacchus towards negligent vine-dressers; in Ceres,
against idle ploughmen and tillers of the ground; in Pomona, to unworthy
fruiterers and costard-mongers; in Neptune, towards dissolute mariners and
seafaring men, in Vulcan, towards loitering smiths and forgemen; and so
throughout the rest. Now, on the contrary, this infallible promise was
added, that unto all those who should make a holy day of the above-recited
festival, and cease from all manner of worldly work and negotiation, lay
aside all their own most important occasions, and to be so retchless,
heedless, and careless of what might concern the management of their proper
affairs as to mind nothing else but a suspicious espying and prying into
the secret deportments of their wives, and how to coop, shut up, hold at
under, and deal cruelly and austerely with them by all the harshness and
hardships that an implacable and every way inexorable jealousy can devise
and suggest, conform to the sacred ordinances of the afore-mentioned
sacrifices and oblations, he should be continually favourable to them,
should love them, sociably converse with them, should be day and night in
their houses, and never leave them destitute of his presence. Now I have
said, and you have heard my cure.

Ha, ha, ha! quoth Carpalin, laughing; this is a remedy yet more apt and
proper than Hans Carvel's ring. The devil take me if I do not believe it!
The humour, inclination, and nature of women is like the thunder, whose
force in its bolt or otherwise burneth, bruiseth, and breaketh only hard,
massive, and resisting objects, without staying or stopping at soft, empty,
and yielding matters. For it pasheth into pieces the steel sword without
doing any hurt to the velvet scabbard which ensheatheth it. It chrusheth
also and consumeth the bones wi