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his mind, he would oblige the French king to burn his galleys, and tolerate the protestant religion in his dominions, before he would sheath his sword. He concluded with calling Monsieur Mesnager an insignificant prig.

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The dispute was now growing very warm, and one does not know where it would have ended, had not a young man of about one-and-twenty, who seems to have been brought up with an eye to the law, taken the debate into his hand, and given it as his opinion, that neither Count Rechteren nor Monsieur Mesnager had behaved themselves right in this affair. "Count Rechteren,' says he, should have made affidavit that his servants had been affronted, and then Monsieur Mesnager would have done him justice, by taking away their liveries from them, or some other way that he might have thought the most proper; for, let me tell you, if a man makes a mouth at me, I am not to knock the teeth out of it for his pains. Then again, as for Monsieur Mesnager, upon his servants' being beaten, why, he might have had his action of assault and battery. But as the case now stands, if you will have my opinion, I think they ought to bring it to referees.'

I heard a great deal more of this conference, but I must confess with little edification; for all I could learn at last from these honest gentlemen was, that the matter in debate was of too high a nature for such heads as theirs, or mine, to comprehend.

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No. 482. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1712.

Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant.

LUCR. iii. 11.

As from the sweetest flower the lab'ring bee
Extracts her precious sweets.

CREECH.

WHEN I have published any single paper that falls in with the popular taste, and pleases more than ordinary, it always brings me in a great return of letters. My Tuesday's discourse, wherein I gave several admonitions to the fraternity of the henpecked, has already produced me very many correspondents; the reason I cannot guess at, unless it be, that such a discourse is of general use, and every married man's money. An honest tradesman, who dates his letter from Cheapside, sends me thanks in the name of a club, who, he tells me, meet as often as their wives will give them leave, and stay together till they are sent for home. He informs me, that my paper has administered great consolation to their whole club, and desires me to give some further account of Socrates, and to acquaint them in whose reign he lived, whether he was a citizen or a courtier, whether he buried Xantippe, with many other particulars: for that, by his sayings, he appears to have been a very wise man, and a good Christian. Another, who writes himself Benjamin Bamboo, tells me that, being coupled with a shrew, he had endeavoured to tame her by such lawful means as those which I mentioned in my last Tuesday's paper, and that in his wrath he had often gone further than Bracton allows in those cases; but that for the future he was resolved to bear it like

a man of temper and learning, and consider her only as one who lives in his house to teach him philosophy. Tom Dapperwit says, that he agrees with me in that whole discourse, excepting only the last sentence, where I affirm the married state to be either a heaven or a hell. Tom has been at the charge of a penny upon this occasion to tell me, that by his experience it is neither one nor the other, but rather that middle kind of state, commonly known by the name of purgatory.

The fair sex have likewise obliged me with their reflections upon the same discourse. A lady, who calls herself Euterpe, and seems a woman of letters, asks me whether I am for establishing the Salic law in every family, and why it is not fit that a woman who has discretion and learning should sit at the helm, when the husband is weak and illiterate ? Another, of a quite contrary character, subscribes herself Xantippe, and tells me that she follows the example of her namesake; for being married to a bookish man, who has no knowledge of the world, she is forced to take their affairs into her own hands, and to spirit him up now and then, that he may not grow musty, and unfit for conversation.

After this abridgment of some letters, which are come to my hands upon this occasion, I shall publish one of them at large.

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'You have given us a lively picture of that kind of husband who comes under the denomination of the hen-pecked; but I do not remember that you have ever touched upon one that is of the quite different character, and who, in several places of England, goes by the name of "a cot-queen." I have the misfortune to be joined for life with one of this character, who in reality is more a woman

than I am. He was bred up under the tuition of a tender mother, till she had made him as good a housewife as herself. He could preserve apricots, and make jellies, before he had been two years out of the nursery. He was never suffered to go abroad, for fear of catching cold; when he should have been hunting down a buck, he was by his mother's side learning how to season it, or put it in crust; and was making paper boats with his sisters, at an age when other young gentlemen are crossing the seas, or travelling into foreign countries. He has the whitest hand that you ever saw in your life, and raises paste better than any woman in England. These qualifications make him a sad husband. He is perpetually in the kitchen, and has a thousand squabbles with the cook-maid. He is better acquainted with the milk-score than his steward's accounts. I fret to death when I hear him find fault with a dish that is not dressed to his liking, and instructing his friends that dine with him in the best pickle for a walnut, or sauce for a haunch of venison. With all this he is a very good-natured husband, and never fell out with me in his life but once, upon the over-roasting of a dish of wild fowl. At the same time I must own, I would rather he was a man of a rough temper, that would treat me harshly sometimes, than of such an effeminate busy nature, in a province that does not belong to him. Since you have given us the character of a wife who wears the breeches, pray say something of a husband that wears the petticoat. Why should not a female character be as ridiculous in a man, as a male character in one of our sex?

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I am, &c.'

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