mere crossness, for that he was sure her husband would not take it at all ill."[125] The looseness of the marriage tie had been a prevailing evil ever since the Restoration. Steele wrote in the _Tatler_ in 1710: "The wits of this island for above fifty years past, instead of correcting the vices of the age, have done all they could to inflame them. Marriage has been one of the common topics of ridicule that every stage scribbler hath found his account in; for whenever there is an occasion for a clap, an impertinent jest upon matrimony is sure to raise it. This hath been attended with very pernicious consequences. Many a country squire, upon his setting up for a man of the town, has gone home in the gaiety of his heart and beat his wife. A kind husband hath been looked upon as a clown, and a good wife as a domestic annual unfit for the company or conversation of the _beau monde_. In short, separate beds, silent tables, and solitary homes have been introduced by your men of wit and pleasure of the age."[126] The prevailing immorality and coarseness were in keeping with the absence of sympathy with all elevation of thought and sentiment. "If a man of any delicacy were to attend the discourses of the young fellows of this age," wrote Steele, "he would believe that there were none but prostitutes to make the objects of passion."[127] "Every woman is at heart a rake," thought Pope. Women were generally treated with disrespect, and distinctively female virtues were almost without appreciation. It is instructive to contrast the deeds of arms done in honor of a mistress in the Middle Ages, and the elevated sentiments held regarding women in what Addison called a "barbarous age," with the actions by which young men sometimes showed their devotion in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The latter were as extravagant as the former, but extravagant after how different a manner. One young fellow, distinguished himself by drinking wine strained through his mistress' chemise; another, by drinking out of her shoe; another, by having her slipper torn to shreds, cooked, and served up as a dish. Coarseness of thought naturally brought on coarseness of action. Horace Walpole wrote in 1737, "'Tis no little inducement, to make me wish myself in France, that I hear gallantry is not left off there; that you may be polite, and not be thought awkward for it. You know the pretty men of the age in England use the women with no more deference than they do their coach horses, and have not half the regard for them that they have for themselves."[128]