“On one of our greatest generals, remarkable for his gentle, winning manner in the drawing-room as for his cool daring in the field, before he had earned his well-merited honours, I myself heard this verdict pronounced by a jury of maids and matrons: ‘Dear! he’s such a quiet creature, I’m sure he wouldn’t be _much use in a battle_!’ No; give them Parolles going to recover his drum, and they have a champion and a hero exactly to their minds, but they would scarcely believe in Richard of the Lion-Heart if he held his peace and only set his teeth hard when he laid lance in rest. “Therefore it is they tug so unmercifully at the slender thread that holds a captive, imagining it is by sheer strength the quiet creature must be coerced. Some day the pull is harder than usual, the thread breaks, and the wild bird soars away, free as the wind down which it sails, heedless of lure and whistle, never to return to bondage any more. Then who so aghast as the pretty, thoughtless fowler, longing and remorseful, with the broken string in her hand? “She fancied, no doubt, her prisoner was an abnormal creature, rejoicing in ill-usage; that because it was docile and generous it must therefore be poor in spirit, slavish in obedience, and possessing no will of its own. She thought she had found a four-leaved shamrock, and this is the result! “But I may talk for ever and end where I began. Men you _may_ convince by force of argument, if your logic is very clear and your examples or illustrations brought fairly under their noses; but with the other sex, born to be admired and not instructed, you might as well pour water into a sieve. Can you remember a single instance in which with these, while a word of entreaty gained your point forthwith, you might not have exhausted a folio of argument in vain?” He thinks for a minute, and then answers deliberately, as if he had made up his mind— “I never knew but one woman who could understand reason, _and she wouldn’t listen to it_!” CHAPTER VIII RUS IN URBE _Romæ Tibur Amem, ventosus. Tibure Romam!_ quoth the Latin satirist, ridiculing his own foibles, like his neighbour’s, with the laughing, half-indulgent banter that makes him the pleasantest, the chattiest, and the most companionable of classic writers. How he loved the cool retirement of his Sabine home, its grassy glades, its hanging woodlands, its fragrant breezes wandering and whispering through those summer slopes, rich in the countless allurements of a landscape that— “Like Albunea’s echoing fountain, All my inmost heart hath ta’en; Give me Anio’s headlong torrent, And Tiburnus’ grove and hills, And its orchards sparkling dewy, With a thousand wimpling rills,” as Theodore Martin translates his Horace, or thus, according to Lord Ravensworth— “Like fair Albunea’s sybil-haunted hall, By rocky Anio’s echoing waterfall, And Tibur’s orchards and high-hanging wood, Reflected graceful in the whirling flood.”