What if they eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing imagination. "Te tenet, absentes alios suspirat amores." ["She has you in her arms; her thoughts are with other absent lovers."--Tibullus, i. 6, 35.] What? have we not seen one in these days of ours who made use of this act for the purpose of a most horrid revenge, by that means to kill and poison, as he did, a worthy lady? Such as know Italy will not think it strange if, for this subject, I seek not elsewhere for examples; for that nation may be called the regent of the world in this. They have more generally handsome and fewer ugly women than we; but for rare and excellent beauties we have as many as they. I think the same of their intellects: of those of the common sort, they have evidently far more brutishness is immeasurably rarer there; but in individual characters of the highest form, we are nothing indebted to them. If I should carry on the comparison, I might say, as touching valour, that, on the contrary, it is, to what it is with them, common and natural with us; but sometimes we see them possessed of it to such a degree as surpasses the greatest examples we can produce: The marriages of that country are defective in this; their custom commonly imposes so rude and so slavish a law upon the women, that the most distant acquaintance with a stranger is as capital an offence as the most intimate; so that all approaches being rendered necessarily substantial, and seeing that all comes to one account, they have no hard choice to make; and when they have broken down the fence, we may safely presume they get on fire: "Luxuria ipsis vinculis, sicut fera bestia, irritata, deinde emissa." ["Lust, like a wild beast, being more excited by being bound, breaks from his chains with greater wildness."--Livy, xxxiv. 4.] They must give them a little more rein: "Vidi ego nuper equum, contra sua frena tenacem, Ore reluctanti fulminis ire modo": ["I saw, the other day, a horse struggling against his bit, rush like a thunderbolt."--Ovid, Amor., iii. 4, 13.]