poor women of bygone times who trotted round on their own feet wearing coarse and heavy gowns only fit, as they consider, for peasants. The house must correspond and be furnished according to modern ideas. The walls are hung from floor to ceiling with damask, and fine pictures are needful; above all the chairs, when not covered with velvet, must at least be covered with silk so that the ladies may sit softly. Whoso takes a wife must also keep a good table, not served with homely dishes, which are plebeian, for the ladies of the present day insist on delicate food, not for gluttony—oh no—but because it keeps them healthy and of good heart, and consequently enables them to have fine and well-made children. If linen has to be sewn for the husband or babes the work is commonly sent to the convents, and then the husband is told there is so much to pay for such work and so much for the other and he has to loose his purse-strings or confront a pouting face. “With what majesty do the ladies now drive in their carriage, a peacock when he rustles and spreads his tail is not so proud and puffed up. A new custom too has been introduced in order to have more frequent occasion for going about the town. Visits are paid to brides, even by those who are not relations, and thus the women can spy out other folk’s business, which is always attractive. If the house be not nobly furnished they jeer at the master thereof and call him a miser; but if it be better found than their own they return home discontented and begin to grumble, saying: ‘I have been to see such a one and her house is beautiful; she has this and the other and all is in good taste; but we live worse than artisans, so that I no longer dare invite anyone as I will not have it said that I, who am as good as many of them, and had a marriage portion large eno’ to enjoy what they have—but as it must be so, _pazienza_.’ And the poor wretch of a husband has to swallow it all, and either be constantly tormented, or content his wife and do what he dislikes or perchance cannot afford; for at length the perpetual clapper of the bell at night would break even the head of a ram, which is proverbially hard. “The ladies now all carry fans attached to golden chains when they leave the house, and not only in the streets do they flutter them but in the churches, as an aid to devotion while hearing mass. I have been told by a lady of honour and veracity, not in fun but in sober earnest, that she has seen women’s smocks trimmed round with lace exactly like Monsignori’s surplices. When they leave town for their villas, if the carriages are too large and heavy to go the whole distance, a lettiga[79] is necessary because mounting a horse savours of rusticity, though I have seen my mother-in-law, wife of Messer Luigi Capponi, and the wife of his brother Alessandro, who were not exactly plebeians or beggars, going to their villa in Val d’ Elsa some twenty miles from Florence on the horses of their factor or peasants.