Authors of a higher class than the York printer and topographist have complained of their wives. We read in Burton that Bartholomæus Scheræus, Professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg, whom he calls “that famous Poet Laureate,” said in the introduction to a work of his upon the Psalms, he should have finished it long before, but amongst many miseries which almost broke his back (his words were _inter alia dura et tristia, quæ misero mihi pene tergum fregerunt_,) he was yoked to a worse than Xantippe. A like lamentation is made more oddly and with less excuse, by Domenico Bernino, the author of a large history of All Heresies, which he dedicated to Clement XI. Tertullian, he says, being ill advised in his youth, and deceived by that shadow of repose which the conjugal state offers to the travellers in this miserable world, threw himself into the troubled sea of matrimony. And no sooner had he taken a wife, than being made wise by his own misfortunes, he composed his laborious treatise _de molestiis nuptiarum_, concerning the troubles of marriage, finding in this employment the only relief from those continual miseries, to which, he adds, we who now write may bear our present and too faithful testimony,—_delle quali Noi ancora che queste cose scriviamo, siamo per lui testimonio pur troppo vero e presente._ The Historian of Heresy and the Hebrew Professor might have learnt a lesson from Petrarch's Dialogue _de importunâ Uxore_, in that work of his _de Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ_. When DOLOR complains of having a bad wife, RATIO reminds him that he might blame his ill fortune for any other calamity, but this he had brought upon himself and the only remedy was patience. _Est mala crux, conjux mala; crux tamen illa ferenda est Quâ nemo nisi Mors te relevare potest._ “It is the unhappy chance of many,” says Jeremy Taylor, “that finding many inconveniences upon the mountains of single life, they descend into the valleys of marriage to refresh their troubles, and there they enter into fetters, and are bound to sorrow by the cords of a man's or woman's peevishness; and the worst of the evil is, they are to thank their own follies, for they fell into the snare by entering an improper way.” To complain of the consequences, which are indeed the proper punishment, is to commit a second folly by proclaiming the first, and the second deserves the ridicule it is sure to meet with. Hartley Coleridge has well said, that there must always be something defective in the moral feelings or very unfortunate in the circumstances of a man who makes the public his confidant!