'I tell you, Madam,' urged the chaplain, 'you're quite in the wrong. You've discovered after twenty years' wedlock that your husband's--a man! and you're vexed: would you have him anything else?' 'You're all in a story,' she blubbered maniacally; 'there's no justice, nor feeling, nor succour for a poor abused woman; but I'll do it--I will. I'll go to his reverence--don't try to persuade me--the Rev. Hugh Walsingham, Doctor of Divinity, and Rector of Chapelizod (she used to give him at full length whenever she threatened Zekiel with a visitation from that quarter, by way of adding ponderosity to the menace)--I'll go to him straight--don't think to stop me--and we'll see what he'll say;' and so she addressed herself to go. 'And when you see him, Madam, ask the learned doctor--don't ask me--believe the rector of the parish--he'll tell you, that it hath prevailed from the period at which Madam Sarah quarrelled with saucy Miss Hagar; that it hath prevailed among all the principal nations of antiquity, according to Pliny, Strabo, and the chief writers of antiquity; that Juno, Dido, Eleanor Queen of England, and Mrs. Partridge, whom I read of here (and he pointed to the open volume of Tom Jones), each made, or thought she made, a like discovery.' And the captain delivered this slowly, with knitted brow and thoughtful face, after the manner of the erudite and simple doctor. 'Pretty Partridges, indeed! and nice game for a parish clerk!' cried the lady, returning. 'I wonder, so I do, when I look at him, and think of his goings on, how he can have the assurance to sit under the minister, and look the congregation in the face, and tune his throat, and sing the blessed psalms.' 'You are not to wonder, Madam; believe the sage, who says, _omnibus hoc vitium est cantoribus_.' Devereux knew of old that the effect of Latin on Mrs. Irons was to heighten the inflammation, and so the matron burst into whole chapters of crimination, enlivened with a sprinkling of strong words, as the sages of the law love to pepper their indictments and informations with hot adverbs and well-spiced parentheses, 'falsely,' 'scandalously,' 'maliciously,' and _suadente diabolo_, to make them sit warm on the stomachs of a loyal judge and jury, and digest easily. The neighbours were so accustomed to Mrs. Irons' griefs, that when her voice was audible, as upon such occasions it was, upon the high road and in the back gardens, it produced next to no sensation; everybody had heard from that loud oracle every sort of story touching Irons which could well be imagined, and it was all so thoroughly published by the good lady, that curiosity on the subject was pretty well dead and gone, and her distant declamation rattled over their heads and boomed in their ears, like the distant guns and trumpets on a review day, signifying nothing.