“He sighs for freedom, she for power.”

Mr. Bolingbroke did not comply with his wife’s request, or rather with her injunction, to write every post: and when he did write, Griselda always found some fault with his letters. They were too short, too stiff, or too cold, and “very different indeed,” she said, “from what he used to write before he was married.” This was certainly true; and absence was not at the present crisis the most advantageous thing possible to our heroine. Absence is said to extinguish a weak flame, and to increase a strong one. Mr. Bolingbroke’s passion for his Griselda had, by some means, been of late diminished. He parted from her with the disagreeable impression of a dispute upon his mind. As he went farther from her he perceived that instead of dragging a lengthened chain, his chain grew lighter. His uncle recovered: he found agreeable society in the neighbourhood; he was persuaded to prolong his stay: his mind, which had been continually harassed, now enjoyed some tranquillity. On an unlucky evening, he recollected Martial’s famous epigram and his wife, in one and the same instant:

“My mind still hovering round about you,

I thought I could not live without you;

But now we have lived three weeks asunder,

How I lived with you is the wonder.”

In the mean time, our heroine’s chief amusement, in her husband’s absence, was writing to complain of him to Mrs. Nettleby. This lady’s answers were now filled with a reciprocity of conjugal abuse; she had found, to her cost, that it is the most desperate imprudence to marry a fool, in the hopes of governing him. All her powers of tormenting were lost upon her blessed helpmate. He was not to be moved by wit or sarcasm, eloquence or noise, tears or caresses, reason, jealousy, or the opinion of the world.

What did he care what the world thought, he would do as he pleased himself; he would be master in his own house: it did not signify talking or crying, or being in the right; right or wrong, he would be obeyed; a wife should never govern him; he had no notion of letting a woman rule, for his part; women were born to obey, and promised it in church. As to jealousy, let his wife look to that; if she did not choose to behave properly, he knew his remedy, and would as soon be divorced as not: “Rule a wife and have a wife,” was the burden of his song.

It was in vain to goad his insensible nature, in ho............