are they? A romance, are they? The true happiness of life? Very well:
here are the pleasures of them. You will be in love and make a
match--and look at all the worry of the settlement, in which, by the
way, you may often be defrauded. You will get married--a fine
ceremony, with a fine feast; and all the nasty old women of the
neighbourhood will come and tell bawdy stories to enliven the
occasion. You get married, and thereafter you are at the mercy of your
wife, who will indulge your wishes or not as suits her mood. Your
house will be all awry if she has but a slight headache. When the baby
comes, the place will be filled with old women and baby-linen and
medical apparatus, and you will have all the anxieties of a father
added to the discomforts of a neglected husband. For the rest, your
wife will know how "to cuckold, jilt, and sham" as well as any gay
lady of Covent Garden. And so on.

Much of the satire is acute and well-turned, often novel in expression
if not in thought. But it is, as has been suggested, in the picture of
English middle-class life under James II. that the importance of the
book lies. Here is the domestic side of what the great diarists and
the great poets hint at, and the excess of which municipal records,
those treasuries of private appearances in public, chronicle with the
severity of judgment. You have the young couple going (alas that the
river for this purpose has, so to speak, been moved farther up its own
course!) for a row on the Thames, with Lambeth, Bankside and Southwark
echoing to their laughter. They might visit the New Spring Gardens at
Vauxhall; but they would probably avoid the old (second) Globe Theatre
on Bankside, for it was a meeting-house at which the formidable Baxter
preached. Or they might go into Kent and pick fruit, even as
"beanfeasters" do to this day; or to Hereford for its cider and perry,
the drinking of which is a custom not yet extinct. Or maybe only for