I opened the _Essays_ carelessly, for each and every page of them is
precious and replete with themes for meditation. In so doing, I alighted
upon the chapter entitled, 'Of three Good Women,'--which commences thus:
'They are not to be found by the dozen, as every one knows, and
especially not in the duties of married life, for that is a market full
of such thorny circumstances that it is no easy matter for a woman's
will to keep whole and sound in it for any length of time.'

'Montaigne is an impertinent fellow!' I exclaimed, slamming to the book.
'What? this close reader of antiquity, this fine analyst of the human
heart, has been able to find only three good women, only three devoted
wives, in all the Greek and Roman annals! This is playing the joker out
of season. Goodness is the special attribute of woman. Every married
woman is good, or supposed to be such. I bethink me, too, that our old
jurists always make the law presume this goodness to exist, at the
outset,'

Thus meditating, I wandered into my library, and there took up a fine
old volume, bound in red morocco, and entitled 'The Dream of Vergier;' a
book full of wisdom and logic, and written by some venerable clerk,
during the reign of Charles V., king of France. I looked for the page
that had struck my fancy, but--alas! how oddly one's memory changes with
the lapse of years--instead of finding, in that grave old book, the just
panegyric of woman's goodness, I discovered, to my great surprise, only
a violent satire all spiced with texts borrowed from St. Augustine, the
Roman laws and the ancient canons, with this sage conclusion, full
worthy of the exordium:--

'I do not say, however, that there is no good woman at all, but the