And, without
knowing it, she passes from spirit to letter and from soul to sense.
And would you be simple enough to believe that the manners, the
sentiments of a man like you, who usually dress and undress before
your wife, can counterbalance the influence of these books and
outshine the glory of their fictitious lovers, in whose garments the
fair reader sees neither hole nor stain?--Poor fool! too late, alas!
for her happiness and for yours, your wife will find out that the
_heroes_ of poetry are as rare in real life as the _Apollos_ of
sculpture!
Very many husbands will find themselves embarrassed in trying to
prevent their wives from reading, yet there are certain people who
allege that reading has this advantage, that men know what their wives
are about when they have a book in hand. In the first place you will
see, in the next Meditation, what a tendency the sedentary life has to
make a woman quarrelsome; but have you never met those beings without
poetry, who succeed in petrifying their unhappy companions by reducing
life to its most mechanical elements? Study great men in their
conversation and learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they
condemn poetry and the pleasures of imagination.
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