"No dowried dame her spouse O'erbears, nor trusts the sleek seducer's vows."
But it would be as wrong to infer from this that the taint was universal, as it would be to gauge our own social morality by the erratic matrons and fast young ladies with whom satirical essayists delight to point their periods. The human heart is stronger than the corruptions of luxury, even among the luxurious and the rich; and the life of struggle and privation which is the life of the mass of every nation would have been intolerable but for the security and peace of well-ordered and happy households. Sweet honest love, cemented by years of sympathy and mutual endurance, was then, as ever, the salt of human life. Many a monumental inscription, steeped in the tenderest pathos, assures us of the fact. What, for example, must have been the home of the man who wrote on his wife's tomb, "She never caused me a pang but when she died!" And Catullus, mere man of pleasure as he was, must have had strongly in his heart the thought of what a tender and pure-souled woman had been in his friend's home, when he wrote his exquisite lines to Calvus on the death of Quinctilia:--
"Calvus, if those now silent in the tomb Can feel the touch of pleasure in our tears For those we loved, that perished in their bloom, And the departed friends of former years-- Oh, then, full surely thy Quinctilia's woe For the untimely fate, that bids thee part, Will fade before the bliss she feels to know How very dear she is unto thy heart!"
Horace, the bachelor, revered the marriage-tie, and did his best, by his verses, to forward the policy of Augustus in his effort to arrest the decay of morals by enforcing the duty of marriage, which the well-to-do Romans of that day were inclined to shirk whenever they could. Nay, the charm of constancy and conjugal sympathy inspired a few of his very finest lines (Odes, I. l3)--"_Felices ter et amplius, quos irrupta tenet copula_," &c.,--the feeling of which is better preserved in Moore's well-known paraphrase than is possible in mere translation:--
"There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, When two that are linked in one heavenly tie, With heart never changing, and brow never cold, Love on through all ills, and love on till they die! One hour of a passion so sacred is worth Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss; And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth, It is this, it is this!"
