human
Spare, I pray thee, Pæan! and thou, O goddess, lay down thine arrows! The children are innocent. Transfix the mother herself! So prays Amphion. Yet Pæan bends his bow. Therefore she had to bury her herds of children, together with their sire, while Niobe seems to herself to be more noble than Latona's race, and moreover more fruitful even than the white sow. What dignity of deportment, what beauty, can compensate for your wife's always throwing her own worth in your teeth? For all the satisfaction of this rare and chief good is destroyed, if, entirely spoilt by haughtiness of soul, it entails more bitter than sweet. But who is so devotedly uxorious, as not to feel a dread of her whom he praises to the skies, and hate her seven hours out of every twelve? There are some things, trifling indeed, and yet such as no husband can tolerate. For what can be more sickening than the fact that no one woman considers herself beautiful, unless instead of Tuscan she has become a little Greek--metamorphosed from a maid of Sulmo to a