All gifts and invitations cease; no friend will value you, and you will be forced to lament your misery and make your complaint with Bartholomaeus Scheraeus, that famous poet laureate and professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg: “I would have finished this work long ago, except that, among other hard and grievous things that almost broke my miserable back”—I use his own words—among many miseries that almost broke my back, “marriage, through Xanthippe-like behaviour,” a shrew for my wife, tormented my mind beyond measure and more than all the rest.

So you too will be forced to complain and cry out at last, with Phoroneus the lawyer, “How happy I would have been if I had had no wife!”

If what I have said does not suffice, see more in Lemnius, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, book 4, chapter 13; Espensaeus, On Continence, book 6, chapter 8; Kornmann, On Virginity; Platina’s Dialogue on Love; The Practice of the Art of Loving; Barbaro, On Marriage; Arnisaeus, Politics, chapter 3; and the one who is “a match for them all,” Nevisanus the lawyer, in almost every page of his Marriage Miscellany.