A Good Woman is a comfort, like a man. She lacks of him nothing but
heat. Thence is her sweetness of disposition, which meets his stoutness
more pleasingly; so wool meets iron easier than iron, and turns
resisting into embracing. Her greatest learning is religion, and her
thoughts are on her own sex, or on men, without casting the difference.
Dishonesty never comes nearer than her ears, and then wonder stops it
out, and saves virtue the labour. She leaves the neat youth telling his
luscious tales, and puts back the serving-man's putting forward with a
frown: yet her kindness is free enough to be seen, for it hath no guilt
about it; and her mirth is clear, that you may look through it into
virtue, but not beyond. She hath not behaviour at a certain, but makes
it to her occasion. She hath so much knowledge as to love it; and if she
have it not at home, she will fetch it, for this sometimes in a pleasant
discontent she dares chide her sex, though she use it never the worse.
She is much within, and frames outward things to her mind, not her mind
to them. She wears good clothes, but never better; for she finds no
degree beyond decency. She hath a content of her own, and so seeks not
an husband, but finds him. She is indeed most, but not much of
description, for she is direct and one, and hath not the variety of ill.
Now she is given fresh and alive to a husband, and she doth nothing more
than love him, for she takes him to that purpose. So his good becomes
the business of her actions, and she doth herself kindness upon him.
After his, her chiefest virtue is a good husband. For she is he.