Page:Elizabethan People.djvu/373

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.


BIRTH—BAPTISM—ETC.
293

What jointure will you make for your son? And many a match is broken off for a penny more or less, as though they could not afford their children at such a price; when none should cheapen such ware but affection, and none buy it but love.... Indeed our parents take great care to make us ask blessing and say grace whenas we are little ones, and growing to years of judgment, they deprive us of the greatest blessing, and the most gracious things to our minds: they give us pap with a spoon before we can speak, and when we speak for that we love, pap with a hatchet: because their fancies being grown musty with hoary age, therefore nothing can relish in their thoughts that savours of sweet youth: they study twenty years together to make us grow as straight as a wand, and in the end by bowing us, make us as crooked as a cammock. For mine own part (sweet Candius) they shall pardon me, for I shall measure my love by mine own judgment, not my father's purse or peevishness. Nature hath made me his child not his slave."

How like a slave's was the treatment of an Elizathan girl, who opposed her father's will in marriage may be read in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in Romeo and Juliet. Though the scene in the latter play where Capulet abuses Juliet is doubtless introduced for comic effect, the