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She was fond of dropping his sovereigns ostentatiously into the plate,
and she liked to see them stand out rather conspicuously against the
commonplace half-crowns and shillings,
So he took her to all the charity sermons, and if by any extraordinary
chance there wasn’t a charity sermon anywhere, he would drop a couple
of sovereigns (one for him and one for her) into the poor-box at the door;
And as he always deducted the sums thus given in charity from the
housekeeping money, and the money he allowed her for her bonnets and
frillings,
She soon began to find that even charity, if you allow it to interfere
with your personal luxuries, becomes an intolerable bore.

On Sundays she was always melancholy and anything but good society,
For that day in her household was a day of sighings and sobbings and
wringing of hands and shaking of heads:
She wouldn’t hear of a button being sewn on a glove, because it was a work neither of necessity nor of piety,
And strictly prohibited her servants from amusing themselves, or indeed
doing anything at all except dusting the drawing-rooms, cleaning the
boots and shoes, cooking the parlour dinner, waiting generally on the family, and making the beds.
But BLAKE even went further than that, and said that people should do
their own works of necessity, and not delegate them to persons in a menial situation,
So he wouldn’t allow his servants to do so much as even answer a bell.
Here he is making his wife carry up the water for her bath to the
second floor, much against her inclination,–
And why in the world the gentleman who illustrates these ballads has
put him in a cocked hat is more than I can tell.

After about three months of this sort of thing, taking the smooth with the rough of it,
(Blacking her own boots and peeling her own potatoes was not her notion of connubial bliss),
MRS. BLAKE began to find that she had pretty nearly had enough of it,
And came, in course of time, to think that BLAKE’S own original line of
conduct wasn’t so much amiss.

And now that wicked person–that detestable sinner (“BELIAL BLAKE” his
friends and well-wishers call him for his atrocities),
And his poor deluded victim, whom all her Christian brothers dislike and pity so,
Go to the parish church only on Sunday morning and afternoon and
occasionally on a week-day, and spend their evenings in connubial
fondlings and affectionate reciprocities,
And I should like to know where in the world (or rather, out of it)
they expect to go!