Crossword-Solution: MORALISE 8 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

When I stalked out like that from the library in fine mood to moralise and apostrophise heaven in a way that would no doubt have looked fine upon these pages, one sprightly damsel, just as the gloomy rhetoric was bursting from my lips, thrust a flower under my nose whose scent brought on a violent attack of sneezing, her companions joining hands and dancing round me while they imitated my agony.

Stevenson (so I moralise blandly as we sit together on the devil’s garden-wall), no more abominable sin than this gloom, this plaguey peevishness; why (say I) what matters it if we be a little uncomfortable—that is no reason for mangling our unhappy wives.

Cretiens li Gois is cited by the author of the "Ovide moralise" as the author of the episode of Philomena incorporated in his long didactic poem.

Did any author but yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale, we also might be offended.

Peter’s-in-the-East, Oxford (1568): ‘There was buried Alyce, the wiff of a naughty fellow whose name is Matthew Manne.’ There is immortality for Matthew Manne, and there is, in short-hand, the tragedy of “Alyce his wiff.” The reader of this record knows more of Matthew than in two hundred years any one is likely to know of us who moralise over Matthew! At Kyloe, in Northumberland, the intellectual defects of Henry Watson have, like the naughtiness of Manne, secured him a measure of fame.