‘Many other examples might we instance of the imperiousness of women, and what stratagems they have invented for gaining the Breeches from their Husbands, but these I think may suffice for one single sheet of paper, and, indeed, as many as can well be afforded for four Farthings; but least any one should complain of a hard pennyworth, to make him amends, I will afford him a song into the bargain:—
‘The Song.
‘When women that they do meet together,
Their tongues do run all sorts of weather,
Their noses are short, and their tongues they are long,
And tittle, tittle, tattle is all their song.
‘Now that women (like the world) do grow worse and worse, I have read in a very learned authour, viz., Poor Robin’s Almanack, how that about two hundred and fifty years ago (as near as he could remember) there was a great sickness almost throughout the whole world, wherein there dyed Forty-five millions, eight hundred, seventy-three thousand, six hundred and ninety-two good women, and of bad women only three hundred, forty and four; by reason whereof there hath been such a scarcity of good women ever since: the whole breed of them being almost utterly extinct.’
And so an end. But the author of this pamphlet is not alone in his satires of domestic infelicity. Here you shall see, in The Woman to the Plow, how these things struck our forbears. He has good ideas, this seventeenth-century versifier, but his gifts in the matter of rhyme and rhythm are all too slight:—
THE WOMAN TO THE PLOW AND THE MAN TO THE HEN-ROOST;
OR, A FINE WAY TO CURE A COT QUEAN.
Both men and women, listen well,
A merry jest I will you tell,
Betwixt a good man and his wife
Who fell the other day at strife.
He chid her for her huswivery,
And she found fault as well as he.
He says:—