The chief literary exponents of female depravity, satirising women for what they were and hardly allowing an exception to the general rule, forgetting the part of men in their degraded state, and regarding the prospect of improvement with a degree of scepticism which has made them the abomination of feminists, were Alexander Pope and Lord Chesterfield. Pope's estimate of the sex, contained in the second of the "Moral Essays", and confirmed by numerous allusions in his other works, ranks him among those who jeer at women in general. Their two prevailing passions according to him, are "love of pleasure", and "love of sway":
"Men, some to bus'ness, some to pleasure take,
But every woman is at heart a rake:
Men, some to quiet, some to public strife,
But every lady would be queen for life."
The former he is rather inclined to excuse, for "where the lesson taught is but to please, can Pleasure be a fault?" But the latter contains in it the germs of unavoidable wretchedness to the woman who outlives the power and influence which beauty grants her and whose punishment consists in finding herself in later years friendless and neglected, and without the redeeming blessing of a cultivated intellect and a sensitive heart, which
"... shall grow, while what fatigues the ring
Flaunts and goes down, an unregarded thing."
The many inconsistencies in the female character are passed in review and scourged with the whip of a satirist who does not care to rack his brains for means of improvement, but whose egoism revels in the intellectual delight of scathing ridicule. Women make their very changeability a means of attracting suitors, they are "like variegated tulips," showing many colours and attracting chiefly by variety:
"Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create