A Splendid Spread. (Cruikshank, 1850.)
Nor was Erasmus's estimate of women more favorable than Brandt's, though he expresses it more lightly and gayly, as his manner was. And curious it is to note that the foibles which he selects for animadversion are precisely those which form the staple of satire against women at the present time. In one of his Colloquies he describes the "Assembly of Women, or the Female Parliament," and reports at length the speech of one of the principal members, the wise Cornelia. This eloquent lady heartily berates the wives of tradesmen for presuming to copy the fashions of the rich and noble. Would any one believe that the following sentences were written nearly four hundred years ago?
"'Tis almost impossible by the outside," says Cornelia to her parliament of fine ladies, "to know a duchess from a kitchen-wench. All the ancient bounds of modesty have been so impudently transgressed, that every one wears what apparel seems best in her own eyes. At church and at the play-house, in city and country, you may see a thousand women of indifferent if not sordid extraction swaggering it abroad in silks and velvets, in damask and brocard, in gold and silver, in ermines and sable tippets, while their husbands perhaps are stitching Grub-street pamphlets or cobbling shoes at home. Their fingers are loaded with diamonds and rubies, for Turkey stones are nowadays despised even by chimney-sweepers' wives. It was thought enough for your ordinary women in the last age that they were allowed the mighty privilege to wear a silk girdle, and to set off the borders of their woolen petticoats with an edging of silk. But now—and I can hardly forbear weeping at the thoughts of it—this worshipful custom is quite out-of-doors. If your tallow-chandlers', vintners', and other tradesmen's wives flaunt it in a chariot and four, what shall your marchionesses or countesses do, I wonder? And if a country squire's spouse will have a train after her full fifteen ells long, pray what shift must a princess make to distinguish herself? What makes this ten times worse than otherwise it would be, we are never constant to one dress, but are as fickle and uncertain as weathercocks—or the men that preach under them. Formerly our head-tire was stretched out upon wires and mounted upon barbers' poles, women of condition thinking to distinguish themselves from the ordinary sort by this dress. Nay, to make the difference still more visible, they wore caps of ermine powdered. But they were mistaken in their politics, for the cits soon got them. Then they trumpt up another mode, and black quoiss came into play. But the ladies within Ludgate not only aped them in this fashion, but added thereto a gold embroidery and jewels. Formerly the court dames took a great deal of pains in combing up their hair from their foreheads and temples to make a tower; but they were soon weary of that, for it was not long before this fashion too was got into Cheapside. After this they let their hair fall loose about their foreheads; but the city gossips soon followed them in that."
And this game, we may add, has been kept up from that day to this; nor does either party yet show any inclination to retire from the contest.
Erasmus was, indeed, an unmerciful satirist of women. In his "Praise of Folly" he returns to the charge again and again. "That which made Plato doubt under what genus to rank woman, whether among brutes or rational creatures, was only meant to denote the extreme stupidness and folly of that sex, a sex so unalterably simple, that for any of them to thrust forward and reach at the name of wise is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools, such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the turning the course of nature, the bare attempting whereof is as extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a trite proverb, That an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple; so a woman will be a woman, i. e., a fool, whatever disguise she takes up." And again: "Good God! what frequent divorces, or worse mischief, would oft sadly happen, except man and wife were so discreet as to pass over light occasions of quarrel with laughing, jesting, dissembling, and such like playing the fool? Nay, how few matches would go forward, if the hasty lover did but first know how many little tricks of lust and wantonness (and perhaps more gross failings) his coy and seemingly bashful mistress had oft before been guilty of? And how fewer marriages, when consummated, would continue happy, if the husband were not either sottishly insensible of, or did not purposely wink at and pass over, the lightness and forwardness of his good-natured wife?"
American Lady walking in the Snow.
"I have often shivered at seeing a young beauty picking her way through the snow with a pale rose-colored bonnet set on the very top of her head. They never wear muffs or boots, even when they have to step to their sleighs over ice and snow. They walk in the middle of winter with their poor little toes pinched into a miniature slipper, incapable of excluding as much moisture as might bedew a primrose."—Mrs. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, vol. ii., p. 135. 1830.