Endearing thus the common acts of life.
The mistress still shall charm him in the wife.
Dr. Johnson thought this poem showed a mind attentive to life, that it was vigorously and very elegantly expressed, and that it was marked by much truth and much prudence. But Lady Mary Wortley Montagu summarized Lord Lyttleton's platitude in a contemptuous couplet:
Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet;
In short, my deary, kiss me! and be quiet.
In 1744 Edward Moore published his Fables for Ladies.[437] In thirteen rather smoothly versified little tales he enforces the ordinary maxims included in the accepted social creed for women. Only the last one goes out of the realm of decorum and domesticity. In "The Owl and the Nightingale" the Nightingale represents the woman who "minds the duties of her nest" and sings the song taught her by nature, and so gains applause from man and bird. The opposite type is represented by the Owl who, puffed up with self-conceit, spends her time in pedantry and sloth. The owl-like lady vaunts her own wits, twits her husband with his inferiority, and lets her children go ragged and dirty.
With books her litter'd floor is spread,
Of nameless authors, never read;
Foul linen, petticoats, and lace
Fill up the intermediate space.