Whenever you have a maiden-head, be sure make a penny of the first fruits, and at the second-hand let the next justice of peace have the residue on free cost, tho’ you must give her her lesson, and present her as a pure virgin; by this sort of bribery, you may win all the magistrates in Middlesex; make Hicks’s-hall your sanctuary, and gain an useful ascendency over the whole bench of justices.
Never admit common faces into your domestick seraglio, ’tis a scandal to your family, a dishonour to your function, and will certainly spoil your trade; but ply close at inns upon the coming in of waggons, and gee-ho-coaches, and there you may hire fresh country wenches, sound, plump, and juicy, and truly qualified for your business.
Whatever you do, never trust any of your tits into an inn of court, or inn of chancery, for if you do they will certainly harass her about from chamber to chamber, till they have rid her off her legs; elevate her by degrees, from the ground-floor to their garrets, and make her drudge like a landress, thro’ a whole stair-case; and after a good weeks work, send her home with foul linnen, torn heed-geer, rumbled scarf, apparel spew’d upon, without fan, with but one glove, no money, and perhaps a hot tail into the bargain.
This advice for the present, if put in practice, I hope will prove of use to you; I must tell you, there is nothing to be done in the world you live in, without cunning; religion itself, without policy, is too simple to be safe; therefore, if you do but take care for the future and deal by the world, as a woman of your station ought to do, and play your cards like a gamestress, I don’t at all question, but the mystery of bawding, by your good management, may be rais’d again, in spite of reformation, to its pristine eminency; which are the hearty wishes of,
Your Defunct Friend,
Creswell.
Moll Quarles’s Answer to Mother Creswell of Famous Memory.
Loving Sister,
YOUR compassionate letter, has so won my affections to your pious memory, that it shall be always my endeavour to pursue your kind instructions, and to make myself the happy imitatrix of your glorious example, having often, with great satisfaction, heard of your fame; which as long as there is a young libertine, or an honest old whoremaster living upon earth, can never be obliterated. Were I to give you an account of the severe usage, and many persecutions I have been under of late days, since the mercenary reformation of ill-manners has been put on foot, it would soften the most obdurate wretches within your infernal precincts, and make them squeeze me out a tear of pity, tho’ your unextinguishable fire had so dry’d their souls, that their immortalities were crusted into perfect cinder.
Of all the unmerciful impositions that ever were laid upon bumb-labour, none ever so highly afflicted, or so insupportably oppress us, the retailers of copulation, as this intolerable society, who have brib’d those who were our pimps to forsake our interest; and have made those scoundrels who were our meanest servants, our implacable masters; who come in clusters like cowardly bailiffs to arrest a bully; distrain our commodities for want of money to pacify their greedy avarice; fright away our customers, and make us pawn our cloaths to redeem little more than our nakedness from a cat of nine-tails, and the filthy confines of a stinking prison: At least five hundred of these reformed vultures are daily plundering our pockets, and ransacking our houses, leaving me sometimes not one pair of tractable buttocks in my vaulting-school to provide for my family, or earn me so much as a pudding for my next Sunday’s dinner: nay, sometimes I have been forc’d to wag my own hand to get a penny for want of a journey-woman in my house to dispatch business. To shun their jury, I once got sanctuary in the Rolls-liberty, where I thought myself as safe as a fox in a badgers hole, and had bid defiance to the rogues even to this day, for only sacrificing now and then an elemosynary maiden-head to the fumbling of old impotency; but some ill-natur’d observators beginning to reflect, occasion’d my good friend to look a little a-skew upon me, when he found his gravity and reputation began to be smear’d a little; so that I was soon toss’d out by his untimely fear, whose lust before had kindly given me protection: and now again, as true as I am a sinner, the rogues plunder’d me of at least eight pence out of every shilling for forbearance-money, and I believe will grow so unreasonable in a little time, that they will not be content with less gain than an apothecary. The officers of the parish, where-ever I liv’d, had the scouring of their old rusty hangers for a word speaking, without so much as gratifying the wench for making the bed, or being ever at the expence of presenting one of my poor girls with a paper-fan, or a pair of taffeta shoestrings. One honest churchwarden, I must confess, when I liv’d in St. Andrew’s parish, after I had serv’d him and his son with the choicest goods in my warehouse for above two years together, till they had got a wife between them, had the gratitude, like an honest man, to present me with a looking-glass; which I took so kindly at his hands, that I declare it, should he come to my house to morrow, I would oblige him with as good a commodity in my way, as a worthy old fornicator or adulterer would desire to lay his hand upon.
Thus plaguing and pillaging of all our known houses of delight, has been a great discouragement to young ladies from tendring their service at such places, or rendevouzing in numbers upon the lawful occasions that concern their livelihood, for fear of trouble or molestation, and make them rather choose to deel singly, as interlopers, than incorporate themselves with the company of town-traders, for fear of being scratch’d out of their burrows by those reforming ferrets, who make worse havock with the poor sculking creatures, than so many weasles or pole-cats would do with coneys in a warren; they sleep in fear, walk in dread, converse in danger, do their business, poor wretches, insteed of pleasure, with an aking heart. Oh, sister! what a miserable age is this we live in after you, that one part of mankind cannot obey the great law of nature, but the other part shall make a law to punish them for doing it! Which sport, if totally neglected, would soon make lions, and tygers princes of the earth, and turn the world into a solitary wilderness.