To all the tyrannies of it.
Ah cruel Sex! will you depose us too in Wit?
The other, full of the oddest tropes, states that:
The World did never but two Women know
Who, one by fraud, the other by wit did rise
To the two tops of Spiritual dignities;
One Female Pope of old, one Female Poet now.
The panegyric was impressive; but it was all somewhat patronizing, addressed as though to a flying pig. There is an air of strain about Orinda’s nearest contemporary rival. The gifted Anne Killigrew, who, dying young, was the subject of a great ode by Dryden, had to write a long poem protesting against the ‘saying that her verses were made by another’:
Like Aesop’s painted jay, I seem’d to all,
Adorn’d in plumes, I not my own could call.