Enter Ladies fantastically habited, in a wanton and pleasant posture: passing over the stage, they are encountered by six amorous complimental Servants, every one singling forth his mistress for discourse.
2d Boy. What humorous tomboys be these?
1st Boy. The only gallant Messalinas of our age. That love-spotted ermine is Madam Fricase, a woman of a rampant spirit; a confident pretender to language; and, for the Latin, she makes herself as familiar with the breach of Priscian's head as if it were her husband's.
2d Boy. Who is she, that looks like a mounted scaledrake?[113]
1st Boy. That spitfire is Madam Caveare: one whose assiduate trading brought age upon her before her time. But art has taught her to supply furrowed deformities with ceruse boxes, and to repair a decayed complexion with an Italian fucus. This, with other fomentations, have so enlivened her, as they render her no less active than if she at last grass had but casten her colt's-tooth. The next in rank is that mincing madam Julippe, who would not bear a child for a world (though her endeavours be pregnant enough), for fear she should disfeature the comeliness of her body.
2d Boy. Yet she's a medlar.[114]
1st Boy. A mellow one, and as ready to fall in autumn upon all occasions.
2d Boy. What may that gaudy gewgaw lady be, that throws such scornful looks upon our galleries?
1st Boy. That's a brave martial Milanoise: Semiramis never had a more imperious spirit. She styles herself Madam Joculette; a jocund girl, on my word, and one that will not engage her honour, nor barter in a low commodity, for nothing. She was a tirewoman at first in the suburbs of Milan; but falling into an ebb of fortune, and hearing the quaint and various fancies of our country damosellas, she took upon her this adventure to improve her annual pension; which she has by the dexterity of her wit and incomparable curiosity of art highly enlarged, and by this unexpected means—for it happened, to give an addition to her future happiness, that one Sir Gregory Shapeless, a mundungo[115] monopolist, a paltry-penurious-pecking pinchgut, who had smoked himself into a mercenary title of knightship, set his affection upon her soon after her arrival here; whom thou may imagine, Nick, to be no sooner wooed than won. But scarcely were their marriage-sheets warm, till her dissembled fancy, having no other bait but lucre to feed it, grew cold, and the mundungo-knight became pitifully crest-fallen—more in love with the world than his Italian doxy. A divorce she sues, and so happily pursues, as by the solicitancy of her private ingles she became whole sharer in his trucking fortunes; since which time she pastures freely upon the common without fear of enclosure.
2d Boy. Why should she not? A barren ranging doe, having once leapt over her own pale, may encroach, though not with security, upon any other's liberty.