et cætera. He further asserted that ‘her tress also should be of crispèd gold,’ and intimated graciously that
‘With wit, and these, perchance I might be tied,
And knit again with knot that should not slide.’
His contemporary, Lord Surrey, included among ‘the means to attain happy life,’ ‘the faithful wife, without debate’—that is, I suppose, a lady without forty-parson-power of talk—a not impossible, nay, fairly common, She.
In a lyric by Beaumont and Fletcher, we find the supposed speaker giving utterance to a series of such wishes. ‘May I,’ he says, ‘find a woman fair, And her mind as clear as air!’
‘May I find a woman rich,
And of not too high a pitch!...
May I find a woman wise,
And her falsehood not disguise!...
May I find a woman kind,
And not wavering like the wind!...’
And, in truth, he talks throughout as if he did not expect to discover any such rarity. Everyone knows the little poem in which Ben Jonson details his preferences in women’s dress, declaring that ‘a sweet disorder’ does more bewitch him ‘than when art Is too precise in every part.’ But elsewhere he paints for us, not a perfect feminine attire, but the faultless maid herself, as he would have her:
‘I would have her fair and witty,
Favouring more of Court than City,
A little proud, but full of pity,
Light and humorous in her toying,
Oft building hopes and soon destroying...
Neither too easy nor too hard,
All extremes I would have barr’d.’
That, it would seem, was rare Ben’s ideal.
Carew, it is notorious, professed to despise ‘lovely cheeks or lips or eyes,’ if they were not combined with ‘A smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts, and calm desires.’ A rosy cheek, a coral lip, and even star-like eyes, as he sagely said, would waste away. And in this somewhat priggish, and perhaps not wholly sincere, vein, he finds a rival in the anonymous bard who declared that he did not demand
‘A crystal brow, the moon’s despair,
Nor the snow’s daughter, a white hand,
Nor mermaid’s yellow pride of hair,’