An invective against the pride of vvomen.

An invective against the pride of vvomen.

Table of contents

An Invective against the Pride of VVomen.

[Page]

An Invective against the Pride of VVomen.

[1]

VVIll Womens vanities never have end?

Alas! what is the matter?

Shall Poets all their Spirits spend,

And Women never the better!

Will Bagnols Ballad hath done no good,

To the Head that's bid in the Taffat`y-hood,

Which makes the virtuous chew the cud,

And me, till now, their debter.

[2]

I once resolved to be blind,

And ne're put Pen to sheet,

Though all the race of Women-kind

Were mad, I would not see't.

Yet now my heart is so big, it struts;

That hold I cannot for my guts,

But with as much ease as Hens cracks Nuts,

My lines, and numbers meet.

[3]

And first I will begin to touch,

Upon their dawbing Paint;

Their Sin that way is grown so much

It makes my Muse prove faint:

For when they are got into a new Suit,

They look as if they'd straight go to't,

The devil's in't, and's Dam to boot,

'Twould anger any Saint.

[4]

Their faces are bespread and peec'd,

With several sorts of patches,

As if some Cat their skins had fleec't,

With Stars, half-Moons, and natches:

Prodigious Signs, and Invocations,

And Meteors of such dreadful fashions,

Booker hath no such Prognostications,

Oh! out upon them wretches.

[5]

With these they are disfigured so,

They look as wild as Elves;

Their Husbands scarce their Wives can know,

Nor they sometimes themselves:

And every morning feed their chops,

With Candles, Broths, and Hony-sops,

And lap it up as thick as Hops,

Ne're think on him that delves.

[6]

Their soaring Thoughts to Books advance,

'Tis ods, that may undo 'um;

For ever since Dame Eves mischance,

That villanous itch sticks to 'um:

And if they get but a little smack,

They talk, as if they nought did lack,

Of Sidney, Drayton, and Balzaack,

'Twould weary a man to woo 'um.

[7]

Sometime I think them quite subdued,

They let me use such freedom;

And by and by they call me rude,

Then such a word strikes me dumb:

They are fickle and shy, God save 'um,

A man can never tell where to have 'um;

I wish we were all resolv'd to leave 'um,

Till we hereafter need 'um.

[8]

Their kind Behaviour is a trap,

For men, wherein to catch 'um,

With sugared words they lye and snap,

But I'll be sure to watch 'um:

For if once with many a quaint device,

They get you into fools paradise,

They'l laugh, and leave you in a trice;

The Fiend will one day fetch 'um.

[9]

A Syrene once had got a Drone,

And thus began to chatter,

Sweet-heart, quoth she, I am thine own;

But there was no such matter:

For when he thought her as sure as a Gun,

She set up her tayl, and a way she run,

As if she would have out-stripped the Sun,

The Devil could never have sat her.

[10]

Or if some Women mean, good sooth,

And promise lawful Marriage,

'Tis ten to one she hath ne're a tooth,

And then poor men must forrage:

Who sure is Wed, is sped with a wanyon,

He may weep without the help of an Onyon,

He's an Ox, or an Ass, or a slabberdegullion,

That wooes, and doth not barr-age.

[11]

Sometimes they in the water lurk,

Like Fish with silver fins,

And then I wish I were the Turk,

And they my Concubins.

But now I'll tell you truth without erring,

They are neither Fish, Flesh, nor good red Herring;

And wheresoe're you find them stirring,

They'l put you in mind of your Sins.

[12]

Our Zealous Lecturers often Preach,

And Homilies do expound;

But Women, as if they were out of their reach, persever, and stand their ground:

There's not one among ten, but she's Sermon proof,

You may Preach as well to the Wall, or Roof,

Their Hearts are as hard as a Horses hoof,

And as hollow, but not so sound.

[13]

And when do you think this geer will mend,

And come to a better pass?

Indeed, I think, it will never have end:

What, never! Oh out alas:

They hold such wicked Councils between 'um,

We can do little but make Ballads agen 'um;

Ten thousand Furies, I think, is in 'um:

Is not this a pitiful Case?

[14]

I think it would not do amiss,

To put them in a Play;

There's matter, and enough, I wis,

And I'll have the Second day.

Where some shall be habited like unto Pages,

The rest shall go as they are Baggages;

He that sets them o' work, will pay them their wages,

Troth that's the only way.

[15]

And when I have brought them on the Stage,

All sorts of People among;

I'll there expose them like Birds in a Cage,

To be gaz'd on in the midst of the throng:

Nay now I have got them into my clutches,

Although you may think that this over-much is,

I'le favour neither Lady nor Dutchess,

They are no more to me than they that go on crutches,

I have made this Staff too long.

[16]

Some virtuous Wives abroad are seen,

Who give them Caution ample,

But they, as if they had never been,

On all good Precepts trample:

But here is the spite, it would anger a stone,

For a Woman to go to Heaven alone;

What is bred in the Flesh, will ne're out of the Bone,

They'l not amend by example.

Information about this book

Title statement

An invective against the pride of vvomen.

Edition statement

1657

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A87293

ID [STC]

Wing I284

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.20[56]

ID [STC]

ESTC R211936

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99870604

ID [PROQUEST]

99870604

ID [VID]

163472

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. A87293)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 163472)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Thomason Tracts ; 247:669f20[56])

Source

— An invective against the pride of vvomen.,

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

s.n.,. [London :: 1657]. (Verse - "VVill womens vanities never have end?".) (A ballad comprised of 16 stanzas printed in four columns.) (Annotation on Thomason copy: "May".) (Reproduction of the original in the British Library.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.