the viler poems of the Rev. Robert Herrick and the Very Rev. the Dean
of Dublin, Jonathan Swift, D.D. There are salacious hints, there are
bawdy words, but no more than Falstaff or the wife of Bath or the
Summoner or Tom Jones might have used--less, on the whole. There is no
need, to borrow a phrase from the book's sequel, to "make use of the
gesture of casting up the whites of the eyes." "True-hearted souls
will solace their spirits with a little laughter, and never busy their
brains with the subversion of Church and State government."

Certainly the writer favoured the jovial life. Food and wine flow in
his pages like milk and honey in Canaan. There is no room in his house
for the Puritans, not even, apparently, in the bringing up of his
child. "Those that frequent Mr Baxter's Puritanical Holding-forth"
must be merry when they come to his feast. He will have no
_Catechizing of Families_--a discourse published by Richard Baxter in
this very year 1683; and the only _Compassionate Counsel_--a Baxter
pamphlet of 1681--he is likely to offer to young men is to take life
lightly, as his hero does, and above all, not to marry.

For that is the true point of this lively piece of irony (the irony is
less well sustained in the sequel, _The Confession of the New Married
Couple_, and dropped altogether in the bitter _Letter_ at the end of
_The Ten Pleasures_). It is a savage attack upon women--upon (to quote
a Rabelaisian sentence) "the quarrelsome, crabbed, lavish, proud,
opinionated, domineering and unbridled nature of the female sex."
Women, he says, "are in effect of less value than old Iron, Boots and
Shoes, etc., for we find both Merchants and money ready always to buy
those commodities." The analogy is an unfortunate one, for one of his
implications is that women can easily be bought. But he--if it is a
"he"--is in deadly earnest. Love, marriage, he asks scornfully--what