fairest flowers and garlands. A woman of this species is a very pretty thing for a stranger to look upon, but very detrimental to the owner, unless it be a king or prince who takes a fancy to such a toy. 'The ninth species of females were taken out of the ape. These are such as are both ugly and ill-natured, who have nothing beautiful in themselves, and endeavour to detract from or ridicule every thing which appears so in others. 'The tenth, and last species of women, were made out of the bee and happy is the man who gets such an one for his wife. She is altogether faultless and unblameable; her family flourishes and improves by her good management. She loves her husband, and is beloved by him. She brings him a race of beautiful and virtuous children. She distinguishes herself among her sex. She is surrounded with graces. She never sits among the loose tribe of women, nor passes away her time with them in wanton discourses. She is full of virtue and prudence, and is the best wife that Jupiter can bestow on man.' I shall conclude these Iambics with the motto of this paper which is a fragment of the same author: 'A man cannot possess any thing that is better than a good woman, nor any thing that is worse than a bad one.' As the poet has shewn a great penetration in this diversity of female characters, he has avoided the fault which Juvenal and Monsieur Boileau are guilty of, the former in his sixth, and the other in his last satire, where they have endeavoured to expose the sex in general, without doing justice to the valuable part of it. Such levelling satires are of no use to the world, and for this reason I have often wondered how the French author above-men tioned, who was a man of exquisite judgment and a lover of virtue, could think human nature a proper subject for satire in another of his celebrated pieces, which is called 'The Satire upon Man. What vice or frailty can a discourse correct, which censures the whole species alike, and endeavours to shew by some superficial strokes of wit, that brutes are the more excellent creatures of the two? A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and make a due discrimination between those who are, and those who are not the proper objects of it. L. No. 211. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1. Fictis meminerit nos jocari Fabulis. PHED. L. i. Prol. Let it be remember'd that we sport in fabled stories. HAVING lately translated the fragment of an old poet, which describes womankind under several characters, and supposes them to have drawn their different manners and dispositions from those animals and elements out of which he tells us they were com pounded; I had some thoughts of giving the sex their revenge, by laying together in another paper the many vicious characters which prevail in the male world, and shewing the different ingredients that go to the making up of such different humours and constitutions. Horace has a thought which is something akin to this, when, in order to excuse himself to his mistress, for an invective which he had written against her, and to account for that unreasonable fury with which the heart of man is often transported, he tells us, that when Prometheus made his man of clay, in the kneading up of the heart he seasoned it with some furious particles of the lion.' But upon turning this plan to and fro in 1 L. i. 16. Thus translated by Mr. Duncombe. my thoughts, I observed so many unaccountable humours in man, that I did not know out of what animals to fetch them. Male souls are diversified with so many characters, that the world has not variety of materials sufficient to furnish out their different tempers and inclinations. The creation, with all its animals and elements, would not be large enough to supply their several extravagances. Instead, therefore, of pursuing the thought of Simonides, I shall observe, that as he has exposed the vicious part of women from the doctrine of pre-existence, some of, the ancient philosophers have in a manner, satirized the vicious part of the human species in general, from a notion of the soul's post existence, if I may so call it; and that as Simonides describes brutes entering into the composition of women, others have represented human souls as entering into brutes. This is commonly termed the doctrine of transmigration, which supposes that human souls, upon their leaving the body, become the souls of such kinds of brutes as they most resemble in their manners; or to give an account of it, as Mr. Dryden has described it in his translation of Pythagoras his speech in the fifteenth book of Ovid, where that philosopher dissuades his hearers from eating flesh. VOL. Thus all things are but alter'd, nothing dies, The soul is still the same, the figure only lost. To please the taste of glutton-appetite; With rabid hunger feed upon your kind, Or from a beast dislodge a brother's mind. --V. 239, &o Plato in the vision of Erus the Armenian, which I may pos sibly make the subject of a future speculation, records some beautiful transmigrations; as that the soul of Orpheus, who was musical, melancholy, and a womanhater, entered into a swan; the soul of Ajax, which was all wrath and fierceness, into a lion; the soul of Agamemnon, that was rapacious and imperial, into an eagle; and the soul of Thersites, who was a mimic and a buffoon, into a monkey. Mr. Congreve, in a prologue to one of his comedies,' has touched upon this doctrine with great humour. Thus Aristotle's soul, of all that was, I shall fill up this paper with some letters, which my last Tuesday's speculation has produced. My following correspondents will shew, what I there observed, that the speculation of that day affects only the lower part of the sex. From my house in the Strand, October 30, 1711. "MR. SPECTATOR, "UrON reading your Tuesday's paper, I find by several symptoms in my constitution, that I am a bee. My shop, or if you please to call it so, my cell, is in that great hive of females which goes by the name of the New-Exchange; where I am daily employed in gathering together a little stock of gain from the finest flowers about the town; I mean the ladies and the beaus. I have a numerous swarm of children, to whom I give the best education I am able: but, sir, it is my misfortune to be married to a drone, who lives upon what I get, without bringing any thing into the ད་ common stock. Now, sir, as on the one hand I take care not to behave myself towards him like a wasp, so likewise I would not have him look upon me as a humble bee; for which reason I do all I can to put him upon laying up provisions for a bad day, and frequently represent to him the fatal effects his sloth and negli gence may bring upon us in our old age. I must beg that you will join with me in your good advice upon this occasion, and you will for ever oblige "SIR, "Your humble Servant, "MELISSA." Piccadilly, October 31, 1711. "I AM joined in wedlock, for my sins, to one of those fillies who are described in the old poet with that hard name you gave us the other day. She has a flowing mane, and a skin as soft as silk: but, sir, she passes half her life at her glass, and almost ruins me in ribbons. For my own part, I am a plain handicraft man, and in danger of breaking by her laziness and expensiveness. Pray, master, tell me in your next paper, whether I may not expect of her so much drudgery as to take care of her family, and зurry her hide in case of refusal. "Your loving friend, "BARNABY BRITTLE." Cheapside, October 30. "MR. SPECTATOR, "I AM mightily pleased with the humour of the cat, be so kind as to enlarge upon that subject. "Yours till death, JOSIAH HENPECK." "P. S. You must know I am married to a Grimalkin." |