In cold and frosty weather grow
Enamour'd of a wife of snow;
And though she were of rigid temper,375
With melting flames accost and tempt her:
Which after in enjoyment quenching,
He hung a garland on his engine.[1]
Quoth she, If love have these effects,
Why is it not forbid our sex?380
Why is 't not damn'd, and interdicted,
For diabolical and wicked?
And sung, as out of tune, against,
As Turk and Pope are by the saints?[2]
I find, I've greater reason for it,385
Than I believ'd before t' abhor it.
Quoth Hudibras, These sad effects
Spring from your heathenish neglects
Of love's great pow'r, which he returns
Upon yourselves with equal scorns;390
And those who worthy lovers slight,
Plagues with prepost'rous appetite;
This made the beauteous queen of Crete
To take a town-bull for her sweet;[3]
And from her greatness stoop so low,395
To be the rival of a cow.
Others, to prostitute their great hearts,
To be baboons' and monkeys' sweet-hearts.[4]
Some with the devil himself in league grow,
By's representative a negro;[5] 400
- ↑ In the history of Howell's Life of Lewis XIII. p. 80, it is said that the French horsemen, who were killed at the Isle of Rhé, had their mistresses' favours tied about their engines.
- ↑ Perhaps alluding to Robert Wisdom's hymn:
"Preserve us, Lord, by thy dear word—
From Turk and Pope, defend us, Lord." - ↑ Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos, of Crete, according to the myth, fell in love with a bull, and brought him a son.
- ↑ Old books of Natural History contain many stories of the "abduction" of women by the Mandrill, and other great kinds of ape. And fouler tales than these were circulated after the Restoration, against the Puritans.
- ↑ Such an amour forms the plot of Titus Andronicus, a play which Shakspeare revised for the stage, and which has in consequence been wrongly ascribed to him.
