294
HUDIBRAS.
[PART III.
'Tis hard to say in multitudes, 715
Or who imported the French goods.[1]
But health and sickness b'ing all one,
Which both engag'd before to own,[2]
And are not with their bodies bound
To worship, only when they're sound, 720
Both give and take their equal shares
Of all they suffer by false wares;
A fate no lover can divert
With all his caution, wit, and art:
For 'tis in vain to think to guess 725
At women by appearances,
That paint and patch their imperfections
Of intellectual complexions,
And daub their tempers o'er with washes
As artificial as their faces; 730
Wear under vizard-masks[3] their talents
And mother-wits before their gallants;
Or who imported the French goods.[1]
But health and sickness b'ing all one,
Which both engag'd before to own,[2]
And are not with their bodies bound
To worship, only when they're sound, 720
Both give and take their equal shares
Of all they suffer by false wares;
A fate no lover can divert
With all his caution, wit, and art:
For 'tis in vain to think to guess 725
At women by appearances,
That paint and patch their imperfections
Of intellectual complexions,
And daub their tempers o'er with washes
As artificial as their faces; 730
Wear under vizard-masks[3] their talents
And mother-wits before their gallants;
- ↑ Nicholas Monardes, a physician of Seville, who died 1577, tells us, that this disease was supposed to have been brought into Europe at the siege of Naples, from the West Indies, by some of Columbus's sailors who accompanied him to Naples, on his return from his first voyage in 1493. When peace was there made between the French and Spaniards, the armies of both nations had free intercourse, and conversing with the same women were infected by this disorder. The Spaniards thought they had received the contagion from the French, and the French maintained that it had been communicated to them by the Spaniards. Guicciardini, at the end of his second book of the History of Italy, dates the origin of this distemper in Europe, at the year 1495. But Dr Gascoigne, as quoted by Anthony Wood, says he knew several persons who had died of it in his time, that is, before 1457, in which year his will was proved. Indeed, after all the pains which have been taken by inquisitive writers to prove that this disease was brought from America, or the West Indies, the fact is not sufficiently established. Perhaps it was generated in Guinea, or some other equinoctial part of Africa. Astruc, who wrote the History of Diseases, says it was brought from the West Indies, between the years 1494 and 1496. In the earliest printed book on the subject, Leonicenus de Epidemia quam Itali Morbem Gallicum, Galli vero Neapolitanum vocant, Venet. Aldi, 1497, the disease is said to have been till then unknown in Ferrara.
- ↑ Alluding to the words of the marriage ceremony: so in the following lines,—with their bodies bound
To worship. - ↑ Masks were introduced at the Restoration, and were then worn as a
