Читать книгу Terrible Tractoration, and Other Poems онлайн

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We never knew them fail to wend

Quite to eternity’s hither end.

For women, uglier than Gorgons,

We manufacture beauty’s organs,

And give them splendid shapes and faces

Which might be envied by the Graces.

Pimples like pepper pods, warts like squashes,

Vanish before our beauty washes;[19]

By help of corsets, stays and boddices,

We transform dowdies into goddesses.[20]

Nice ladies’ minds we manufacture,

Cast in a mould without a fracture,

And sell the precious things in lots,

An art we learn’d of Doctor Watts.

And o’er the shop where these are made,

In nine inch letters is portray’d,

Fine female faculties form’d and furnished,

With genteel educations burnished.

This shop supplies the place, no doubt,

Of seminaries talk’d about,

But never put in operation,

Fitted for female education.[21]

We fabricate spruce dandy noddies,

With souls adapted to their bodies,

To wit so exquisitely small

They might as well have none at all.[22]

When we discern an abstract right,

We press it ever main and might;