ould not be fair, but lovely to behold;
Of lively look, all grief for to repel;
With right good grace,'

et caetera. He further asserted that 'her tress also should be of crisped
gold,' and intimated graciously that

'With wit, and these, perchance I might be tied,
And knit again with knot that should not slide.'

His contemporary, Lord Surrey, included among 'the means to attain happy
life,' 'the faithful wife, without debate'--that is, I suppose, a lady
without forty-parson-power of talk--a not impossible, nay, fairly
common, She.

In a lyric by Beaumont and Fletcher, we find the supposed speaker giving
utterance to a series of such wishes. 'May I,' he says, 'find a woman
fair, And her mind as clear as air!'

'May I find a woman rich,
And of not too high a pitch!...
May I find a woman wise,
And her falsehood not disguise!...
May I find a woman kind,
And not wavering like the wind!...'

And, in truth, he talks throughout as if he did not expect to discover
any such rarity. Everyone knows the little poem in which Ben Jonson
details his preferences in women's dress, declaring that 'a sweet
disorder' does more bewitch him 'than when art Is too precise in every
part.' But elsewhere he paints for us, not a perfect feminine attire,
but the faultless maid herself, as he would have her:

'I would have her fair and witty,
Favouring more of Court than City,
A little proud, but full of pity,
Light and humorous in her toying,
Oft building hopes and soon destroying...
Neither too easy nor too hard,
All extremes I would have barr'd.'

That, it would seem, was rare Ben's ideal.

Carew, it is notorious, professed to despise 'lovely cheeks or lips or
eyes,' if they were not combined with 'A smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts, and calm desires.' A rosy cheek, a coral lip, and even
star-like eyes, as he sagely said, would waste away. And in this
somewhat priggish, and perhaps not wholly sincere, vein, he finds a
rival in the anonymous bard who declared that he did not demand

'A crystal brow, the moon's despair,
Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand,
Nor mermaid's yellow pride of hair,'

and so on, but instead,

'A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I would trust,
Yet never link'd with error find--

'One in whose gentle bosom I
Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burthen'd honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the