The Spectator

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: nesses of her sex, is still described as a woman in this particular. The poet tells us, that, after having made a great slaughter of the enemy, she unfortunately cast her eye on a Trojan who wore an embroidered tunic, a beautiful coat of mail, with a mantle of the finest purple. ' A golden bow, ' says he, ' hung upon his shoulder; his garment was buckled with a golden clasp, and his head covered with an helmet of the same shining metal.' The Amazon immediately singled out this well-dressed warrior, being seized with a woman's longing for the pretty, trappings that he was adorned with. This heedless pursuit after these glittering trifles, the poet (by a nice concealed moral) represents to have been the destruction of his female hero. Monday, March 19, 1711. I Have received a letter, desiring me to be very satirical upon the little muff that is now in fashion; another informs me of a pair of silver garters buckled below the knee, that have been lately seen at the Rainbow coffeehouse in Fleet-street; a third sends me an heavy complaint against fringed gloves. To be brief, there is scarce an ornament of either sex which one or other of my correspondents has not inveighed against with some bitterness, and recommended to my observation. I must therefore, once for all, inform my readers, that it is not my intention to sink the dignity of this my paper with re- flections upon reel-heels or top-knots, but rather to enter into the passions of mankind, and to correct those depraved sentiments that gave birth to all those little extravagances which appear in their outward dress and behaviour. Foppish and fantastic ornaments are only indications of vice, not criminal in themselves. Extinguish vanity in the mind, and you naturally retrench the little superfluities of garniture and eq..