Page:Elizabethan & Jacobean Pamphlets.djvu/257

Rh valleyes: Or, as those snowy fleeces, which the naked bryer steales from the innocent nibbling sheep, to make himselfe a warm winter liuery, are to either of them both an excellent ornament: So make thou account, that to haue fethers sticking heere and there on thy head, will embellish, and set thy crowne out rarely. None dare vpbraid thee, that like a begger thou hast lyen on straw, or like a trauelling Pedler vpon musty flockes: for those feathers will rise vp as witnesses to choake him that sayes so, and to proue that thy bed was of the softest downe.

When / your noblest Gallants consecrate their houres to their Mistresses and to Reuelling, they weare fethers then chiefly in their hattes, being one of the fairest ensignes of their brauery: But thou, a Reueller and a Mistris-seruer all the yeare, by wearing fethers in thy haire, whose length before the rigorous edge of any puritanicall paire of scizzers should shorten the breadth of a finger, let the three huswifely spinsters of Destiny rather curtail the thread of thy life. O no, long hair is the onely nette that women spread abroad to entrappe men in; and why should not men be as far aboue women in that commodity, as they go beyond men in others? The merry Greekes were called Καρηχομὄωντες long-haired: loose not thou (being an honest Troian) that honour, sithence it will more fairely become thee. Grasse is the haire of the earth, which, so long as it is suffred to grow, it