Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/231

Rh would such tales be worth, unless the subjects were given by name and surname. But this is a thing I will not do at any price, for I desire to bring shame on no woman; and I have made profession to avoid in this my book all evil-speaking whatsoever, so that none may have aught to reproach me with on the score of scandal-mongering. However to tell my tales, suppressing the names, in this can be no harm. I do leave my readers to guess the persons intended; and many a time they will suppose it to be one, though all the while 'tis quite another.

 

OW just as we do see different sorts of wood of such different nature, that some will burn when quite green, as the ash and the beech, but others, be they as dry, old and well seasoned as you please, for instance the elm, the alder and others, do burn only as slowly and tediously as possible, while many others, following the general nature of all dry and old wood, do blaze up in their dryness and oldness so rapidly and suddenly 'tis rather a destroying and instant reducing to ashes than burning proper, so is the like true of women, whether maids, wives or widows. Some, so soon as ever they be come to the first greenness of their age, do burn so easily and well, you would say from their very mother's womb they do draw thence an amorousness; as did the fair Laïs from her fair mother Tymandra, that most famous harlot, and an hundred thousand others which herein do take after the good whores their mothers. Nay! sometimes they do not so much as wait for the age of maturity, that may be put