Your sixteen cloves, a little musk, dried mints,
Bugloss, and barley-meal--

VOLP [ASIDE.]: She's in again!
Before I fain'd diseases, now I have one.

LADY P: And these applied with a right scarlet cloth.

VOLP [ASIDE.]: Another flood of words! a very torrent!

LADY P: Shall I, sir, make you a poultice?

VOLP: No, no, no;
I am very well: you need prescribe no more.

LADY P: I have a little studied physic; but now,
I'm all for music, save, in the forenoons,
An hour or two for painting. I would have
A lady, indeed, to have all, letters, and arts,
Be able to discourse, to write, to paint,
But principal, as Plato holds, your music,
And, so does wise Pythagoras, I take it,
Is your true rapture: when there is concent
In face, in voice, and clothes: and is, indeed,
Our sex's chiefest ornament.

VOLP: The poet
As old in time as Plato, and as knowing,
Says that your highest female grace is silence.

LADY P: Which of your poets? Petrarch, or Tasso, or Dante?
Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine?
Cieco di Hadria? I have read them all.

VOLP [ASIDE.]: Is every thing a cause to my distruction?

LADY P: I think I have two or three of them about me.

VOLP [ASIDE.]: The sun, the sea will sooner both stand still,
Then her eternal tongue; nothing can 'scape it.

LADY P: Here's pastor Fido--

VOLP [ASIDE.]: Profess obstinate silence,
That's now my safest.

LADY P: All our English writers,
I mean such as are happy in the Italian,
Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly:
Almost as much, as from Montagnie;
He has so modern and facile a vein,
Fitting the time, and catching the court-ear!
Your Petrarch is more passionate, yet he,
In days of sonetting, trusted them with much:
Dante is hard, and few can understand him.
But, for a desperate wit, there's Aretine;
Only, his pictures are a little obscene--
You mark me not.

VOLP: Alas, my mind is perturb'd.

LADY P: Why, in such cases, we must cure ourselves,
Make use of our philosophy--

VOLP: Oh me!

LADY P: And as we find our passions do rebel,
Encounter them with reason, or divert them,
By giving scope unto some other humour
Of lesser danger: as, in politic bodies,
There's nothing more doth overwhelm the jud