-telling rested
with the queen, who, with womanly grace beginning to speak, said,
"Noble damsels, like as in the lucid nights the stars are the ornament
of the sky and as in Spring-time the flowers of the green meadows,
even so are commendable manners and pleasing discourse adorned by
witty sallies, which latter, for that they are brief, are yet more
beseeming to women than to men, inasmuch as much and long speech,
whenas it may be dispensed with, is straitlier forbidden unto women
than to men, albeit nowadays there are few or no women left who
understand a sprightly saying or, if they understand it, know how to
answer it, to the general shame be it said of ourselves and of all
women alive. For that virtue,[69] which was erst in the minds of the
women of times past, those of our day have diverted to the adornment
of the body, and she on whose back are to be seen the most motley
garments and the most gaudily laced and garded and garnished with the
greatest plenty of fringes and purflings and broidery deemeth herself
worthy to be held of far more account than her fellows and to be
honoured above them, considering not that, were it a question of who
should load her back and shoulders with bravery, an ass would carry
much more thereof than any of them nor would therefore be honoured for
more than an ass.

[Footnote 69: _Virtu_, in the old Roman sense of strength, vigour,
energy.]

I blush to avow it, for that I cannot say aught against other women
but I say it against myself; these women that are so laced and purfled
and painted and parti-coloured abide either mute and senseless, like
marble statues, or, an they be questioned, answer after such a fashion
that it were far better to have kept silence. And they would have you
believe that their unableness to converse among ladies and men of
parts proceedeth from purity of mind, and to their witlessness they
give the name of modesty, as if forsooth no woman were modest but she
who talketh with her chamberwoman or her laundress or her bake-wench;
the which had Nature willed, as they would have it believed, she had
assuredly limited unto them their prattle on other wise. It is true
that in this, as in other things, it behoveth to have regard to time
and place and with whom one talketh; for that it chanceth bytimes that
women or men, thinking with some pleasantry or other to put another to
the blush and not having well measured their own powers with those of
the latter, find th