inging of bells, and when they have a
glass in their heads they go up into some belfry, and ring the bells for
hours together, for the sake of exercise. Perlin's comment is that men
are hung for a trifle in England, and that you will not find many lords
whose parents have not had their heads chopped off.

It is a pleasure to turn to the simple and hearty admiration excited in
the breasts of all susceptible foreigners by the English women of the
time. Van Meteren, as we said, calls the women beautiful, fair, well
dressed, and modest. To be sure, the wives are, their lives only
excepted, entirely in the power of their husbands, yet they have great
liberty; go where they please; are shown the greatest honor at banquets,
where they sit at the upper end of the table and are first served; are
fond of dress and gossip and of taking it easy; and like to sit before
their doors, decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by
the passers-by. Rathgeb also agrees that the women have much more liberty
than in any other place. When old Busino went to the Masque at Whitehall,
his colleagues kept exclaiming, "Oh, do look at this one--oh, do see
that! Whose wife is this?--and that pretty one near her, whose daughter
is she?" There was some chaff mixed in, he allows, some shriveled skins
and devotees of S. Carlo Borromeo, but the beauties greatly predominated.

In the great street pageants, it was the beauty and winsomeness of the
London ladies, looking on, that nearly drove the foreigners wild. In
1606, upon the entry of the king of Denmark, the chronicler celebrates
"the unimaginable number of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, and other
delicate dames, filling the windows of every house with kind aspect." And
in 1638, when Cheapside was all alive with the pageant of the entry of
the queen mother, "this miserable old queen," as Lilly calls Marie de'
Medicis (Mr. Furnivall reproduces an old cut of the scene), M. de la
Serre does not try to restrain his admiration for the pretty women on
view: only the most fecund imagination can represent the content one has
in admiring the infinite number of beautiful women, each different from
the other, and each distinguished by some sweetness or grace to ravish
the heart and take captive one's liberty. No sooner has he determined to
yield to one than a new object of admiration makes him repent the
precipitation of his judgment.

And all the other foreigners were in the like case of "gone