By lightning shot from Chloe’s eyes! 
  While these reflections fill’d his head,
The bride was put in form to bed: 
He follow’d, stript, and in he crept,
But awfully his distance kept. 
  Now, “ponder well, ye parents dear;”
Forbid your daughters guzzling beer;
And make them ev’ry afternoon
Forbear their tea, or drink it soon;
That, ere to bed they venture up,
They may discharge it ev’ry sup;
If not, they must in evil plight
Be often forc’d to rise at night. 
Keep them to wholesome food confin’d,
Nor let them taste what causes wind: 
’Tis this the sage of Samos means,
Forbidding his disciples beans.[8]
O! think what evils must ensue;
Miss Moll, the jade, will burn it blue;
And, when she once has got the art,
She cannot help it for her heart;
But out it flies, even when she meets
Her bridegroom in the wedding-sheets.
Carminative and diuretic[9]
Will damp all passion sympathetic;
And Love such nicety requires,
One blast will put out all his fires. 
Since husbands get behind the scene,
The wife should study to be clean;
Nor give the smallest room to guess
The time when wants of nature press;
But after marriage practise more
Decorum than she did before;
To keep her spouse deluded still,
And make him fancy what she will. 
  In bed we left the married pair;
’Tis time to show how things went there. 
Strephon, who had been often told
That fortune still assists the bold,
Resolved to make the first attack;
But Chloe drove him fiercely back. 
How could a nymph so chaste as Chloe,
With constitution cold and snowy,
Permit a brutish man to touch her? 
Ev’n lambs by instinct fly the butcher. 
Resistance on the wedding-night
Is what our maidens claim by right;
And Chloe, ’tis by all agreed,
Was maid in thought, in word, and deed. 
Yet some assign a different reason;
That Strephon chose no proper season. 
  Say, fair ones, must I make a pause,
Or freely tell the secret cause? 
  Twelve cups of tea (with grief I speak)
Had now constrain’d the nymph to leak. 
This point must needs be settled first: 
The bride must either void or burst. 
Then see the dire effects of pease;
Think what can give the colic ease. 
The nymph oppress’d before, behind,
As ships are toss’d by waves and wind,
Steals out her hand, by nature led,
And brings a vessel into bed;
Fair utensil, as smooth and white
As Chloe’s skin, almost as bright. 
  Strephon, who heard the fuming rill
As from a mossy cliff distil,
Cried out, Ye Gods! what sound is this? 
Can Chloe, heavenly Chloe,——? 
But when he smelt a noisome steam
Which oft attends that lukewarm stream;
(Salerno both together joins,[10]
As sov’reign med’cines for the loins:)
And though contriv’d, we may suppose,
To slip his ears, yet struck his nose;