“Imprimis, all the tools and utensils necessary for carrying on the trade, viz.:  several bundles of darts and arrows well pointed and capable of doing great execution.  A considerable quantity of patches, paint, brushes and cosmetics for plastering, painting, and white-washing the face; a complete set of caps, “a la mode a Paris,” of all sizes, from five to fifteen inches in height; with several dozens of cupids, very proper to be stationed on a ruby lip, a diamond eye, or a roseate cheek.

“Item, as she proposes by certain ceremonies to transform one of her humble servants into a husband and keep him for her own use, she offers for sale, Florio, Daphnis, Cynthio, and Cleanthes, with several others whom she won by a constant attendance on business during the space of four years.  She can prove her indisputable right thus to dispose of them by certain deeds of gifts, bills of sale, and attestation, vulgarly called love letters, under their own hands and seals.  They will be offered very cheap, for they are all of them broken-hearted, consumptive, or in a dying condition.  Nay, some of them have been dead this half year, as they declare and testify in the above mentioned writing.

     “N.B.  Their hearts will be sold separately.”

When all the above implements and wiles failed to entrap a lover, and the coquette was left as a “wall-flower,” as the Germans express it, the men of the day satirized the unfortunate one just as mercilessly.  Read, for example, a few lines from the Progress of Dullness, thought to be a very humorous poem in its time: 

“Poor Harriett now hath had her day;
No more the beaux confess her sway;
New beauties push her from the stage;
She trembles at the approach of age,
And starts to view the altered face
That wrinkles at her in her glass.

* * * * *

“Despised by all and doomed to meet
Her lovers at her rivals’ feet,
She flies assemblies, shuns the ball,
And cries out vanity, on all;

* * * * *

“Now careless grown of airs polite
Her noon-day night-cap meets the sight;
Her hair uncombed collects together
With ornaments of many a feather.

* * * * *

“She spends her breath as years prevail
At this sad wicked world to rail,
To slander all her sex impromptu,
And wonder what the times will come to.”

During the earlier years of the seventeenth century, as we have noted, this deprecatory opinion by men concerning woman’s garb was not confined to ridicule in journals and books, but was even incorporated into the laws of several towns and colonies.  Women were compelled to dress in a certain manner and within fixed financial limits, or suffered the penalties of the courts.  Many were the “presentations,”