And terrify'd into an awe,
Pass on ourselves a salique law ;'
Or, as some nations use, give place,
And truckle to your mighty race :
Let men usurp th' unjust dominion,
As if they were the better women.'

:

380

• Pass on ourselves a salique law ;] The salique law debars the succession of females to some inheritances. Thus knights fees, or lands holden of the crown by knights service, are in some parts, as the learned Selden observes, terræ salicæ males only are allowed to inherit such lands, because the females cannot perform the services for which they are granted. See Selden's notes on the eighteenth song of Drayton's Polyolbion. The French have extended this law to the inheritance of the crown itself. See Shakspeare, Henry V. Act i. scene ii.

1 Let men usurp th' unjust dominion,

As if they were the better women.] The Lady concludes with great spirit: but it may be that the influence of the sex has not been much over-rated by her. Aristophanes hath two entire plays to demonstrate, ironically, the superiority of the female sex. of the Lysistrata.

See v.

538

In Butler's Common-place Book, are the following lines under the article Nature and Art:

The most divine of all the works of nature

Was not to make model, but the matter:

A man may build without design and rules,
But not without materials and tools;
This lady, like a fish's row, had room
For such a shoal of infants in her womb :
The truest glasses naturally misplace
The lineaments and features of her face,
The right and left still counterchange,
And in the rooms of one another range;
Nature denies brute animals expression,
Because they are incapable of reason.

Precious stones not only do foretell
The dire effects of poison, but repell

When no one person's able t' understand
The vast stupendous uses of the hand;
The only engine helps the wit of man,
To bring the world in compass of a span:
From raising mighty fabrics on the seas,
To filing chains to fit the necks of fleas,
The left hand is but deputy to the right,
That for a journeyman is wont t' employ 't.

: 85.: -8: 8:: NAON: