Love for Love

Scene XIV.

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MRS FRAIL

I shall get a fine reputation by coming to see fellows in a morning. Scandal, you devil, are you here too? Oh, Mr Tattle, everything is safe with you, we know.

MRS FRAIL

No, I'll allow a lover present with his mistress to be particular; but otherwise, I think his passion ought to give place to his manners.

MRS FRAIL

You are the most mistaken in the world; there is no creature perfectly civil but a husband. For in a little time he grows only rude to his wife, and that is the highest good breeding, for it begets his civility to other people. Well, I'll tell you news; but I suppose you hear your brother Benjamin is landed? And my brother Foresight's daughter is come out of the country: I assure you, there's a match talked of by the old people. Well, if he be but as great a sea-beast as she is a land-monster, we shall have a most amphibious breed. The progeny will be all otters. He has been bred at sea, and she has never been out of the country.

MRS FRAIL

Now you talk of conjunction, my brother Foresight has cast both their nativities, and prognosticates an admiral and an eminent justice of the peace to be the issue male of their two bodies; 'tis the most superstitious old fool! He would have persuaded me that this was an unlucky day, and would not let me come abroad. But I invented a dream, and sent him to Artimedorus for interpretation, and so stole out to see you. Well, and what will you give me now? Come, I must have something.

MRS FRAIL

Pooh! No, I thank you, I have enough to do to take care of my own. Well, but I'll come and see you one of these mornings. I hear you have a great many pictures.

SCANDAL

Hang him, he has nothing but the Seasons and the Twelve Caesars--paltry copies--and the Five Senses, as ill-represented as they are in himself, and he himself is the only original you will see there.

TATTLE

Oh, madam, those are sacred to love and contemplation. No man but the painter and myself was ever blest with the sight.

SCANDAL

Yes, faith; I can shew you your own picture, and most of your acquaintance to the life, and as like as at Kneller's.

VALENTINE

No indeed, he speaks truth now. For as Tattle has pictures of all that have granted him favours, he has the pictures of all that have refused him: if satires, descriptions, characters, and lampoons are pictures.

SCANDAL

Yes; mine are most in black and white. And yet there are some set out in their true colours, both men and women. I can shew you pride, folly, affectation, wantonness, inconstancy, covetousness, dissimulation, malice and ignorance, all in one piece. Then I can shew you lying, foppery, vanity, cowardice, bragging, lechery, impotence, and ugliness in another piece; and yet one of these is a celebrated beauty, and t'other a professed beau. I have paintings too, some pleasant enough.

SCANDAL

I have some hieroglyphics too; I have a lawyer with a hundred hands, two heads, and but one face; a divine with two faces, and one head; and I have a soldier with his brains in his belly, and his heart where his head should be.

SCANDAL

Yes, I have a poet weighing words, and selling praise for praise, and a critic picking his pocket. I have another large piece too, representing a school, where there are huge proportioned critics, with long wigs, laced coats, Steinkirk cravats, and terrible faces; with cat-calls in their hands, and horn-books about their necks. I have many more of this kind, very well painted, as you shall see.

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