The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12Brann, William Cowper
History
The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
But the Gall of the girl who puts her picture in the
papers, accompanied by a paid puff of her "purty," scarce
equals that of the conceited maid who imagines she has
only to look at a man and giggle a few times to "mash
him cold"--to get his palpitating heart on a buckskin
string and swing it hither-and-yon at pleasure. How the
great he-world does suffer at the hands of those heartless
young coquettes--if half it tells 'em be true! David said
in his haste that all men are liars. And had he carefully
considered the matter he would have come to the same
conclusion. Washington may have told his father the
truth about that cherry-tree; but later in life he became
entirely too popular with the ladies for a man unable to lie.
It is natural for men to pay court to a pretty woman
as for flies to buzz about a molasses barrel; but not every
fly that buzzes expects to get stuck, I beg to state. The
man who doesn't tell every woman who will listen to him
--excepting, perhaps, his wife--that she's pretty as a peri,
even though she be homely enough to frighten a mugwump
out of a fat federal office; that she's got his heart grabbed;
that he lives only in the studied sunshine of her store-
teeth smile and is hungering for an opportunity to die for
her dear sake--well, he's an angel, and he-seraphs are
almighty scarce I beg of you to believe. Since Adonis
died and Joseph was gathered to his fathers none have
appeared that I am aware of. These young gentlemen were
all right, I suppose; but I'd like to see either of them
get elected nowadays on the Democratic ticket in Texas.
But feminine conceit, fed on flattery, were as milk-shake
unto mescal, as a kiss by mail to one by moonlight compared
with the insufferable egotism of the "pretty man"
who puts his moustache up in curl-papers and perfumes
his pompadour; who primps and postures before an amorous
looking-glass and imagines that all Eve's daughters
are trying to abduct him. Whenever I meet one of these
male irresistibles I'm forcibly reminded that the Almighty
made man out of mud--and not very good mud at that.
The two-legged he-thing who makes a clothes-horse of
himself and poses on the street-corner perfumed like an
emancipation day picnic; who ogles a pretty woman until
the crimson creeps into her cheek, then prides himself on
having captured her heart like the boy caught the itch,--
because he couldn't help it--when she's only blushing for
the mother who bore the pitiful parody on manhood; who
imagines that every maid who deigns to waste a smile on
him is sighing her soul out for his sweet sake, has allowed
his Gall to go to his head and curdle his brains.
. . .
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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