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The Works of Thomas Campion

Complete Songs, Masques, and Treatises with a Selection of the Latin Verse: Edited with an introduction and notes by Walter R. Davis

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146

XI.

[If Love loves truth, then women doe not love]

If Love loves truth, then women doe not love;
Their passions all are but dissembled shewes;
Now kinde and free of favour if they prove,
Their kindnes straight a tempest overthrowes.
Then as a Sea-man the poore lover fares:
The storme drownes him ere hee can drowne his cares.
But why accuse I women that deceive?
Blame then the Foxes for their subtile wile:
They first from Nature did their craft receive:
It is a womans nature to beguile.
Yet some, I grant, in loving stedfast grow;
But such by use are made, not nature, so.
O why had Nature power at once to frame
Deceit and Beauty, traitors both to Love?
O would Deceit had dyed when Beauty came
With her divinesse ev'ry heart to move!
Yet doe we rather wish, what ere befall,
To have fayre women false, then none at all.