When we reached the house, Mrs. Milicent was awaiting us at the door of the gallery for to conduct us to the best place wherein we could see her majesty's entrance. There were some seats there and other persons present, some of which were of Polly's acquaintance, with whom she did keep up a brisk conversation, in which I had occasion to notice the sharpness of her wit, in which she did surpass any woman I have since known, for she was never at a loss for an answer; as when one said to her--
"Truly, you have no mean opinion of yourself, fair mistress."
"As one shall prize himself," quoth she, "so let him look to be valued by others."
And another: "You think yourself to be Minerva."
Whereupon she: "No, sir, not when I be at your elbow;" meaning he was no Ulysses.
And when one gentleman asked her of a book, if she had read it:
"And wherefore no more," quoth he, "since that hath wit in it?"
"Because," she answered, "an author who sets all his wit in his epistle is like to make his book resemble a bankrupt's doublet."
"In this wise," saith she, "that he sets the velvet before, though the back be but of buckram."
"For my part," quoth a foppish young man, "I have thoughts in my mind should fill many volumes."
"Alack, good sir," cries she, "is there no type good enough to set them in?"
He, somewhat nettled, declares that she reads no books but of one sort, and doats on _Sir Bevis and Owlglass_, or _Fashion's Mirror_, and such like idle stuff, wherein he himself had never found so much as one word of profitable use or reasonable entertainment.
"I have read a fable," she said, "which speaks of a pasture in which oxen find fodder, hounds, hares, storks, lizards, and some animals nothing."
"To deliver you my opinion," said a lady who sat next to Polly's disputant, "I have no great esteem for letters in gentlewomen. The greatest readers be oft the worst doers."
"Letters!" cries Polly; "why, surely they be the most weighty things in creation; for so much as the difference of one letter mistaken in the order in which it should stand in a short sentence doth alter the expression of a man's resolve in a matter of life and death."
"How prove you that, madam?" quoth the lady.
"By the same token," answered Polly, "that I once did hear a gentleman say, 'I must go die a beggar,' who willed to say, 'I must go buy a dagger.'"