Genre:

Poetry, Drollery

Subjects:

Gender, Education, Instruments, Reading

    'What saw he there? no silken robes, / But quadrants, telescopes, and globes, / In learn'd confusion pil'd, / And pickled toads, and ponderous books, / And pot-hooks, diagrams, and crooks— / The Elfin monarch smil'd'. The lady is found in a reverie studying Greek; Oberon charges her with having a bloodshot eye and inky lips as a result of her studies, but she is unrepentant. He concludes: 'Why shall the gloomy mists of pride / Extinguish beauty's beam? / Ah why, why cause the female mind, / For every native sweet design'd, / With pedant's weeds to teem!'.