contemplation, private, solitude, London satire, vices, social ills, treachery, Juvenalian

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consideration and apologising for the brevity of her reply (‘Is. W. Beyng Wery of Writyng, Sendeth This for Answere’, sigs Ei^v-Eii^r). She has decided, she says, to opt for a period of private contemplation of her problems and requests to be left in solitude: “Good cousin write not nor any more replye,/ But geve mee leaue, more quietnes to trye” (l.14).

Here the sequence of verse letters ends, but the inference is that, rather than becoming reconciled with her mistreatment, this isolation causes her anger to boil and the “extreame rage”, from which Berrie, C. B. and George attempted to save her, has gained control over her as she engages in a satirical project that bears some resemblance to the sort of ignominious street flyting from which the entire miscellany seems designed to divert her up until this point (Berrie, ‘In Answer to Comfort Her, by the Waying his Haps to be Harder’, l.2 ). Immediately following this last epistle is the final piece in the miscellany, a London satire that takes the reader on a street tour of the capital in order to catalogue its vices and social ills. ³⁵⁰ It is written in the form of Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’ in which she leaves a legacy to the corrupt, pitiless city of things already in its possession. That this piece progresses thematically and sequentially from the verse letters is evident in that it is a satire of London. Æneas, the source of Dido’s strife, was of course the great grandfather of Brutus, founder of London, the source of Whitney’s strife, and thus Æneas is also implicated as the progenitor of her misfortune as well as of Dido’s. In this reading London becomes a synecdoche for the treachery of men.

This is not the coarse street flyting of a scold that might be expected of a woman taking her readers on a Juvenalian tour of the city. Whitney’s bitterness is contained in her parody of a polite formal legacy. The satire of the piece is to be found in the ironic

³⁵⁰ ‘The Aucthour (Though Loth to Leaue the Citie) vpon her Friendes Procurement, is Constrained to Departe: Wherfore (She Fayneth as She Would Die) and Maketh her Wyll and Testament, as Foloweth’, sigs Eii^r-Eviii^v.

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