Wit & Attitude Quote by John Florio

A travel brag dressed up as a three-part insult, Florio's line works because it flatters and needles at the same time. Calling England "the paradise of women" is less a feminist anthem than a sly nod to English domestic norms: comparatively strong legal customs around marriage settlements and widowhood, a bustling consumer culture in London, and a courtly ideal that prized female virtue as a kind of social currency. "Paradise" is praise, but it also hints at constraint - a gilded enclosure where women are celebrated in ways that keep them legible and manageable.

Then comes the gendered sting: "the purgatory of men". Purgatory is not damnation; it's a place of grinding penance. Florio is poking at a stereotype of English masculinity as overburdened by work, duty, and social discipline - less Mediterranean swagger, more Protestant sobriety. The joke carries an immigrant's edge. Florio, an Italian-English writer and language broker, is translating cultures and quietly ranking them, suggesting that England's orderliness extracts a price from its men.

The final turn, "the hell of horses", lands hardest because it's concrete. Horses were the engine of early modern life - transport, war, agriculture - and England's roads, weather, and relentless demand could ruin an animal. Ending on horses is classic satiric misdirection: after lofty moral realms (paradise, purgatory), the punchline is logistics and cruelty. The subtext is that a society can look civilized on top while running, quite literally, on exhausted bodies underneath.