Wit & Attitude Quote by Francis Quarles

Luxury arrives dressed as a flirtation and leaves like a mugging. Quarles turns a moral warning into a creature-feature: honeyed mouth, galled heart, stinging tail. The line works because it refuses the soft-focus notion of “treating yourself” and insists on luxury as performance and trap, a pleasure engineered to feel clean at the point of entry and brutal at the point of payment.

“Bastard mirth” is the key insult. He’s not attacking joy; he’s attacking counterfeit joy, the kind that borrows the face of celebration while smuggling in dependence and shame. “Bastard” carries the era’s charge of illegitimacy and social anxiety: luxury is pleasure without rightful lineage, delight cut loose from virtue, labor, or necessity. It’s not merely excessive; it’s unmoored.

The anatomy is rhetorical strategy. Mouth, heart, tail: seduction, motive, consequence. Quarles compresses an entire moral psychology into a single body, making the reader feel the timeline of temptation. Honey is immediate and sensory; gall is interior and delayed; the sting is the final punctuation, the moment indulgence turns creditor. It’s also a subtle critique of how luxury circulates socially: it speaks sweetly in public, curdles privately, then punishes you in the aftermath.

Context matters: Quarles writes in a 17th-century English Protestant culture that distrusted ornament, appetite, and courtly excess, especially under political and religious strain. The line isn’t anti-beauty so much as anti-enchantment: a warning that what feels like freedom can be a leash, gilded to look like a gift.