Among the literary curiosities of the eighteenth century are two books by Thomas Amory. One of these, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, appeared in 1755 in two volumes. The first volume of the second work, The Life of John Buncle, was published in 1756, and a second volume appeared in 1766. When he began the Memoirs he had planned to extend the series to eight volumes, but he did not carry it beyond the second volume of John Buncle. The full title of the Memoirs[474] indicates its character as a medley of unrelated observations, disquisitions, and opinions. John Buncle has a less erratic plan, some order being given by the fact that the hero engages in seven successive matrimonial ventures in the course of his travels through Yorkshire and the Lake District. But the books are alike in aim, both being an exposition of Christian Deism. John Buncle's wives are all either able advocates of Socinianism when he meets them, or they have minds so attempered that on hearing the tenets of that faith they ardently embrace it. The ladies in both books are introduced with a Defoe-like apparatus of seemingly accurate details as to dates, locations, and particular circumstances. Although these ladies have had a great variety of romantic adventures and differ somewhat as to wealth and social position, they are essentially alike in character and function, the one purpose of the author being through them to exemplify and explain his religious beliefs. The interesting point is that Mr. Amory in creating ideal and learned defenders of his views should have chosen young ladies. And this was deliberately done. He states it as his conviction "that the faculties and imagination of women's minds properly cultivated may equal those of the greatest men," and he advocates a higher education for young women of sufficient fortune: "It would be so far from making them those ridiculous mortals Molière has described under the character of learned ladies; that it would render them more agreeable and useful, and enable them by the acquisition of true sense and knowledge, to be superior to gayety, dress and dissipation. They would be glorious creatures then. Every family would be happy."

In accordance with this view his young ladies in the Memoirs and John Buncle have not only virtue, wealth, and beauty, but learning of the most specialized and difficult sort. One girl of twenty had been for five years studying under the tutelage of a Scotchman and had attained great proficiency in "arithmetic, Algebra, and fluxions." On her first interview with the author she discoursed for ten uninterrupted pages on the method of fluxions and so wrought upon her hearer's admiration that "for a full quarter of an hour after she ceased he sat looking at her in the greatest astonishment." But he recovered sufficiently to secure the mathematical prodigy as his fourth wife. Another "master in the fluxionary way" was a Mrs. Benslow, and most of the ladies found a perennial source of joy in algebra and arithmetic. But the realm in which their minds luxuriated was that of speculative theology. They read books on religious faiths, ancient and modern, they discussed the most abstruse problems of metaphysics, and they carried ethical problems into the most attenuated ramifications.

The lady who seems to be in all ways Mr. Amory's ideal is Miss Harriot Eusebia Harcourt. She appears in both books, and in definiteness of personality is superior to any of the other characters. It is not impossible that Amory gives under her name a highly idealized portrait of some one he knew. The Biographium Femineum, published in 1766, was so impressed by Miss Harcourt as to catalogue her among distinguished Englishwomen, but the entire account seems to be based on Amory's characterization. She is also admitted as a real person in Female Biography, by Miss Mary Hays, in 1803, and in Rose's New Biographical Dictionary, in 1839. But Miss Harcourt is almost certainly a fictitious character. If any woman had really accomplished what is described in Amory's books, it is incredible that there should have been no contemporary notice of so novel an experiment.[475]

According to Amory, Miss Harcourt was born in 1705. She received a learned education supplemented by nine years of travel in Europe with her father who secured for her the best masters in the languages of the different countries, so that she became an accomplished linguist. On the death of her father in 1733 she inherited a large fortune which she was free to spend according to her own ideas. Her acquaintanceship with noble nuns in various parts of Europe had convinced her that a life similar to theirs, but outside the Catholic Church, would be ideal. She thereupon returned to England and with eleven like-minded ladies she organized a society of "Reformed Recluses." On her estate in Richmondshire she built a beautiful cloister as a winter residence. In the summer the Society occupied a charming villa on the Green Island, a part of her father's property in the western islands of Scotland. Amory says that he was shipwrecked on this island and that during his long stay there he became intimately acquainted with the details of Miss Harcourt's scheme of life. On so agreeable a theme he allowed his imagination free rein. The magnificent situation of the Green Island gave full scope for descriptions of wild and romantic scenery.[476] For the things wrought by the hand of man in the grounds about the villa, he had but to take hints from some of the great English gardens, notably that at Stowe. The Elysium, the marble busts, the Rotunda, at Stowe, were almost certainly the original of his Elysian Fields, groups of marble statues, and Orbicular Building. And as these external details stimulated his fancy to the production of an Aladdin-like garden, so such suggestions as those of Mary Ward's "Institute," or especially Mary Astell's "Protestant Nunnery," stimulated his active mind into working out the details of such a plan. He described not only the constitution of such a society, its financial status, and its general aims, but he went into all the minutiæ of dress, meals, social customs, diversions, occupations. The ladies paid £500 on entrance, they took no vows of celibacy, they had no prioress, they lived well, they had abundant service, they dressed richly. The badge of their order was a large diamond cross. No one was admitted who had not a taste for music. Musical composition, playing on different instruments, singing, painting, and drawing were the elegant diversions. There was a large and well-selected library, and the ladies made researches according to their taste, with the proviso that once a week they must read to the rest the result of their labors—a sort of multifarious and inchoate seminar. The approved papers were recorded in a club book called Didaskalia. These ladies being Christian deists and having minds unclouded by the mists of superstition, enthusiasm, and atheism, spent much time in rational devotion. Mr. Amory becomes ecstatic as the picture of this ideal society grows under his hand and finally declares that if he were a woman of fortune he would at once seek out this happy society of religious recluses with a certainty that no other life on the globe could offer such felicity. He approves of Miss Harcourt's last act which was to will her large fortune as an endowment for this cloistral house. A fanciful dream, but one that constantly brings to mind Tennyson's Princess. Only to Amory's Green Island there came no disrupting influences of love and childhood. He left his ladies still enjoying their learned seclusion, and filling volume after volume of the Didaskalia, painting great pictures, producing original oratorios, making abstruse speculations, and serving God with calm hearts.[477]

CHAPTER V
SATIRIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE LEARNED LADY IN COMEDY

The artificial comedy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England is of genuine significance as a social document. Its purpose was to hold up to ridicule whatever in contemporary life, especially the life of the every-day middle-class world, could be counted foolish or absurd. In its pages nearly every phase of ordinary human activity could look upon its more or less distorted image, and the taste and temper of the times are pretty fairly measured by the personages accepted by dramatists, actors, and audiences as legitimate sources of comic appeal.

Literature offered a surprisingly rich field to the writers of comedy. Tragedies and comedies, the new Italian opera, farces, pantomimes, harlequinades, pastoral dramas, were parodied, burlesqued, and criticized on the stage. Individual authors, theater-managers, actors, and actresses, were ever-recurring figures in the popular comedy. Quite a little library might, for instance, be gathered of the satiric representations of Colley Cibber, Theophilus Cibber, and Susanna Maria Cibber.

Other popular comic types were heroes and heroines marked by national characteristics. An illuminating social study might be made of the Irishman in comedy, the many ancestors of Sheridan's "Sir Lucius O'Trigger," as "Sir Teague O'Divelly," "Sir Calligan O'Bralligan," "Mr. O'Connor MacCormack," "Major O'Flaherty," and the rest of the truculent, honey-tongued, generous, blundering tribe. There are stage Scotchmen and Welshmen represented by "Sir Pertinax MacSycophant," "Mr. Apreece," and their congeners. The Frenchman as valet, music-master, dancing-master, and villain-in-ordinary to the heroes is ubiquitous.

Or we might study the professions. Physicians line up on the stage as quacks, charlatans, conscious impostors. Lawyers are pictured as men whose sole purpose is to hide ignorance and knavery in a cloud of words, and to empty the pockets of their clients in a trumped-up pursuit of justice.

The Church does not escape. The Puritan who in Restoration drama was represented as a psalm-singing, whining, long-faced hypocrite, concealing a vicious life under a pretense of rigid sanctity, was replaced as a comic type in the early eighteenth century by the non-juror, and when later Wesley's tabernacle and Foote's play-house were competing for popular favor, it was the Methodist who obtained the bright reversion, there being ascribed to him all the cant and hypocrisy of his forbears.

Society is likewise represented in all its follies and vices. Of genuine social importance is a study of the long line of "fops," "coxcombs," "pretty fellows," "beaux," "macaronies," "dudes," as they were variously called, from "Sir Solomon, the Cautious Coxcomb," in 1669, through "Sir Fopling Flutter," "Sir Courtly Nice," "Sir Novelty Fashion," "Lord Foppington," "Sir William Mode," "Mr. Apeall," "Sir Brilliant Fashion," "Lord Trinket," "Brisk," "Flutter," "Sparkish," and the rest of the inane tribe, with their laces and frills, their powdered wigs, their enameled snuff-boxes, their ivory combs and pocket-mirrors, their muffs and canes, their inordinate vanity, affectation, and empty-headedness.

Learning, too, found its place on the stage. From the establishment of the Royal Society in 1662, the work of the Gresham professors was the theme of unbridled ridicule. The virtuoso who spent his whole time with a telescope investigating the geography of the moon or with a microscope determining the nature of the bloom on a plum; the anatomist, the geologist, the antiquarian, were counted fair game for the satirist.

I. The Learned Lady as a Comic Type

In this multifarious activity of the comic spirit it would be strange if any pretense to learning on the part of women should escape. And we are, in fact, presented with a motley procession of mock Minervas. Even as early as Jonson there was some recognition of the comic potentialities of the learned lady as a type. In Epicœne (1609) Morose is warned against matrimony by Truewit who recounts the ways in which a learned wife could shatter his peace. Proud to show her Latin and Greek, she might talk all day like a parrot; or, cunning in controversy, she might attack the very knots of divinity; or, considering herself a critic, she might "censure poets, and authors, and stiles, and compare 'hem, Daniel with Spenser, Ionson with tother youth, and so foorth."[478] But this summary seems to be less a reflection of contemporary life than an echo from Juvenal's Sixth Satire.[479] More bitterly satirical is Jonson's representation of the "Collegiate Ladies," "an order between courtiers and country madams, that live from their husbands." But these ladies make no pretense to learning. Lady Haughty and her coadjutors are frivolous, affected, profligate women whose "college-grammar" and "college-honours"[480] have no significance beyond the amorous intrigue for which their order was founded. The play reads as if there had been some contemporary organization at which Jonson's satire was directed, but no record of such an organization is extant. At any rate, the satire was against women who considered themselves emancipated from conjugal life, rather than against learned women as such. In The Devil is an Ass (1616) Jonson brings into some prominence "a Lady Projectress" who is said to deserve the gratitude of the commonwealth of ladies for her great undertakings in their behalf. But her solid service is in the realm of Spanish fashions and new cosmetics.

Jasper Mayne, in The City Match (1639), has a fling at the "new foundation" and "the philosophical Madams" in a manner even more contemptuous than that of Jonson. He also presents a Mrs. Scruple, a Puritan school-mistress learned in religious lore, who can expound the Scriptures, who "works Hebrew samplers and teaches to knit in Chaldee." Her pupil Dorcas makes "religious petticoats," substituting church histories for flowers, and sanctifying cushionets and smock-sleeves with holy embroideries. But it seems to be the religious zeal that is here satirized, with only an incidental reflection on the learning implied in a knowledge of Hebrew and Chaldee.

These remote hints did not result in the establishment of a stage type. It was through Molière that the learned lady took her place in English comedy. The immediate object of Molière's attack was the coterie of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a salon established about 1615. The avowed purposes of this exclusive literary circle were to rid the French tongue of impurities, to cultivate le beau and le vrai bel amour and bel conversation. They had a vocabulary peculiar to themselves, and they devulgarized French by calling common things by uncommon names. They improvised stories and rhymes, played literary games, called themselves by noms de Parnasse, and held exalted views on friendship, love, and marriage, which they endlessly discussed. In the time of its greatest power some of the most noted men and women of France belonged to this salon, but gradually pedantry and affectation had crept in, and the extravagances of the later Précieux and Précieuses in thought, speech, and manners awakened the ridicule of Molière. In his Preface to Les Précieuses (1659) he protested that the true Précieuses could not rightly be vexed at a satire meant only for those absurd people who wretchedly imitated them. But it is nevertheless apparent that his play was an attack on the whole assembly of learned or pseudo-learned ladies and gentlemen who made up the salon, with particular attention to the ladies. In this play he satirized especially bel amour, poetic improvisation, and fine language.

Thirteen years later he returned to the general subject in a more elaborate play, Les Femmes Savantes (1672), where, in the characters of Armande, Bélise, and Philaminte, he represented the false delicacy of the learned ladies, the absurdities of their struggle for pure diction, their puerile literary enthusiasms, their affected interest in science and philosophy, their neglect of all the ordinary duties of life, and the essential hypocrisy of their professedly platonic attitude towards husbands and lovers.

Molière's plays were well known to the earliest English playwrights of the Restoration.[481] Etherege had seen Les Précieuses[482] on the French stage, and the impression it had made upon him was evidenced by his Sir Fopling Flutter, a brilliant English version of Molière's Mascarille, but Etherege nowhere takes up the ideas represented by Madelon and Cathos. Wycherley had personally known the circle of the Hôtel de Rambouillet during his stay in France from 1655 to 1660,[483] and he could not have failed to know of the sensation created by Molière's attack on the noted salon. And throughout his work he was profoundly influenced by Molière in his general conception of true comic material and methods. But apparently the learned-lady theme did not appeal to him as especially suitable for English treatment. Or possibly the very fact of his close association with some of the most brilliant members of the salon made him averse to a satiric representation even of their absurdities.

The first comedy to show any direct influence of Madelon and Cathos is Dryden's Mock Astrologer (1668).[484] Donna Aurelia is like her ancestors in Les Précieuses in her attempts at fine language. She is unable "to speak ten words without some affected phrase that is in fashion." In direct imitation of the French damsels she calls her looking-glass "the counsellor of the graces," and urges upon her maid fashionable language and pronunciation. In her effort to secure striking phraseology she does not rise above the constant use of "furious." She has a "furious inclination" for the occult sciences, a "furious tender" for Don Melchor, and a ghost is a "furiously furious" appearance. Her indigence of epithets puts her far behind Molière's nimble-tongued young ladies, but she certainly strives to be in the same class.

The influence of Molière became more apparent after the presentation of Les Femmes Savantes in 1672. In Dryden's Marriage à la Mode (1672) is a really vital and entertaining picture of a lady with a literary fad. Melantha is one of the sprightliest and most convincing of the comedy heroines before Congreve's Millamant. Melantha is a Sicilian town lady, young, fair, and rich; a finished coquette, an inveterate news-monger, a hanger-on of the court. She would, she says, rather be "mal traitée at court than deified in the town." She accordingly overdoes what she considers to be court characteristics. Especially does she ape the French. French dances and clothes, French plays and ballets, French words, all that's writ in France, fill her with rapture. Her lover does not win her by his face or fortune, but by his rapid fire of French terms. Melantha belongs to the cult of the précieuses in her joy over fine language. An Indian gown, a gimp petticoat, a new point gorget, are tossed to her maid Philatio as a reward for any new words she may bring in. Melantha counts it an ignominy to use vulgar, threadbare words that are fit for nothing but to be thrown to peasants. She practices her vocabulary with her glances at the mirror, and makes up effective sentences into which she may run new acquisitions such as naïveté, sottises, embarrass, and is most unhappy when they prove recalcitrant and are lost in the rapid interplay of talk.

Melantha is an admirable example of social satire, a delightfully audacious representation of a contemporary folly. France was the recognized home of culture and good-breeding. No courtier or fashionable lady could be counted as having the last word in refinement who had not spent some time on French soil, and the French language was one of the most important studies of the higher classes in England. What was taken for granted in court circles became, of course, the ne plus ultra of the ambitious town lady. But her hastily acquired and imperfect knowledge would lead to mistakes and over-emphasis, the result being a character of genuinely comic import. For the stage interpretation of Melantha actresses doubtless had many a social model among the town ladies with violent court aspirations. Cibber says that Melantha was "as finish'd an Impertinent as ever flutter'd in a Drawing-Room," and that she contained "the most compleat System of Female Foppery that could possibly be crowded into the tortured Form of a Fine Lady." And chief among her fopperies was her preciosity, a characteristic marked in most of the learned ladies represented in seventeenth and eighteenth century comedy.

Mrs. Behn's Sir Patient Fancy came out late in 1678 and was based for its chief intrigue on Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire which had appeared in 1673. But the character of Lady Knowell, "an affected learned woman," reverted to Les Femmes Savantes. She is the young stepmother of Lord Knowell's marriageable son and daughter and is of considerable importance in the general movement of the play, but her real function is to present a caricature of a learned lady. She understands Greek, Latin, and Italian. She cannot endure "divine Homer" in a translation: "Ton d'apamibominous prosiphe podas ochus Achilleus! Ah how it sounds! which English't dwindles into the most grating stuff:—Then the swift-footed Achilles made reply." As she looks upon the frivolous young girls of the play she exclaims: "I'm for the substantial pleasure of an Author. Philosophemur! is my Motto.... Oh the delight of Books! When I was their age I always employed my looser Hours in reading—if serious, 't was Tacitus, Seneca, Plutarch's Morals, or some such useful Author; or in an Humour gay, I was for Poetry, Virgil, Homer, or Tasso."

To this emphasis on the classics is added a preciosity which consists of misdirected attempts to use impressive language. Lady Knowell is an early and not very amusing Mrs. Malaprop. Her "hard words" are sometimes legitimate words to which she attaches a wrong meaning, as in the sentence, "There is much Volubility in Human Affairs," when she means "variability." But most of her words are compounded of portions of others each one of which contains some shade of her meaning; as, "Were I querimonious [querulous, acrimonious] I should resent the affront"; "Notwithstanding your Exprobations [expostulations, disapprobations]"; and "I saw your Reclination [revolt, declination] from my Addresses." These bungling attempts to play with language are too far-sought, too puzzling, to bring instant laughter, but they suffice to establish Lady Knowell as at least a would-be precursor of Mrs. Malaprop a century later.

The young ladies make sport of Lady Knowell. Lucretia does not approve of her learning. "Methinks," she says, "to be read in the Arts, as they call 'em, is the peculiar Province of the other Sex." Isabella is of much the same opinion, yet she feels that women might easily surpass most University men: "Indeed the Men ... boast their Learning and Languages; but if they can find any one of our Sex fuller of Words, and to so little Purpose as some of their Gownmen, I'll be content to change my Petticoats for Pantaloons and go to a Grammar-school."

In Shadwell's Sullen Lovers (1669) is a Lady Vaine who calls herself a "Virtuosa" and is learned in medicaments. She boasts of her serviceableness with her "Flos Unguentorum, Paracelsian, and Green-salve," and praises the Album Grecum as a salve of her own concoction.

Of much more interest is Shadwell's Bury-Fair (1689). The chief characters are Lady Fantast, Mrs. Fantast, and Lady Fantast's stepdaughter, Gertrude Oldwit, and their attendant cavaliers. The central action, the joke played on the Fantast ladies in imposing on them a barber dressed up to impersonate a French count, is taken from Les Précieuses. But Lady Fantast and her daughter have their direct ancestry in Philaminte and Armande in Les Femmes Savantes. Wildish who had at first loved Mrs. Fantast, but, on finding her a précieuse, had transferred his affections to Gertrude, is Molière's Clitandre, while Gertrude herself and Mr. Oldwit are the Henriette and Chrysale of the French play. The common sense of the play is embodied in Wildish, Gertrude, and Mr. Oldwit. Lady Fantast is not herself especially learned, but all her ambitions in that line have been concentrated on her daughter. "I have bred my daughter a linguist," she proudly exclaims when the young lady quotes Latin. The two ladies converse as follows:

Lady Fantast has an adoration of French equal to that of Melantha. "No Conversation," she says, "can be refin'd and well-drest without French to lard it." The false count wins his way with the ladies when he professes to believe them French:

The barber-count makes fun of the French of the ladies Fantast, but in one of the conversations the joke is turned the other way, for Mrs. Fantast's learning very nearly proves fatal to the count:

Gertrude is the foil to Mrs. Fantast and she sees no necessity for the punctilious breeding of the ladies Fantast. "Breeding! I know no Breeding necessary, but Discretion to distinguish Company and Occasions; and Common Sense, to entertain Persons according to their Ranks; besides making a Curt'sie not awkwardly, and walking with one's Toes out."

To so low-bred a view of manners Mrs. Fantast can only exclaim, "Ars non habet Inimicum præter Ignorantem"; but Gertrude responds: "A Lady may look after the Affairs of a Family, the Demeanor of her Servants, take care of her Nursery, take all her Accounts every Week, obey her husband, and discharge all the Offices of a good Wife, with her Native Tongue; and this is all I desire to arrive at."

The two ladies are especially obnoxious to Mr. Oldwit, who exhausts a Billingsgate vocabulary in his irritation at their follies. He sums up his misery in the exclamation, "He that would have the Devil more damn'd, let him get him to marry a She-Wit!"

Mr. Thomas Wright's The Female Vertuosos (1693) is confessedly drawn from "the great Original of French Comedy." Ten of the characters and most of the situations are plainly modeled on Les Femmes Savantes, but the name of the play and the idea of ridiculing the new science may have been suggested by Shadwell's The Vertuoso, a popular attack on the Royal Society. Wright gains a trace of originality by transferring his chief learned ladies from the realm of word-mongery to that of pseudo-science. The tone of the play is indicated by the prefixed quotation from Dryden's translation of Juvenal's Sixth Satire:[485]

The three "Vertuosos" are Lady Meanwell, Mrs. Lovewit, and Catchat. Mrs. Lovewit has been making laboratory experiments in behalf of the literati. She has collected all the plays that ever came out and is planning to put them in a limbeck and extract all the quintessence of wit that is in them to sell by drops to the poets of the age. Mrs. Meanwell has just made the great discovery that rain comes from clouds. With a housewifely objection to the wet streets of London and a corresponding sense of civic responsibility, she has invented a way of keeping the streets as dry and clean as a drawing-room the year round. She has just been to the Lord Mayor to propose her scheme, which is to erect a series of posts similar to the lamp-posts newly set up in London, equip them with great bellows, and have city watchmen to blow the clouds away. Catchat is interested in astronomy. Through a telescope she has seen men in the moon and been almost embarrassed by the loving looks cast upon her by the amorous sparks of that shining world.

While science is the main interest in this play, the other accepted traits of the learned woman are not neglected. Catchat, for instance, has been nurtured on the Grand Cyrus and theoretically accepts its cold guidance in matters of love. But her platonic ideals fade before her desires, and she becomes the most impassioned husband-hunter of the throng. Literary criticism is not omitted. Mr. Maggot Jingle's poem "To the Countess of Squeezingham upon her Ague" gains rapturous praise from the ladies. The maid Lucy is about to be discharged for having committed "the horrid, scandalous, and exorbitant Offence" of saying that "Cowley, the wretched Cowley, was as good a poet as the incomparable Sir Maggot Jingle."

The domestic infelicity of Lord and Lady Meanwell is described as a result of the lady's learning. Lord Meanwell says of her, "My wife is a terrible Dragon when she is out of Humour; she makes indeed a High Boast of her Philosophy but she is not a bit the less Cholerick for it, and her Morals that teach her to look upon all Things with an indifferent Eye have not the least Influence on her Passions." Lady Meanwell is a virago before whose hard words her husband shrinks into cowed submission.

As an outcome of their combined wits these ladies are about to open an "Academy of Beaux Esprits," where they may communicate to each other such discoveries as they make, and which shall serve as an "Apollo's Levee" to the Sapphos of the Age, and as a Sovereign Tribunal for all new books.

Congreve's contribution to the learned lady in comedy comes in The Double Dealer (1694), in the admirable figure of Lady Froth, "a coquet pretender to poetry, wit, and learning." Her pet affectation is that of an extravagant passion for her husband, Lord Froth, the solemn coxcomb of the play, and her affections have been bound up with her literary aspirations even from the days of their courtship. She had known love and sleepless nights and whimsies and vapors, but she had also known how to give them vent.

By virtue of her learning and her lord's title Lady Froth assumes superiority over Cynthia, the modest, sensible heroine.

Her ladyship is also an author and has written an heroic poem on her connubial bliss. She communicates this fact to Brisk, the foolish critic.

Lady Froth was certainly not without a competent critical apparatus for writing poetry since she declares herself familiar with Bossu, Rapin, Dacier upon Aristotle, and Horace. The wittiest portion of the play is based on Molière's scene where the lady critics praise the foolish poet. In Congreve the foolish poet is a woman and the critic a man, but the comic situation is essentially the same.

In 1697 there appeared a play by "W. M." entitled Female Wits. Up to this time the character of the learned lady had been general in type and based pretty closely on Molière, but with Female Wits the satire became personal. The point of the play was that the three "wits" should be recognized as representing specific ladies. Calista was Catherine Cockburn, a beautiful young girl who at seventeen had had the misfortune to have a tragedy brought out at the Theater Royal.[486] She was treated rather gently, being merely bantered for pretending to understand Latin and Greek. On being asked if she had read Cicero's Oration she answered, "I know it so well as to have turned it into Latin." Marsilia was Mrs. Manley, two of whose tragedies, The Royal Mischief and The Lost Lover, had appeared the preceding year.[487] She is represented as having a play in rehearsal. In the meantime she has a new project on the stocks. She is going to show the superiority of the moderns to the ancients by a revision of "Catiline's Conspiracy." The first speech is to remain as it is in the original, while the others, re-written with all the ornaments of modern rhetoric, will show up, by contrast, the poverty of the Latin style. The sample she gives of her new version was undoubtedly a fling at heroic tragedy. Her address to Rome begins: "Thy fated Stones, and thy cemented Walls, this Arm shall scatter into Atoms. Then on thy Ruins will I mount! Mount, my aspiring Spirit, mount! Hit yon azure Roof and justle Gods!" Mrs. Wellfed, "a fat female author," was at once known to stand for Mrs. Pix,[488] a writer of intolerable tragedies and poor comedies, and noted for her love of good living. Except for the personal reference this play offers little that can be of interest.

Vanbrugh's Æsop (1699) is a play adapted from Boursault. Æsop is the sage to whom successive people bring their problems. To each one he gives a solution in a verse fable. Hortensia, the heroine of one of these episodes, is described by her maid as "the wise Lady, the great scholar, that nobody can understand." She loves "Words of Erudition," and waxes eloquent on philosophical abstractions. There is something in her nature that soars too high for the vulgar, but she hopes to find in Æsop a kindred soul because, as she says, "His Intellects are categorical." But Æsop scorns her fine language. "Now by my Faith, Lady," he answers, "I don't know what Intellect is; and methinks categorical sounds as if you call'd me Names. Pray speak that you may be understood; Language was designed for it, indeed it was."

When Hortensia's lover asks Æsop's advice as to the best way to manage a "Philosopheress," the wise man advises retreat while there is yet time. The little apologue of "The Linnet and the Nightingale" embodies his views and is the most trenchant expression so far come upon of the supposed permanent opposition between learning and the eternal feminine:

In Charles Gildon's Comparison between the Two Stages (1702) we have a discussion by two gentlemen, Rambler and Sullen, and a critic, Chagrin, as to the comparative merits of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields. The most important reference to women playwrights is in the following passage: