In Farquhar's The Inconstant (1703) one lady, named "Bisarre" because of her odd, capricious ways, illustrates Pope's "Most women have no character at all," so briskly does she change from "a starch'd piece of Austerity" to a pert madcap. As a prude she takes rank among the learned ladies. She has a grave, reverend air, and is dubbed "a Plato in Petticoats." She wins the affections of Captain Duretete—a man socially hampered by a University education—when she talks to him in his own language. "The Forms that Logicians introduce," she begins in pedantic tone, "and which proceed from simple Enumeration, are dubitable." Duretete interrupts in an ecstasy, "She's mine, Man; she's mine: My own Talent to a T. I'll match her in Dialectics, faith. I was seven Years at the University, Man, nurs'd up with Barbara, Celarunt, Darii, Ferio, Baralipton. Did you know that 't was Metaphysics made me an Ass?" Bisarre is the only heroine whose learning wins her a husband.

In Mrs. Centlivre's The Basset Table (1705) the charming young Valeria has a lover whom she intends to marry, but she is too much occupied with scientific research to have any time for darts and flames and lover's sighs. Fortunately Ensign cares so much for Valeria and her ducats that he is able to endure the tediousness of courtship in which laboratory experiments supersede passion.

He cannot edge in a word of love so absorbed does she declare herself to be in observing the circulation of blood in a fish's tail. Valeria is quite ahead of her time in her passion for dissection. She has devoted her pretty dove to the cause of research, and offers her jewels in return for her cousin's fine Italian greyhound, likewise to be used in her pursuit of anatomical secrets. When accused of cruelty she exclaims in quite a modern tone, "Can Animals, Insects, or Reptiles be put to a nobler use than to increase our Knowledge?" She loses her sailor lover by breaking in upon his sea lingo with a request that he should speak, "properly, positively, laconically, and naturally" and by deluging him with questions about mermaids and the inhabitants of the stars. He quickly determines that he doesn't regard a "Philosophical Gimcrack the value of a cockle-shell," and considers the lovely young Valeria as "fitter for Moorfields than Matrimony." She turns away from him with a sigh at the time wasted on a being so irrational as a suitor, and devotes herself again to the "immense Pleasures of dear, dear Philosophy."

Lady Reveller and her woman, Alphiew, sharply criticize Valeria for her unfeminine occupations.

The heroine of Charles Johnson's The Generous Husband (1711), Florida, is described as a "Pretender to Learning, a Philosophress." She is young, beautiful and with a tolerable dower. But she is invincibly opposed to marriage. She gives caustic analyses of the lawyer, the courtier, the soldier, the country squire, proposed by her father with matrimonial intent. "I'll not be married," she says, "I'll not submit myself to the uneven Temper of a Humourist; I'll neither be a Prop to a Fool's Fortune, nor a Bar to a Libertine's Pleasure." "I hate Men, I hate the Cumber of a Family, everything concurs to discourage me, to make me fear it, to make it my Aversion. Study has nothing in it but what is serene and calm." When her father urges the loss of her inheritance if she does not marry, her unmoved answer is, "I shall have still a good Book—which I am persuaded I shall love much better than a bad Husband—I'll tell you, Sir, for these three Years that I have been acquainted with Aristotle, we have not had the least difference together." Various lovers present themselves. One of them says he trembles whenever he visits her because she puts him so in mind of his schoolmaster, but he determines to stand "a little Ear-bating before Marriage"—encouraged thereto by the lady's money—with the hope of devising effective restraints after marriage. Another bold lover ventures upon her in her study where she sits surrounded by books and mathematical instruments. He is disguised as a traveling Japanese philosopher, and she enters upon the conversation with a learned salutation—Vir Colendissime si tu illorum Eruditorum, but he begs her in the name of Dr. Bentley not to repudiate her "vernacular Idiom," and the interview proceeds in the English tongue. All goes prosperously until the pseudo-philosopher speaks of love. She dismisses him with "What a terrible Solecism in good Manners has this Fellow committed—Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus; excellent Scipio—I admire that thought." She yields to love only when the learned Mr. Dypthong, who has "corrected every Nod in Homer," appears as a suitor. He has just escaped from the "Gothic Persecution of a sort of Animalcula call'd Punsters" and comes to her as an Oracle of Reason. This is the right approach and his victory is assured when he praises her noble easy Odes that Horace would not blush to own, her immortal Sonnet on Cato, her mastery of "both the Ethos and the Pathos." She pays him in kind with honeyed compliments from the Muses and the Graces. They discuss the Cartesian system, and the Epicurean, the Peripatetic and the Platonic Schools of Thought. The inhabitants of the moon come in for passing notice. The soul and the mind receive analysis. This sort of courtship suits her. 'T is thus a "Philosophress" should be wooed. She balks a little at the marriage articles, praying Mr. Grub to alter the savage style of them into something more genteel, at least in so far as to let the dates be "Calendar and Ides"; the pounds and pence, "Sesterces and Talents." But she yields the point on making the unhappy discovery that to be learned and polite in dower articles would be illegal, that the law demands tautology, verbiage, an impertinent jargon. It is only when Mr. Dypthong is unmasked a villain that Florida becomes "sick of Letters," lays aside the "Severity of Thought" along with her big folios, and accepts the paternal choice in the way of a husband. Her father, whose slightest remarks have received pitiless logical analysis from his daughter, who is urged to maintain silence or to speak "positively—laconically—naturally," whose arguments are met with classic quotations that are but as gibberish to his uninstructed ear, hands her over to a husband with a sigh of relief. His conclusion is, "Wit in a Woman is like Mettle in a blind Mare." The lover agrees that "a She-Understanding shou'd always be passive." Learning, he says, may give a woman more Sail, but she's sure to lack Ballast!

In January, 1717, there appeared a farce at Drury Lane entitled Three Hours after Marriage. It was the joint work of Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot, but the character of the learned lady, Phœbe Clinket,[489] was by Pope. Phœbe is not an important person in the plot. She was evidently drawn merely to caricature a learned lady, in this case an authoress. She comes upon the stage in an ink-stained dress with pens stuck in her hair. Her maid carries strapped to her back a desk on which Phœbe writes:

The main portion of the first act is devoted to a development of the satiric representation of an authoress, and the character is given special point by the fact that it was intended for Lady Winchilsea. Probably no woman of the time was more cruelly pilloried. Exactly why Pope chose to give so disagreeable a picture of her it would be difficult to say, but fortunately one is not obliged to give a reasonable basis for Pope's satirical sketches. For the occasion it is sufficient to say that her dramatic attempts were not to his taste, and that some obscure personal irritation led him to take the opportunity of this play to speak his mind.

In minor points the character might be counted fairly applicable to Lady Winchilsea. Her learning, her devotion to literary pursuits, her fecundity in verse, her opposition to amatory themes, her detestation of the modern stage, are all characteristics that tally with the burlesque portrait. Lady Winchilsea was also very religious, and though herself maid of honor to Mary of Modena and so necessarily much in the corrupt Restoration court, was even unnecessarily strict and severe on the subject of morals and manners. This prudishness was satirized by Phœbe Clinket's boast that she is "unwilling to stand even on the brink of an indecorum," as a result of which delicacy she has never allowed in her plays "the libertinism of lip-embraces," and this in spite of the fact that Aristotle never actually prohibited kissing on the stage. But in the main points of Phœbe Clinket's self-confidence and her determination to push her play at all hazards to the point of public presentation, there is no hint of a likeness to Lady Winchilsea, who was exceedingly modest and deprecatory about her work. She never willingly allowed her dramatic writings to pass beyond a small domestic and literary circle, nor out of her voluminous verse did any but a very small portion reach publication with her permission. Furthermore, the tragedy of The Universal Deluge attributed to Phœbe Clinket bears no resemblance to any extant work by Lady Winchilsea.

Taken as a whole, quite apart from any personal application, Phœbe Clinket is the most detestable picture of a learned lady in any of the comedies. She is vain, boastful, and superficial; she is a pedant, a prude, and a hypocrite; and there are no mitigating traits.

Colley Cibber put on his play The Refusal at Covent Garden in 1721 and published it the same year. It is a close version of Les Femmes Savantes, the rich, middle-class family of Sir Gilbert Wrangle in Cibber's play being the counterpart of the wealthy bourgeois family of Chrysal in Molière. The action follows that of Molière's play, and Molière gives the model for many of the important situations and conversations. Curll called The Refusal merely "a Sampler, whereon Monsieur Molière's Stitching may easily be perceived from Mr. Cibber's canvas."[491] But Cibber's play is a success in that it is a brilliant English adaptation of the French original. The two characters that represent learned ladies are Lady Wrangle and her daughter Sophronia.

Sir Gilbert thus describes his wife to Mr. Frankly: "She's a great plague to me. Not but my lord bishop, her uncle, was a mighty good man; she lived all along with him; I took her upon his word; 't was he made her a scholar; I thought her a miracle; before I had her I used to go and hear her talk Latin with him an hour together; and there I—I—I played the fool." Throughout the play Sir Gilbert is very evidently a member of "the hen-pecked fraternity." Lady Wrangle has an important place in but two scenes and in both of these she endeavors to domineer over her husband. In the scene with the maid he is completely cowed, and in the scene of the wedding contract he is triumphant only because of abundant friendly backing. Lady Wrangle's quarrelsome, jealous disposition is perhaps more in evidence than her learning, but she has learning too. She quotes Latin whenever possible and is herself an authoress.

The famous scene in Molière where the maid Martine is to be dismissed for her indifference to Vaugelas and the laws of grammar, becomes in Cibber a similar hurly-burly against the maid and the cook for having used a sheet of one of Lady Wrangle's productions in which to wrap the roast. The maid—"a brainless ideat," "a dunce," "an illiterate monster," "an eleventh plague of Egypt," according to the energetic vituperation of her mistress—seeing the leaf to be blotted and blurred took it for waste paper.

The leaf in question is a part of Lady Wrangle's translation of the passion of Byblis. Her husband calls it the passion of Bibble-Babble, and says, "If a line on't happens to be mislaid, she's as mad as a blind mare that has lost her foal; she'll run her head against a stone-wall to recover it. All the use I find of her learning is, that it furnishes her more words to scold with."

Lady Wrangle's creed as expressed to Charlotte is, "Refine your soul; give your happier hours up to science, arts, and letters; enjoy the raptures of philosophy, subdue your passions, and renounce the sensual commerce of mankind." She, however, claims Frankly as her lover, a virtuous and platonic one, to be sure, but so irrevocably hers as to preclude significant attentions to others. When she learns of his open love to Charlotte—she exclaims, "I thought virtue, letters, and philosophy had only charms for him: I have known his soul all rapture in their praises." And her indignation that he should "contaminate his intellects with such a chit of an animal" changes her platonic love into the most jealous hate. Her philosophy as to the proper conduct of the passions has no influence on her actions.

Sophronia is unlike her prototype Armande, in that Cibber converts her some time before the end of the play and she takes a husband with a delight equal to that of Charlotte herself. Sophronia was, on her father's second marriage, when he was foolishly enamoured of Lady Wrangle's Latin, put into the hands of the Bishop to be made by him into a second prodigy of learning. She had also the advantage of being instructed by her stepmother in the doctrines of platonic love. Her learning, her doctrine of the union of souls, her enthusiasm for poetry, all give an effect of genuineness. Her lover Granger understands her well. He grants her "half mad with learning and philosophy," but still "a fool of parts and capable of thinking right." Frankly had formerly made love to her in conventional fashion, but to him she had shown herself a marble-hearted lady, a proud and haughty prude. But Granger knows how to approach her. He humors all her romantic notions, chimes in with all her raptures in the air, scouts all love that is but an affair of the veins and the arteries, exalts only the sexless union of harmonious minds and souls, quotes Latin, declaims blank verse, makes slow and delicate and utterly submissive and reluctant approaches to so mundane a thought as marriage, and finally she falls a victim to blandishments so adroitly mingled. Granger's words, like Hybla drops, distil upon her sense; faint philosophy deserts her; and "like a wounded dove" she "trembling hovers to her mate for succour" in the most approved romantic style. When her stepmother says accusingly, "What then becomes of your Platonic system?" she answers, "Dissolved, evaporated, impracticable, and fallacious all: you'll own I have labour'd in the experiment, but found at last, that to try gold in a crucible of virgin-wax was a mere female folly." And she closes the play with

The characters of Lady Wrangle and Sophronia with their affectations and useless learning are emphasized by the natural, sensible Charlotte who serves as a foil. She is a gay, laughing, wheedling, fascinating little rogue with a quick wit, and a genius for common sense. She cannot believe that a soul was crammed into a body just to spoil sport and she gives her whole nature free play. She loves Mr. Frankly and says so, and she avows her preference for marriage as against philosophical mysteries. Her praises are recited by Mr. Frankly in the words, "As she does not read Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, or Seneca, she is neither romantic nor vain of her pedantry; and as her learning never went higher than Bickerstaff's Letters, her manners are consequently natural, modest and agreeable."

In Bickerstaff's Lionel and Clarissa (1768), Sir John Flowerdew seems quite in advance of his age in securing a tutor for his daughter and in considering "a little knowledge" necessary for a woman. "I am far," he says, "from considering ignorance as a desirable characteristic; when intelligence is not attended with impertinent affectation, it teaches them [women] to judge with precision, and gives them a degree of solidity necessary for the companion of a sensible man." This, however, is a cool statement of theory. When his daughter outwits him and marries the tutor, he has a violent reaction in favor of the straitest training a maid can have:

Except for Lionel and Clarissa there were after Cibber's Refusal few representations of the learned lady as a comic type, until after the revival of the comedy of manners under Sheridan and Goldsmith. The sentimental comedy was occupied in rescuing super-sensitive, over-refined, delicate, tearful, and helpless heroines from the plots of abnormally dark villains, and in bestowing the prizes thus captured on the high-minded, self-conscious Sir Charles Grandisons who posed as heroes of the play. Comic types fell by the way until Goldsmith succeeded in his knight-errantry in behalf of the goddess of fun, and routed sensibility, and sentimentality. And the learned ladies in the comedy after 1770 represent a new kind of learning, and the ladies themselves are in many respects unlike their sisters of an earlier date.

II. The Novel-Reading Girl as a Comic Type

The learned-lady theme had an interesting variant in the novel-reading girl. This type, as it appeared in comedy and fiction, is also of French origin. It finds its direct ancestry in Molière's Les Précieuses (1659), a satiric representation of the vogue of the French romances, most of which appeared in the twenty-five years before Les Précieuses.[492]

Along with the vogue of the romances came the critical comment. Scarron's Roman Comique (1651) burlesqued La Calprenède. Boileau's Héros de Romans (1664) and L'Art Poétique (1674) satirized especially the romances of Scudéry. The two satires that showed the effect of the romances on the minds of young girls were Molière's Les Précieuses and later Furetière's Roman Bourgeois (1666).

These romances and satires were almost as well known in the original to cultivated Englishmen as they were to Frenchmen. There were also numerous translations. Between 1647 and 1660 Polexandre, Cassandre, Ibrahim, Artemène, Clélie, Almahide, Cléopâtre, all appeared in English versions, and some of them several times. And the satires were also promptly translated. There is no better illustration of the general English familiarity with those romances than that furnished by the letters Dorothy Osborne wrote to Sir William Temple in 1652-54. The Hôtel de Rambouillet coterie itself could hardly have been more nearly letter perfect in the details than was this young English lady. Her reading becomes so absorbing that her grave lover finds it necessary to caution her against the "late hours" reported to him. She is penitent, but her enthusiasm is unabated. Parts of Cléopâtre, she says, pleased her more than anything she had ever read in her life. She confesses that she cried an hour together over the sad story of Almanzor, and was so angry with Alcidiana that she could never love her after. But she is no uncritical admirer of the heroes and heroines. Her sense of humor does not forsake her. She laughs at L'Amant Jaloux, in Cyrus, as one who seeks his own vexation, and L'Amant mon Aimé was "an ass." Sir William's interest in the romances is hardly less than Dorothy's. She sends him the separate volumes as she completes them, and there is a lively interchange of impressions and comments on various characters and situations.[493]

After the Restoration the fondness for romances may have been somewhat lessened by the new passion for the theater. But romance-readers were still numerous. Pepys tells us that his wife sat up till twelve over the Grand Cyrus. Again he says, "I find my wife troubled at my checking her last night in a coach in her long stories out of the Grand Cyrus which she would tell, though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner." However, he must have repented of his rigor, for we find him later calling at Martin's his book-seller's, where he bought Cassandre and some other French books for his wife's closet. And Mr. Pepys himself confesses to at least one Sunday devoted to French romances.[494]

That Mr. and Mrs. Pepys were not alone in their tastes is made evident by contemporary arraignment of the romances as harmful influences. Mr. Pepys records a conversation with a Mr. Wilson who protested passionately against them as perverters of history. The Ladies' Calling (1673) brings the matter home to daily life:

The popularity of the French romances and the protests they aroused would naturally make the romance-loving girl a type of genuine social interest, and it is surprising that this element of Molière's Les Précieuses was not sooner taken up in English comedy. There were, to be sure, occasional references to romance-reading something in the style of Molière. In Shadwell's Bury-Fair (1689), for instance, Gertrude is apparently familiar "with Romances and Love and Honour Plays," and she complains that all the lovers talk so in the style of the romances that a girl knows in advance just what compliments she must listen to.[496] And in Wright's Female Vertuosos (1693) Sir Maurice says, "O' my Conscience, Women's Heads, now-a-days, are so stuff't up with their Trash of Romances and Poetry, that there is no Room left in 'em for Reason, or Common Sense." Later he bewails his fate more bitterly: "This Plague of Wit has infected all my Servants, even my little Boy, forsooth, can not turn the Spit now without a Pharamond or a Cassandra in his hand." But it was not till Steele's Tender Husband in 1705 that the romance-reading girl appeared in England as a developed type. Steele's Biddy Tipkin[497] is nearly half a century later than Molière's Madelon and Cathos, but they are her unquestioned ancestors.

In Molière's play the two country girls endeavor to apply to real life the ideas they have gained from the romances. Gorgibus, the father of Madelon and uncle of Cathos, is a worthy citizen whose common-sense views of life subject him to the scornful raillery of the young ladies. He endeavors to provide them with good husbands, but his straightforward methods shock their romance-tutored minds. To be greeted at the first interview with marriage proposals is a crude and coarse proceeding. If Cyrus had married Mandane, and Clélie had married Aronce at once, what would have become of Mademoiselle de Scudéry's romances Artemène and Clélie? The dull Gorgibus, and the lovers he has brought are hopelessly ignorant of le carte de Tendre, ignorant of the regions known as Billets-doux, Petits-soins, Billets-galants, Jolis-vers, and the other exactly marked stages of a well-wrought courtship. The young ladies even doubt the reality of their relationship to Gorgibus, and they reject the names Cathos and Madelon in favor of Polixène and Aminte. Gorgibus attributes all their vagaries to the reading of romances, and in the climax of his irritation exclaims to the stock of offending volumes, "Et vous, qui êtes cause de leur folie, sottes billeveseés, pernicieux amusements des esprits oisifs, romans, vers, chansons, sonnets et sonnettes, puissiez-vous être à tous les diables!"

The fundamental idea and many of the satiric details in the presentation of Biddy Tipkin in Steele's The Tender Husband exactly follow the French model. Biddy's reading is identical with that of Madelon and Cathos, but wider in scope. She refers familiarly to passages or characters in Cléopâtre, Cassandre, Pharamond, Ibrahim, Artemène, Clélie, and Almahide, showing that she had practically covered the field of romance. She is an heiress under the charge of her uncle, Hezekiah Tipkin, a banker of Lombard Street, and his sister, "an antiquated virgin with a mighty affectation for youth." Pounce, a lawyer on the lookout for a rich match for his client, the impecunious Captain Cleremont, describes Biddy thus: "Well then, since we may be free, you must understand, the young lady, by being kept from the world, has made a world of her own. She has spent all her solitude in reading romances, her head is full of shepherds, knights, flowery meads, groves, and streams, so that if you talk like a man of this world to her, you do nothing." But Cleremont, quite equal to the situation, responds, "Oh, let me alone—I have been a great traveller in fairy-land myself, I know Oroondates; Cassandra, Astræa, and Clelia are my intimate acquaintance." Pounce predicts success for the fluent Captain, but there are other plans for Biddy. Her guardians wish her to marry her cousin, Humphry Gubbin, a country lout, familiarly known as "Numps." Her attitude towards him and towards her prosaic aunt appears in the following conversation:

By mere force of contrast the way is open for the smooth-tongued Mr. Cleremont. He meets the ladies in the park with such phrases as "the cool breath of the morning," "the season of pearly dews and gentle zephyrs," and Biddy is enraptured. After the adroit withdrawal of the aunt by Pounce, Cleremont well maintains with Biddy his reputation as a traveler in fairy-land, and assumes likewise the military prowess without which no romance hero was complete. He soon cleverly turns the conversation to a proposal of marriage, but Biddy understands the laws of romance too well to yield immediately. They part in the true spirit of Cassandre.

But Biddy has not the cold constitution of the romance heroines and she presently acknowledges that she finds in herself all the symptoms of a raging amour. "I love solitude," she soliloquizes, "I grow pale, I sigh frequently. I call upon the name of Cleremont when I don't think of it—His person is ever in my eyes, and his voice in my ears—Methinks I long to lose myself in some pensive grove, or to hang over the head of some warbling fountain, with a lute in my hand, softening the murmurs of the waters." And in spite of her reluctance to abridge courtship and so shut off "all further decoration of disguise, serenade and adventure," she finally consents to an immediate elopement, declaring that if Oroondates had been as pressing as Cleremont Cassandra would have been but a pocket-book.

Biddy, her aunt, and her two suitors, form the most delightful group of characters in the comedy of manners before Goldsmith and Sheridan. And Biddy can hold her own against any of the heroines except Congreve's Millamant. Nance Oldfield created the character in 1705 and it continued to be a favorite on the stage. The play was given several times nearly every year to 1736 and occasionally afterwards, so that the character of Biddy was one often before the public.

There are also other indications that the topic of romance-reading was one of continued interest. In 1748 there appeared the second edition of an anonymous work entitled The Lady's Drawing-Room. Being a Faithful Picture of the Great World. One chapter entitled "The Adventures of Marilla" presents a character following in the wake of "Biddy Tipkin" and antedating the Female Quixote by perhaps a decade: