2. The Century following the Restoration
The period to be here presented in detail is the century following the Restoration. During this period the work of women spreads out in new directions. Not only is there a greater variety in the kinds of writing, but other forms of self-expression are entered upon. In this more complicated era the strictly chronological method becomes confusing. It seems more desirable to take up the work under different species, keeping to chronological development within each species.
Two kinds of new work by women, acting and painting, demand brief preliminary notice. Though possibly not within the category of learned occupations they must yet be recognized as of great importance in the new life opening before women.
Actresses
Charles II had in France been familiar with the custom of having women on the stage, and when he issued his two patents to Davenant and Killigrew he inserted the famous clause, "We do permit and give leave from this time to come that all women's parts be acted by women." Mrs. Coleman had taken the part of Ianthe in Davenant's Siege of Rhodes in 1656, but this was not a regular play. It was more of the nature of an opera or spectacle. The first woman to act on the public stage in England was probably the actress who played Desdemona, December 8, 1660. "J. Jordan" wrote a prologue to introduce her as "the first woman that came to act on the stage," but he did not give her name.[139]
The theatrical novelty initiated by this unknown actress was far-reaching in its effects. Through the ensuing years a constantly increasing number of women followed the lure of the stage. No other opportunity open to the ambition of women met with so eager a response, or could number so many aspirants, or could register success so unqualified. Yet as we read of these early English actresses we hardly think of acting as a profession or of them as artists. They were in no sense students of the parts they played. Beauty, youth, high spirits, a certain native endowment of wit or boldness, ability to sing a song or dance a jig, seemed to meet all the demands of audiences too much delighted with the mere fact of seeing women on the stage to be over-critical of their technique or interpretation. Moreover, the runs of plays were short, three days being about the average, so there was hardly time to work up finished productions. The stage tenure of most of the actresses was also brief, hardly more than a prelude to the social and domestic irregularities of their later lives. Cunningham names Mrs. Betterton as the only actress of Charles II's day who was not mistress to some man at court. "Frailties," as they were euphemistically called, became so normally associated with actresses that Anne Bracegirdle excited incredulous surprise by her reputed purity of life, and she was presented by the noblemen of her day with a purse of eight hundred guineas in recognition of her virtue.[140] The immorality of these early actresses, girls of no rigorous professional training and no professional standards, is quite intelligible. In appearing before the public at all they broke so many conventions, defied the feminine ideal so completely, that a few steps further in pursuit of flattery and luxurious living hardly seemed to count. As actresses they were at once under a moral stigma anyhow, so far as the soberer part of the community was concerned, and they naturally followed the path of least resistance and accepted the morality of the court of the merry monarch, a court where virtue with her "lean and scare-crow face" seldom intruded. The unfortunate outcome of the turpitude of the Restoration actresses is that they built up in the public mind a prejudice against actresses as a class, a prejudice which affected later even such women as Mrs. Betterton, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Cibber, or Mrs. Siddons. But it must not be forgotten that they served the cause of women by opening the way to a new and important profession, a profession in which women have no handicaps. The stage has been represented by more women of genius, and has given to women more unstinted recognition in fame and money, than have any of the other forms of public activity into which women have so far been admitted, except, possibly, in late years, administrative work in social service.
It is unnecessary, in this study, to carry the account of the actresses into further detail, or further down the century. The history of the part women took on the seventeenth and eighteenth century stage would make a volume of itself. And since it was many years before acting was connected with any critical or intellectual conception of the plays represented, it may suffice here to leave this portion of the new work of women with the mere announcement of its inception.
Artists
To acting we may add another new realm, that of painting. The earliest woman portrait-painter on record in England is Anne Carlisle, who died about 1680. In 1658 Sir William Sanderson, in his Graphice, commenting on the artists then in England, said, "And in Oyl Colours we have a vertuous example in that worthy Artist, Mrs. Carlisle." In the notes left by Vertue to Walpole was a statement that he had seen in about 1730 the portrait Mrs. Carlisle had painted of herself. Her chief work was in copying the paintings of Italian masters, or, according to a fashion of the times, reproducing them in miniature. It is said that Charles I admired her work so warmly that he presented to her and Van Dyck ultramarine to the value of five hundred pounds.[141]
Of more distinguished ability was Mary Beale (1637-1697),[142] who is said to have studied either with Sir Peter Lely or Robert Walker. At least she watched Lely paint and thereby gained some of his technique. She worked in oils, water-colors, and crayons. Through Sir Peter Lely she was given access to some of the best works of Van Dyck and in copying these gained a training somewhat similar to that given most artists by sojourns in Italy or Holland. There are in the English National Portrait Gallery portraits by her of Charles II and Abraham Cowley. At Knole is her portrait of John Milton; at Woburn Abbey, one of the Duke of Monmouth; Archbishop Tillotson, Henry, Duke of Norfolk, Dr. Sydenham, Dr. Croone, Bishop Wilkins, are among those who sat to her. No other English portrait-painter of the period had so distinguished a clientèle or is represented by so many canvases in English galleries. Her success may be measured, in part, by her financial returns. In a pocket-book kept by her husband in 1672 is this entry: "Received this year, for pictures done by my dearest heart, 202l. 5s." The receipts for 1674 were 216l. 5s.; and for 1677, 429l. She was still painting important portraits in 1691, for we find in the Term Catalogue for Michaelmas of that year the announcement of "The true Effigies of his Grace, John, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Engraven by Rob. White on a large sheet of Paper, from the Original lately painted by Mrs. Mary Beale."
According to the manuscript of Mr. Oldys, Mrs. Beale was also celebrated for her poetry. He styles her, "that masculine poet, as well as Painter, the incomparable Mrs. Beale." Dr. Woodford included in his translations of the Psalms several versions by Mrs. Beale whom he eulogizes as "an absolutely compleat Gentlewoman," and to whom he wrote several poems under the name "Beliza."[143]
Anne Killigrew (1660-1685), a maid of honor to Mary of Modena, died at twenty-five, but she had already attained considerable repute as a portrait painter. There is a tradition that she studied with Sir Peter Lely. If so she must have taken these lessons before she was twenty, for Lely left England in 1680. Dryden says that her portrait of James II expressed "not only his outward part, but drew forth the very image of his heart," and that she was equally successful in depicting the bright beauty and peerless majesty of Mary of Modena. Her portrait of herself was engraved by Becket and prefaces the volume of her poems issued the year after her death. Other paintings were religious in subject, as in her portrayal of incidents in the life of John the Baptist; or mythological, as in her representation of Diana's nymphs. Of far more possible significance is her landscape work. During 1660-1685 Robert Streater is the only English landscape-painter of whom we have record. Charles II brought over a number of Italian and Flemish artists who painted English landscapes in the style of Ruysdael, Poussin, or Salvator Rosa, and their work would be the pictures chiefly known at court. It is not improbable that Miss Killigrew's landscapes were copies or imitations of these foreign artists. Dryden says she painted ruins of Greece and Rome, and forest glades in which were nymphs and shaggy satyrs. Such pictures must have been copies. But Dryden also enumerates sylvan scenes of herds and flocks; clear, shallow little brooks; deep rivers reflecting as in a mirror the trees on their banks. Such pictures are truly English in tone and whatever their intrinsic value such a choice of subjects would put her with Robert Streater at the very inception of English landscape art. And though the scanty records concerning her painting do not substantiate Dryden's description of her landscapes, it could hardly be supposed that he would have been so explicit in a poem written for the family and immediately after her death had there not been some pictures at least moderately correspondent to his lines.[144]
Other seventeenth-century names of less importance show an aspiration in art somewhat above that countenanced by the boarding-schools. Mrs. Pepys and Miss Margaret Pen may serve to indicate the sort of work being done in amateurish fashion in various homes. Both ladies were "learning to limn" with one Mr. Browne. Pepys was tremendously interested in his wife's progress. In the midst of terrifying accounts of the plague and the fire there come in 1665 and 1666 frequent notes on her pictures. Once after a week's absence on exhausting work he records, "To my wife, and having viewed her last piece of drawing since I saw her which is seven or eight days, which pleases me beyond anything in the world, to bed with great content, but weary." The next day, on being importuned to buy her a pearl necklace, he promises it, but only "if she pleases me in her painting." On one occasion he called on Lady Pen and says of the visit, "Talking with Mrs. Pegg Pen, and looking at her pictures, and commended them; but, Lord! so far short of my wife's as no comparison." A month later is the note, "I took my Lady Pen home, and her daughter Pegg and, after dinner I made my wife show them her pictures, which did mad Pegg Pen, who learnes of the same man." In September, 1665, Pepys had just seen his wife's picture of our Saviour and thought it so pretty that he boasted of it to Evelyn, at which Evelyn paid him in kind by telling him that "the beautiful Mrs. Middleton is rare (in painting) and his own wife do brave things."[145]
MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW
From a painting by herself engraved by T. Chambars
The Evelyn family seems to have been instinctively artistic. In Mr. Thoresby's account of a visit to Evelyn, he said he was shown "many drawings and paintings of his own and his lady's doing; one especially of enamel was surprisingly fine, and this ingenious lady told me how she wrought it." Both Mr. Evelyn and his son Draper were proud of Mary's work in painting. Sixteen years after her death Mr. Thoresby wrote: "He afterwards carried me in his coach to his son Draper's at the Temple, and showed me many curious pieces of his ingenious daughter's performances, both very small in miniature, and as large as the life in oil colours, equal it is thought to the greatest masters of the age. He gave me a specimen of some prospects he took in Italy, and etched upon the copper by his own hand."
At the end of the century is Sarah Curtis (d. 1743) who was married in 1701 to Bishop Hoadly. Before her marriage she had been a pupil of Mary Beale, and she is now represented in the National Portrait Gallery by three canvases, portraits of Burnet, Winston, and Hoadly. Mrs. Rowe's paintings were likewise highly prized by discriminating friends. Of greater interest is Mrs. Delany (1700-1788). She copied at least seventy-two pictures by old masters and painted many portraits. Her work is not represented in public galleries, but many of her pictures are still preserved in private collections. Susan Penelope Gibson was a successful miniature painter. Elizabeth Creed was also an artist of at least local repute. She did sacred subjects as altar-pieces for neighboring churches and she painted numerous portraits. She also gave free lessons to the girls living near her. Her daughter Elizabeth, who inherited her artistic tastes, is said to have ornamented a hall in a Tudor mansion near Oundle.
Short and insignificant as this list appears, it yet assumes real importance when we realize not only that these were the earliest English women to enter this field, but that the list shows up surprisingly well when compared with a similar list of the native English painters among the men of the period. Charles I was a great lover of art and he summoned many artists, some of the first rank, to England, and he bought pictures with a far-sighted munificence, and Charles II was ambitious of following along the same distinguished path. But a list of the pictures painted in England before 1700 shows hardly an English name. Hence the presence of any successful women artists is doubly significant.
The amateurish quality of the painting may be in part explained by the fact that in but one case, that of Mary Beale, was there any impetus or training such as are necessarily associated with work adopted as a profession. The painting was an accomplishment, a pleasant occupation for leisure hours, a resource, rather than a life purpose ardently pursued. The only external reward for the many hours at the easel was the praise of a small circle of friends. The real incentive was an inner demand for some form of self-expression, and the mere number of pictures painted, quite apart from the question of their excellence, is indicative of the eagerness with which women welcomed any sort of opportunity for the free play of their own individuality.
Authors
It was not, however, acting or painting that occupied most of the women whose natures craved something out of the ordinary routine. Writing was a much more natural and feasible resource. Acting implied a public, and even painting, especially portrait-painting, was likely to be semi-public. But writing could be carried on in retirement and the results submitted only to the partial criticism of a home or social circle. It did not bring women before a carping public or necessarily into competition with men, for even if plays were produced and books published, the name of the writer could be veiled, as it usually was, under a decent anonymity. Hence women who respected the obvious conventions could yet indulge themselves in authorship.
WRITERS ON PRACTICAL SUBJECTS
When women entered upon writing as a career, it might be thought that they would at first take up subjects familiar to them, but such was not the case. For instance, most of the books for children, before the venture of the Newberys about the middle of the eighteenth century, were by men.[146] It was James Janeway whose maxim, "A child is never too little to go to Hell," resulted in works so popular as A Looking Glass for Children and A Token for Children (1676); John Bunyan's A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rimes for Children; being Divine Poems on the Creed, Commonwealth and Several other Subjects (1690); Mr. Mason's A Little Catechism with little Verses and little sayings, for little children (1693). The Divine and Moral Songs for Children, by Isaac Watts in 1720, carried on the religious instruction. There were also various accounts of the "Life and Saintly Death" of children of tender years, which were published with the avowed purpose of influencing other children of like tender years, but none of these are by women. The first women I have come upon who wrote professedly for children are Sarah Fielding and Mrs. Collyer in 1749.[147]
In a somewhat less degree the same condition exists in relation to medicine, especially in the realms most definitely in the hands of women. Mrs. Pilkington tells us that her father was the first man midwife in England, but nearly all the books on midwifery were written by men. Two women, however, appear in print, in a discussion of their professional work. Mrs. Jane Sharp's book is entitled The Midwives' Book, or the whole Art of midwifery discovered, directing Child-bearing Women how to behave themselves in their Conception, Breeding, Bearing, and Nursing, of Children. In Six Books. By Mrs. Jane Sharp, Practitioner in the Art of Midwifery above thirty years.[148]
Mrs. Elizabeth Cellier, a second writer on midwifery, is known perhaps chiefly because she was supposed to have some connection with the Meal Tub Plot. After her acquittal from treason charges she wrote a pamphlet called Malice Defeated, in which she courageously expressed her adherence to an unpopular cause in the words, "I do not yet so much fear the smell of Newgate as to be frighted for telling the truth; nor is death so great a terror to me, but that I am still ready to seal the same with my blood."[149] She must have been a woman of substance as well as courage, for she was fined a thousand pounds because of certain passages in this pamphlet. She was also condemned to stand in the pillory three times, a punishment which, according to Lady Russell, she bore with intrepidity and nonchalance, protecting her head from missiles by means of a battledore which she held up with one hand, while with the other she gathered up and put into her pocket all the stones that fell within her reach.
In her profession of midwifery Mrs. Cellier was of high repute, but her interests were not circumscribed by her own practice. One of her schemes was the establishment of a "Colledg of Midwives" where the best possible training should be given. Though her pamphlet, entitled A Scheme for the Foundation of a Royal Hospital and raising a revenue of 5000 l or 6000 l a year by and for the Maintenance of a Corporation of Skilful Midwives, did not result in the establishment of her proposed college, the idea and the formulation of the plan do credit to her foresight and intelligence, and sound quite in line with modern forms of woman's civic enterprise.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could show a long list of interesting and elaborately worked-out books on housewifery in general and cooking in particular, but it seldom happens that one of these books is by a woman. It is, to be sure, not impossible that more of the material was furnished by women than is apparent on the surface. Very many of the books on housekeeping matters were anonymous and were probably mere publishers' compilations from unacknowledged sources, and in such cases the actual material may have come from various housewives. But during the century I have come upon but three women who published under their own names the results of their experiences as cooks. The earliest of these was Mrs. Hannah Woolley. She was born about 1623. Her mother and elder sisters are said to have been "very well skilled in physick and chirurgery" and they taught her in her youth. She was twice married, the first time to a schoolmaster named Woolley, and then to a Mr. Francis Challinor. She is known usually as Mrs. Woolley. One of her books, The Queen-like Closet, or A rich Cabinet stored with all manner of rare Receipts for preserving, Candying, and Cookery. Very pleasant and beneficial to all ingenuous persons of the Female Sex, reached its eleventh edition by 1696. Mrs. Woolley had been governess in two noble families and had acquired definite ideas as to polite behavior. This knowledge also she committed to the printed page. On manners, but especially on household management, she wrote as an authority and received due recognition.
Another book, by a woman whose initials I have not been able to expand into a name, is the following: The Cook's New Years Gift, Cookery refined, or The Lady, Gentlewoman and Servant-maid's Companion: containing the Art of dressing all sorts of Flesh, Fish, and Fowl, various ways, after the newest Mode; with their proper seasonings, sauces, Garnishes, serving up and carving, etc. By Mrs. A. M. a long practiser of this curious Art. (Term Catalogues, Mich. 1697. Mich. 1700.)
The work of Mrs. Woolley in the seventeenth century found its most worthy counterpart in the eighteenth century in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which far exceeds any Thing of the kind ever yet Published.... By a Lady. London. Printed for the Author; and sold at Mrs. Ashburn's, a China-Shop, the Corner of Fleet Ditch, 1747. The book was issued with about two hundred subscribers. A fourth edition in octavo came out in 1751, a ninth edition in 1759, and many later editions. In her Preface Mrs. Glasse said, "If I have not wrote in the high polite Stile I hope I shall be forgiven, for my Intention is to instruct the lower Sort, therefore treat them in their own Way. For Example: when I bid them lard a Fowl, if I should bid them lard with large Lardoons, they would not know what I want: But when I say they must lard with small Pieces of Bacon, they know what I mean." The new element in her book was this attempt to write out receipts that were simple enough to come into general use.
WRITERS ON RELIGION AND THEOLOGY
The Term Catalogues for 1670-1713 show how great was the preponderance during those years of books on "Divinity." That women should share in this prevailing interest is but natural, for religion came within the accepted canon of the truly feminine. And there are evidences of an even greater amount of devotional writing by women than might be expected. The period 1650 to 1750, and especially the first half of that period, could show a long list of women noted for lives of piety and good works.[150] The loose living characteristic of the court apparently had its reaction towards exceptional spiritual rigor on the part of many ladies of rank. And of these devout ladies no small number found in the composition of religious verse or prose the intellectual and emotional outlet denied them in other ways. Almost none of this writing was meant for a public. The reams of meditations, prayers, and reflections left in manuscript were merely a private resource, and often kept secret even from the author's family. Such writings were in their nature fugitive, and it would only now and then happen that some relative or friend would collect and order the papers and see them through the press. We accordingly get scattered hints through funeral sermons and casual notices of an amount of devotional writing greatly in excess of that published. But to tabulate even all the published material would be wearisome and to no good end. A few illustrative examples showing the chief characteristics may suffice.
Lady Elizabeth Brooke (1601-1683)
One of the best examples of the persistent and prodigious industry shown by some of these ladies is the work of Lady Elizabeth Brooke. She began at thirty to make notes on sermons, to copy extracts from commentaries, and occasionally to write out some personal opinions, and she kept at this sedative occupation till her death fifty-two years later. It is painful to reflect on such a mass of undigested material, but the significant fact remains that she preferred such reading and writing to the ordinary interests of her sex. Some of her "Observations and Rules for Practice" were published as an appendix to the sermon preached at her funeral. Selections from her writings were published as late as 1828 in The Lady's Monitor.
Anne Murray, Lady Halkett (1622-1699)
Anne Murray, Lady Halkett, was even more industrious. Her father, who was tutor of Charles I and Provost of Eton, died when she was a child, but her mother, who was governess to the Princess Elizabeth, gave her "a complete education." Of her early life she says: "My mother spared no expense in educating all her children in the most suitable way to improve them ... and paid masters for teaching my sister and mee to write, speak French, play on the lute and virginalls, and dance, and kept a gentlewoman to teach us all kinds of needlework, which shows I was not brought up in an idle life." After several complicated and long drawn-out love affairs—fully described in her Autobiography—Anne married Sir James Halkett in 1656. As the years passed her interests finally centered on two subjects, divinity and medicine. In "physick and surgery" she gained great repute. She was consulted in difficult cases from the remotest parts of the kingdom and her fame spread even to Holland. It was quaintly said of her: "She was ever employed either in doing or reaping good: in the summer season she vyed with the bee or ant, in gathering herbs, flowers, worms, snails, etc., for the still or limbeck, for the mortar or boyling pan, etc., and was ordinarily then in a dress fitted for her still-house; making preparations of extracted waters, spirits, ointments, conserves, salves, powders, etc., which she ministered every Wednesday to a multitude of poor infirm persons, besides what she dayly sent abroad to persons of all ranks who consulted her in their maladies."[151] But it was religious themes only that employed her pen. The catalogue of her writings includes twenty-one volumes, or a total of about eight thousand pages of manuscript, some in quarto, some in folio size, and all bound. Some of these books were printed at Edinburgh in 1701. The title of one book of three hundred and fifteen pages will indicate the general character of her writing: Select Meditations and Prayers upon the First Week, with Observations on each Days Creation, and Considerations on the Seven Capital Vices to be opposed, and their opposite Virtues to be studied and practised.
| Vices to be subdued | Virtues to be learned | |
| Pride | Sunday | Humility |
| Covetousness | Monday | Contentation |
| Lust | Tuesday | Chastity |
| Envy | Wednesday | Charity |
| Gluttony | Thursday | Temperance |
| Anger | Friday | Patience |
| Sloth | Saturday | Diligence |
All but nine of these books were written during Lady Halkett's twenty-eight years of widowhood when she had much leisure, but under any circumstances the task was a great one, and becomes the more amazing when we reflect upon it as really only a private recreation. To write so much with no urgency of fame or money shows some very strong inner demand for expression and a very facile pen.
"Legacies"
Another type of religious book goes back for its inspiration to Elizabeth Jocelyn's famous Legacie. One of Lady Halkett's books was The Mother's Will to an Unborn Child, written in 1656 before the birth of her daughter Elizabeth. Books of advice from parents to children to be read after the death of the parents were not uncommon. Elizabeth Sadler (1623-1690), the wife of the Reverend Anthony Walker, was an exceedingly devout woman whose literary instinct and a prevision of death led her to write a large book in octavo for the instruction of her two daughters. Two other books will sufficiently illustrate the type: The Experiences of God's gracious dealing with Mrs. Elizabeth White, late wife of Mr. Tho. White of Caldecot in the County of Bucks; as they were written under her own hand, and found in her Closet after her decease: she dying in child-bed, December 5th, 1669;[152] The Legacie of a Dying Mother to her mourning children; being the Experiences of Mistress Susanna Bell, who died March 13, 1672. With an Epistle Dedicatory by Thomas Brookes, Minister of the Gospel.
Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell (1636-1723)
Lady Russell is an example of a woman who definitely set out to be religious, and whose writings contain an analysis of her methods. The circumstances of her life give everything pertaining to her a particular interest. The execution of Lord Russell for treason in 1683 left her broken by the shock. She had, though without avail, set in motion every possible agency to avert his fate, and she had devoted herself absolutely to him till his tragic death. Then, after a period of the deepest despondency, she entered again upon the duties that lay before her. She conducted the education and arranged the marriages of her three children. She showed herself an excellent business woman in the management of her estate. And she steadily interested herself in securing benefices and other offices for persons of whom her husband would have approved. Her Letters as published contain a few during the first years of her happy married life; many written concerning the "judicial murder" of Lord Russell; and very many concerning family affairs and the candidates for whom she was seeking favor. As letters they are uninteresting. The subject-matter is generally too local and temporary to hold the attention of the modern reader, and the style is dry and hard. Even the records of her bitter grief and of her struggle to attain a mood of Christian resignation are less affecting than might be expected. A kind of apathy seemed to settle down over her spirit. She was too deeply hurt to find in words any balm for her sorrows. She answered condolences when she must, but briefly, and with no lightening of the gloom that encompassed her. Of all her letters the longest and most valuable as a personal revelation is one written to her children July 21, 1691, "a day of sad remembrances," for it was the anniversary of her husband's execution eight years before. In 1691, Rachel, the oldest child, was twenty years old, and Wriothesley, the youngest, was eleven. The five or six pages in which Lady Russell recounts, probably especially for the benefit of Rachel, her method of personal spiritual watch-care, has great value as a religious document, for she was not alone in her way of seeking salvation, in her heart-searchings, in her dependence on the external means of grace, in her sedulous striving after perfection. It was the devout habit of devout people of the time, but perhaps carried to a meticulous excess by Lady Russell. She says that she was always provided with a little piece of paper on which she wrote her faults and temptations as they occurred during the day. At night a careful review of this record contributed to a better watch and ward.
And then [she continued], upon Friday morning when I have prayed my usual daily prayers (which have bin most constantly for many years those in taler's holy living) before I pray that of intercession pa: 35. I stop ... and look upon my dayly notes for that weeke, I recollect my fautes; consider what care I have taken to correct or forsake them—but alas when we do best we shall find enof to be humbled for—therefore I chuse some prayer of confesion most times that in taler's holy living page 302. When I have done it, I make my resolutions to do better for ye time to come, and especialy to watch myselfe where i ame most apt to fal, naming in what I ame so—then I pray some prayer for grace to keep these promises of better obedience—as in pa: 31—for grace to spend our time wel, on page 271, for the grace of faith, hope & charity. Then I pray the dayly prayer of intercession that I left of at in pa:35—after this I praise God ... for all the blessings vouchsafed to me both spiritual & temporal—as that I was born of Christian parents, not suffered to be strangled in the womb, that I was baptized, and sence, educated in Christian Religion. I blesse thee for al checks of Conscience I have had especially those I have profited by.... And then I goe on, I bless thee for our creation, preservation &c.—close with ye lords prayer.
After this service she went over her faults of the week, making a summary of them. A similar abridgment for the month was entered in a book kept for that purpose, the incriminating little pieces of paper were torn up, and a new record entered upon. She found that a frequent re-reading of the book "saved much time in looking back" and contributed to humility. Evidently Lady Russell was as orderly in religion as she was in her business affairs. She finds her definite tabulations "hugely more satisfying to her mind, than a more carelesse loose way of living is, and no settled method." The letter closes with the admonition, "Be devout & reguler in your dutys to God—heaven wil be secure, and pleasures innocent."[153] Lady Russell's letters reveal a devout, difficult, over-burdened life, so much concerned with the means of grace as never to have any happy consciousness of grace itself.
Elizabeth Blake, Mrs. Burnet (1661-1712)
Elizabeth Burnet (1661-1712), daughter of Sir Richard Blake, married at seventeen into a Catholic family. Her husband, Robert Berkeley, was a ward of Bishop Fell, through whom the marriage was brought about. The firmness and tact necessary to maintain her own views as a Protestant and hold her husband to that faith, and yet not antagonize the family, could hardly be expected of so young a girl. But Bishop Fell had judged her character well and she met all the demands of so delicate a situation. She took advantage of many leisure hours in the country to investigate fully the questions at issue between the Catholics and the Protestants. She did not know the learned tongues, but she studied the Scriptures, read commentaries, and conversed with clergymen. When she became a widow in 1693, at thirty-two, she employed her time in two characteristic ways. In the administration of her husband's charitable schemes she found congenial activity. And she gave way to her natural instinct for writing. In 1700 she became the wife of Bishop Burnet. His approval of her literary work and his request that it be published led to the production of her Method of Devotion. It was so popular that she revised and enlarged it and brought out a second edition. And it was republished in 1713 after her death. The book contained "Rules for holy and devout Living," "Prayers on Several Occasions," "Advices and Devotions on the Holy Sacrament." Mrs. Trotter said of her in 1701, "She has an extraordinary clear and solid judgment, the truest goodness and prudence, and the most charming affability in her behaviour; in short, I have met with no such perfection in any of my sex."
Elizabeth Bury (1644-1720)
Elizabeth Bury was another young woman whose bright, acquisitive mind resented conventional inactivity and put out tentacles in all directions for knowledge. Philology, philosophy, history, heraldry, geography, mathematics, were among her interests. She contended that souls were of no sex and that women were often "disposed to an accurate search into things curious and profitable, as well as others." She studied anatomy and medicine until she had gained "a surprizing knowledge of the human body, and of the Materia Medica," so that she could state the symptoms of the most difficult and intricate cases in the physician's own terms. She learned French that she might talk with French refugees to whom she was a benefactress. Her correspondence and conversation were both highly prized. But all these interests must be counted merely as diversions. "Her constant favourite and darling study was divinity." The Bible, Mr. Henry's Annotations, a few works on practical divinity, and a competent number of Hebrew books made up her working library. Hebrew because of its scriptural importance was the subject on which she concentrated her attention and she was reputed to have a critical knowledge of its idioms and peculiarities. It was said that she could even quote the original in common conversation if the elucidation of some text were in question. As the years passed, books and writing, "morning hours with God," and many arduous charitable duties so fully occupied her that she found mere social life an unrewarded tax. Of ordinary conversation she said that though one might strike fire "it always fell on wet tinder." The mass of manuscripts found after her death reflected the variety of her interests, but the majority were on topics such as Meditations on the Divinity of the Holy Scriptures, The unreasonableness of Fretting against God, and similar subjects. She kept also a voluminous Diary, an abridgment of which was published by her husband in Bristol in 1721. Mr. Watts's Elegy indicates something of the reverence with which Mrs. Bury was regarded by her contemporaries; and a woman of her personal charm, executive ability, alert responsiveness to the calls of charity, along with her quick mind, and multifarious, if not always profound, learning would take an even higher place in any organized community to-day.
Susanna Hopton (1627-1709)
Women also entered the less feminine fields of controversy. Susanna Hopton is an interesting example. In her youth she had become a Catholic, but under the influence of her husband she entered upon a thorough study of the points at issue between the Catholics and the Protestants. Dr. Hickes says of her: "She made herself as perfect in the controversie, as English writers could make her, who managed the controversie on both sides. I have (says he) above twenty popish authors, which she left me, and some of them with marginal notes in her own hand. She was well versed in Bishop Moreton's, Archbishop Laud's and Mr. Chillingworth's works, and Ranchin's Review of the Council of Trent, etc."[154] As a result of this reading she drew up a long and learned letter to Father Tuberville, showing him why she had renounced the Church of Rome. This letter was published by Dr. Hickes immediately after her death in his volume of Controversial Letters in 1710. Mr. William said that she was an excellent casuist and divine, and could encounter and confute all enemies of the church. "Her discourse and stile upon serious matters was strong, eloquent and nervous; upon pleasant subjects, witty and facetious: and when it required an edge was sharp as a razor." Daily Devotions, Meditations on the Six Days Of Creation, and Meditations on the Life of Christ were her other works. As a wife, a neighbor, and a friend she seems to have been in high esteem, but her life had the church as its center.
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham (1658-1708)
Damaris Cudworth and Mary Astell, two of the most gifted women of the period, became involved in the theological discussion between John Norris and John Locke. Miss Cudworth knew both disputants well. As a young woman she had corresponded with Norris on the subject of "Platonic Love," and in 1689 he had dedicated to her his Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life, with reference to the study of learning and knowledge. But it was Locke who had a permanent influence on her opinions. While she was still in Cambridge with her father, Ralph Cudworth, Locke taught her divinity and philosophy. After her marriage to Sir Francis Masham in 1685, Locke was a frequent visitor at their home, and from 1691 till his death in 1704 he lived permanently with them. Her polemical articles were doubtless written under his inspiration. In 1694 the correspondence between Mary Astell and John Norris was published, under the title, Letters concerning the Love of God. Two years later Lady Masham answered their arguments in her Discourse concerning the Love of God,[155] which was attributed to Locke and answered by Norris. In 1700 Lady Masham published Occasional Thoughts in reference to a virtuous Christian Life, which is her closing word in the controversy.
Damaris Cudworth was a woman of remarkable intellect. Her father was delighted with the early manifestations of her power and he took pride in securing for her the best possible education. The curious epitaph on her tomb praises her learning, judgment, candor, penetration, and love of truth, and credits her with being a devoted and intelligent mother. It sums up her character in the statement, that "to the Softness and Elegancy of her own Sex" she added "several of the noblest Accomplishments and Qualities of the other," and that "she possessed these advantages in a degree unusual to either." The conventional eulogy on a tomb is always open to suspicion, but in this case the vague generalities of the epitaph fall below the truth. Locke, in a letter to Phillipp van Limborch, said of her: "The Lady herself is so well versed in theological and philosophical studies and of such an original mind that you will not find many men to whom she is not superior in wealth of knowledge and ability to profit by it. Her judgment is excellent, and I know few who can bring such clearness of thought to bear upon the most abstruse subjects, or such capacity for searching through and solving the difficulties. I do not say of most women, but even of most learned men."[156]
Lady Masham was also recognized as one of the early champions for woman's education, for when Mary Astell's Serious Proposal appeared anonymously in 1694 it was by some attributed to Lady Masham. She took the subject up definitely in her Occasional Thoughts. After commenting on the lack of knowledge of science, law, history, politics, morals, and religion, of most English gentlemen, Lady Masham continued:
Thus wretchedly destitute of all that Knowledge which they ought to have, are, generally speaking, our English gentlemen, and being so, what wonder can it be, if they like not that women should have knowledge; for this is a quality that will give some sort of superiority even to those who care not to have it?... But such men as these would assuredly find their account much better therein, if tenderness of that prerogative would teach them a more legitimate way of maintaining it, than such a one as is a very great impediment or discouragement at the least, to others in the doing what God requires of them. For it is an undesirable truth that a lady who is able to give an account of her faith, and to defend her religion against the attacks of the cavilling wits of the age, or the abuses of the obtruders of vain opinions: that is capable of instructing her children in the reasonableness of the christian religion, and of laying in them the foundations of a solid virtue: that a lady, I say, no more knowing than this does demand, can hardly escape being called learned by the men of our days, and in consequence thereof, becoming a subject of ridicule to one part of them, and of aversion to the other; with but a few exceptions of some virtuous and rational persons. And is not the incurring of general dislike one of the strongest discouragements we can have to any thing?[157]
Grace Norton, Lady Gethin (1676-1696)
There was published soon after Lady Gethin's death, from loose papers left by her, a work entitled Reliquiæ Gethinianæ. Congreve's poem, entitled Verses to the Memory of Lady Grace Gethin, occasioned by reading her Book, speaks in high praise of her. He says the book shows all that study or time could teach.
But to what height must his amazement rise,
When, having read the work, he turns his eyes
Again to view the foremost opening page,
And there the beauty, sex, and tender age,
Of her beholds, in whose pure mind arose
Th' ethereal source, from whence the current flows.
Lady Gethin was counted a marvel of wisdom, but when we read her Apothegms and Essays and Witty Sayings we are more impressed by her accurate memory of Bacon and other earlier essayists than by any profound knowledge of life on her own part.
Mrs. Eleanor James (fl. 1685-1715)
Mrs. Eleanor James[158] was a writer on religious and political topics. No complete list of her works has ever been compiled. She gained publicity for her religious views by numerous single printed sheets between 1685 and 1715. John Dunton described her husband as being well known because he was an excellent printer, and "something the better known for being the husband of that she-state-politician, Mrs. Eleanor James." She is said to have constituted herself a sort of "adviser to reigning sovereigns" from Charles II to George I, whom she visited in turn for counsel and admonition. Her chief published works are on religious controversy. Her Vindication of the Church of England (1687) created considerable antagonism. In answer to a satirical Address of thanks to Mrs. James on behalf of the Church of England she wrote Mrs. James's Defence. A lady also appeared in the lists against her in a book entitled Elizabeth Rowe's Short Answer to Eleanor James's Long Preamble or Vindication of the new Test. Mrs. James's Apology (1694) and her Reasons humbly presented to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal (1715) complete the list of her more important publications.
Mrs. Newcome (fl. 1728)
Mrs. Newcome's Enquiry into the Evidences of the Christian Religion was published in 1728. Mr. Bowyer says that she was by every one accounted a most excellent and worthy woman, and that her learning was attested by more than one volume. Mr. Grey mentioned her in his Hudibras as "the very learned lady" who gave him the note about Penguins in Book I. Nichols quotes a Mr. "T. F." who says that she had great fame for learning, but adds cautiously: "All that I know of that matter is, that as often as I have been in company with her, and when things were thrown out designedly to tempt her to speak, and discover herself, as the armour produced to Achilles, it never took effect. So that I can not speak of her learning from my own knowledge; but if she was not that, she was something better, a very good woman."[159]
Catherine Trotter, Mrs. Cockburn (1679-1749)
The most distinguished woman in the field of polemics in the first half of the eighteenth century was Catherine Trotter, better known as Mrs. Cockburn. The contemporary recognition accorded Mrs. Cockburn is to-day the most surprising fact about her. Her father was a Scotchman, a commander in the royal navy, and highly thought of by Charles II, but his death at sea in 1683, and many ensuing disastrous business complications, left the family in serious financial difficulties. Mrs. Trotter was, however, nearly related to the Duke of Lauderdale and the Earl of Perth, a fact which secured her social recognition no matter how narrow her circumstances. Catherine, her youngest child, began writing poetry at a very early age. She also early showed unusual mental alertness, for "she both learned to write and made herself mistress of the French language, by her own application and diligence, without any instructor." In Latin and Logic she had some guidance. Logic was so interesting to her that while still young she drew up an abstract of its principles, for her own use.
Catherine's first extant poem was a thanksgiving in heroic verse for the recovery of Mr. Bevil Higgons from small-pox. She was then fourteen, but the labored lines have a kind of heavy maturity prophetic of her later verse. In her seventeenth year she entered fully upon her literary career. For thirteen years she devoted herself to study and writing, and if applause from high authorities could justify her serious preoccupation with things of the mind, such justification was hers in full measure. Before she was seventeen her tragedy, Agnes de Castro, was acted at Drury Lane. It was by the advice of the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex that she had allowed "this little off-spring of her early muse"[160] to try its fortune in the world, and such success as it had must be attributed largely to the protection of influential patrons. But with or without patrons, whatever Miss Trotter did was sure to win praise. When she wrote a eulogistic poem to Congreve on his Mourning Bride, in 1697, he expressed himself as heartily vexed that her lines came too late for publication with his play, and said of her poetical commendation, "It is the first thing, that ever happened to me, upon which I should make it my choice to be vain."
In 1698 there appeared, at the new theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Miss Trotter's second tragedy entitled The Fatal Friendship. Mr. Betterton, Mr. Verbruggen, Mr. Thurmond, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Bracegirdle, took the chief parts. The play ran several nights and was seen occasionally on the stage until far down in the eighteenth century. Its immediate success was great and the praise that poured in upon the nineteen-year-old author must have been bewilderingly sweet. Mr. Higgons evened up the score for the small-pox poem by some verses which declared her direct descent from Sappho. Mr. Harman said that she maintained the true empire of the stage along with Congreve, Granville, and a few others "well read in honour's school." From "an unknown hand" came a poem addressed to "my much esteemed Friend." This author writes of his consuming anxiety at the beginning of the play, and of the joy that gushed forth as he observed its success. The impression from his poem is that he had known the play intimately before its appearance. According to "the elegant pen of Mr. John Hughes" Miss Trotter's "virgin voice offends no virgin ear," her chaste thoughts and clean expressions set her nobly apart as a reformer of the stage, and she is a successful champion of her sex, since her genius has destroyed the "Salique law of wit" established by men. So pleased was Mr. Farquhar with The Fatal Friendship that he sent his first comedy Love and a Bottle, which had "been scandalously aspersed for affronting the ladies," "to stand its tryal before one of the fairest of the sex, and the best judge." And he adds his thanks for the "favour and honour" she showed him by appearing on his third night. He concludes his letter with a double compliment: "But humbly to confess the greatest motive, my passions were wrought so high by representation of Fatal Friendship, and since raised so high by a sight of the beautiful author, that I gladly catched this opportunity of owning myself your most faithful and humble servant." Mrs. Manly also gave a generous tribute to her young fellow-aspirant for stage honors:
Orinda and the Fair Astrea gone
Not one was found to fill the Vacant Throne;
Aspiring Man had quite regain'd the Sway,
Again had Taught us humbly to Obey;
Till you (Nature's third start, in favour of our Kind)
With stronger Arms, their Empire have disjoyn'd, etc.
Dela Manley
After The Fatal Friendship Miss Trotter's work for the stage need not be particularly dwelt upon. She had a comedy brought out at Drury Lane in 1701. A new tragedy in the same year at Drury Lane, and a tragedy at the Haymarket in 1706, complete the list. Some occasional poems appeared during this period. In 1700 she was one of the nine ladies who wrote on the death of Dryden, under the title The Nine Muses; or Poems written by as many ladies on the death of the late famous John Dryden, Esq. In 1704 she entered the lists with Mr. Addison and Mr. John Philips in celebrating the victory of Blenheim, but she did not venture to publish her poem till the manuscript had been submitted to the Duke of Marlborough. When the duke and the duchess and the lord treasurer Godolphin declared themselves "greatly pleased" she sent her lines to the press.
Besides her dramatic and poetical work Miss Trotter wrote in prose on critical and theological subjects. An interesting disquisition on "the poets of the last age" appeared in the dedication of her The Unhappy Penitent in 1701. Of Shakespeare, Dryden, Lee, and Otway she speaks with independent judgment and considerable discrimination. But none of the works so far listed are those on which her fame rested. It was not in poetry, drama, or literary criticism that she found satisfaction. Religion and philosophy were her true field. Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding was published in 1690, and among the antagonistic criticisms it called forth were three series of Remarks published anonymously in 1697 and 1699. Young as she was Miss Trotter pursued the controversy with the keenest interest and in 1701 she drew up a Defence of The Essay of Human Understanding. Mr. George Burnet of Kemney, then in Holland, and Mrs. Burnet, the wife of Bishop Burnet, were entrusted with the secret of her Defence, and both advised anonymous publication, agreeing with her that her youth and sex would, if known, count against a work of that nature. Her Defence appeared in print in 1702. Mrs. Burnet on finding that the Bishop, Mr. John Norris, and Mr. Locke himself, were highly pleased with it, could keep the secret no longer.[161] Mr. Locke sent Miss Trotter a present of books and a letter in which he expressed his gratitude for "an opportunity to own you for my protectress, which is the greatest honour my Essay could have procured me. Give me leave therefore to assure you, that as the rest of the world take notice of the strength and clearness of your reasoning, so I can not but be extremely sensible, that it was employed in my behalf."[162]
A second pamphlet was entitled A discourse concerning a guide in Controversies and grew out of her own spiritual conflicts. Although of a Protestant family she had become a Catholic early in life, but had gradually found herself less and less in harmony with that church till 1707 when, in this Discourse, she announced her return to the Church of England.
The polemical years between 1701 and 1707 had been diversified by several love affairs. Mr. George Burnet of Kemney, Mr. Fenn who was an eloquent young clergyman,[163] Mr. Cockburn, "and some others," are indicated in her letters. Miss Trotter's letters to two of these lovers, Mr. Fenn and Mr. Burnet, are nearly as polemical as her Defence and Discourse. She uses all her old Art of Logic to reason her lovers into friends. She had, in fact, no particular respect for the passion of love as a factor in human life. She apologized for having given it so important a place in her plays, for it was "not noble enough to fill a whole tragedy."[164] When Mr. Burnet professed "the most passionate ardour of mind and soul" for her,[165] she responded with a eulogy of "just and beneficent friendship." "It is only that niggard passion, which is distinguish'd by the name of love, that excludes all but one object from having a part in it, and is not satisfied without monopolizing the affections of the heart."[166] She offered Mr. Burnet "due gratitude" and she surely owed him some return for the pains he took to spread the fame of her works. He wrote so highly of her to the Princess Sophia that the royal lady wrote in answer: "Je suis charmée du portrait avantageux, que vous me faites de la nouvelle Sappho Ecossoise, qui semble meriter les eloges, que vous luy donnez."[167]
Miss Trotter's letters to Mr. Cockburn, whom she married in 1708, are also full of argument and business. If she had a deep affection for him she certainly never allowed herself to speak out. She says that their chief aim in marriage was to assist each other in performing those duties that flow from the love of God.[168] Of the ensuing twenty years she wrote in 1738 as follows: "Being married in 1708, I bid adieu to the muses, and so wholly gave myself up to the cares of a family, and the education of my children, that I scarce knew there was any such thing as books, plays, or poems stirring in Great Britain."[169] It was an attack on Mr. Locke that again drew her into public controversy. Dr. Winch Holdsworth published in 1720 a sermon on Mr. Locke's "false reasonings" against the resurrection of the same body. The sermon came to her hands some years later and she published in 1726-27 A Letter to Dr. Holdsworth. In 1727 he published A Defence of the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the same Body. Her answer, A Vindication of Mr. Locke's Christian Principles, remained in manuscript till the publication of her works in 1751. She also wrote in 1739 Remarks upon some Writers in the Controversy concerning the Foundation of Moral Duty and Moral Obligation which was published in 1743 in The History of the Works of the Learned. In 1747 she entered upon a confutation of Dr. Rutherforth's Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue. Her Remarks on this Essay was published by Mr. Warburton with a laudatory Preface in which he spoke of her "fine genius," "clearness of expression, strength of reason, precision of logic, and attachment to truth."
From 1731 to 1748 there is a series of letters between Mrs. Cockburn and Anne Hepburn (afterwards Mrs. Arbuthnot), her niece. It is almost entirely a literary and religious correspondence and shows that Miss Hepburn's interests were on almost as high a plane as her aunt's. A list of the books they exchanged and commented on would include most of the important new works in England during the first half of the century. The most interesting literary taste revealed is Mrs. Cockburn's partiality for Pope. In 1738 she wrote him a long letter in which she said, "Your Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and Essay on Man, gave me some idea of your morals. But when I read your private letters, where, as you express it, you throw yourself out upon paper, I thought I saw your heart open and undisguised. I was charmed with the sincere, ingenuous, unsuspecting friend, the unwilling enemy, the benevolent mind, extending to all parties, all religions, all mankind; the filial piety, the tender concern for a mother's approaching death, at an age, when most men would have considered theirs only as a useless burden. In short, I saw so many amiable qualities opening on every different occasion, that I began as much to admire the valuable man as the great genius." She chides him gently for thinking too lightly of his genius, for while he is measuring syllables and coupling rhymes to such excellent moral ends, she is ready to assure him of a final "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." It is a pity this epistle was never sent. It would doubtless have been almost as surprising to the wicked wasp of Twickenham as to the crowd of enemies for whose benefit he was preparing the New Dunciad.
Mr. Birch, who edited Mrs. Cockburn's Works in 1751, said of her:
Posterity at least will be solicitious to know, to whom they will owe the most demonstrative and perspicuous reasonings, upon subjects of eternal importance; and her own sex is entitled to the fullest information about one, who has done such honour to them, and raised our ideas of their intellectual power, by an example of the greatest extent of understanding and correctness of judgment. Antiquity, indeed, boasted of its female philosophers, whose merits have been drawn forth in an elaborate treatise of Menage. [Historia Mulierum Philosophorum, 8vo. Lyons, 1690.] But our own age and country may without injustice or vanity oppose to those illustrious ladies the defender of Locke and Clarke; who, with a genius equal to the most eminent of them, had the superior advantage of cultivating it in the only effectual method of improvement, the study of a real philosophy, and a theology worthy human nature, and its all perfect author.
Mrs. Cockburn had a strong, clear, acute mind. The impression she made on the best thinkers in her generation is due to this fact, and, further, to the fact that she used her mentality on topics then counted vital. She was didactic, she was morally irreproachable, she was unassuming. That her editor's confident prediction of her fame has been discredited by time, that she is in reality hardly so much as a name to-day, is due partly to the oblivion that has overtaken her subjects, but also, and even more justly, to the dead level of her excellence. She has no wit, no fancy, no imagination, no sprightliness of thought, no humor. Mary Astell and "Sophia" were occasionally roused to picturesque indignation. But not so with Mrs. Cockburn. She is as cold, as orderly, as unstimulating as a formula.
Mrs. Margaret Fell (1614-1702)
Among dissenters there is less literary record. We find more among the Quakers than elsewhere, yet even there not so much as might be expected from the fact of their recognition of the equality of the sexes. It was stated in their creed: "As we dare not encourage any ministry but that which we believe to spring from the influence of the Holy Spirit, so neither dare we attempt to restrain this ministry to persons of any condition in life, or to the male sex alone; but as male and female are one in Christ, we hold it proper that such of the female sex as we believe to be endued with a right qualification for the ministry should exercise their gifts for the general edification of the Church."[170] As a rule, however, the Quaker women were too busy on their preaching tours to have much time for authorship. Margaret Fell is their chief representative writer.[171] Her activities began before the Restoration. As the wife of Judge Fell of Swarthmore Hall she was of distinct social importance, and she showed unusual ability in the conduct of the household affairs incident on her husband's wealth and large landed properties. She was always exceedingly devout and Swarthmore Hall was traditionally recognized as the home of "lecturing ministers." Among these itinerant speakers, in 1652, was George Fox. His brief sojourn at Swarthmore was epoch-making, for when Judge Fell returned from a distant visit he was met as he crossed Ulverston Sands by a solemn conclave of gentlemen on horseback whose purpose it was to announce that his wife and most of his household had become Quakers. On investigation he became himself at least sufficiently sympathetic with the new views not to interfere with his wife's convictions. For half a century she was identified with Quaker interests. The great dining-room at Swarthmore was for many years the regular meeting-place of the Friends. In 1669, eleven years after the death of Judge Fell, Margaret married George Fox, and till his death in 1691 she gave her time, her thought, her money, to a defense of persecuted Quakers. Three of her daughters became preachers. She traveled from jail to jail, from house to house, to comfort the imprisoned and their families, and from meeting to meeting to preach the word. As the "nursing mother" of the church she had an immense correspondence. The petitions to the king and to powerful noblemen were often composed and personally presented by her. The importance attached to her advice and opinions is indicated by the hundreds of letters still extant addressed to her by the preachers who gathered about George Fox. During her most active years the practical conduct of church affairs occupied her to the exclusion of other work. But earlier, especially during 1665-1668, she made use of the enforced leisure consequent on various imprisonments to write in defense of Quaker principles. Of the ten tracts thus produced one of the most interesting was on the vexed question of the right of women to preach and was entitled Women's Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures.
Anne Finch, Lady Conway (d. 1679)
Another important lady who, after long study in other religions came finally into the Quaker faith, was Anne Finch, a daughter of Sir Henry Finch. In 1651 she married Lord Conway and was established as mistress of Ragley Castle in Warwickshire. As a young woman she had been attracted by the teachings of Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist. After she became Lady Conway he spent much time at Ragley where he wrote several of his books. During his various absences Mr. More and Lady Conway corresponded regularly on theological subjects. The questions in her letters sufficiently indicate the metaphysical perplexities that absorbed her thoughts. She knew the learned tongues and read eagerly the works of "Plato, Plotinus, Philo Judæus, and the Kabbala Denudata." She was a theosophist and a mystic. The esoteric, the mysterious, the miraculous, captured her imagination. "Under her inspiration Ragley became the home of religious marvels." One chapter of John Inglesant, the novel in which Mr. Shorthouse so sympathetically described Little Gidding, is said to be based on the life at Ragley. Lady Conway suffered from headaches so severe and persistent as to defy the best skill of London and Paris. Under the influence of Mr. More, who said there might be "a sanative and healing contagion as well as a morbid and venemous," she summoned to Ragley the famous Valentine Greatrakes, "the Stroker," but the magic of his hands failed in her case. Her headaches made of her life one long disease, but never conquered her intellectual eagerness and hardly abated her learned pursuits.
When she finally joined the Quakers it was against the advice of Mr. More, but she was one, he said, "who never submitted all her judgment to any one." Her friendship with Robert Barclay and William Penn followed her acceptance of the new doctrines. While Lady Conway was undoubtedly one of the most distinguished converts to the Quaker faith, her invalidism and then her death in 1679 interfered with any such active service as that of Margaret Fell. The two women were, moreover, temperamentally unlike. Margaret Fell, a descendant of Anne Askew, had the blood of the martyrs in her veins. A "cause" could capture her mind and heart. She was energetic, an organizer and administrator. Lady Conway, on the other hand, beyond almost any woman of her time, lived in things of the mind.
Of Lady Conway's numerous works only one has been printed. In 1690 there appeared at Amsterdam a collection of philosophical treatises written in Latin. The first one of the series was a translation of "a work by a certain English countess, learned beyond her sex." Leibnitz, on the authority of Van Helmont, attributed this to Lady Conway. This treatise was re-translated into English in 1692.[172]
Jane Ward, Mrs. Lead (1623-1704)
Mrs. Jane Lead[173] was a mystic and the founder of a sect. She was the daughter of Schildknap Ward, of a good Norfolk family, and it is said that there were no external influences to account for her unusual experiences. As a child in the midst of the Christmas gayeties at her father's house, she heard a miraculous voice that summoned her to a religious life. She became a widow while still young and thereafter followed without hindrance, in the completest seclusion, in London, her recognized vocation. She studied mystical works and had nightly prophetic visions which she recorded in her spiritual diary. Between 1681 and 1702 she published fifteen volumes and another one appeared immediately after her death. In 1693 Mr. Francis Lee, a young Oxford man and a medical student at Leyden, visited her, gave allegiance to her doctrines, and devoted himself to her service. Mr. Lee and Mrs. Lead became the center of an important theosophical organization called The Philadelphian Society, which existed till 1702. Mrs. Lead died in 1704 "in the 81st year of her age and the 65th of her vocation to the inward life." Mr. Lee wrote to the Countess Kniphausen and others in France and Germany a letter entitled The Last Hours of Jane Lead by an Eye and Ear Witness. Five years before her death Mrs. Lead's spiritual diary was published under the title, A Fountain of Gardens, watered by the Rivers of Divine pleasure, and springing up in all the variety of spiritual plants, blown up by the pure Breath into Paradise. To which is prefixed, A Poem, introductory to the Philadelphia Age, called Solomon's Porch, or The Beautiful gate to Wisdom's Temple.
Susannah Annesley, Mrs. Wesley (1670-1742)
One of the most notable women of the early eighteenth century was Susannah Wesley, the mother of John and Charles Wesley. She came of a fine old Nottinghamshire family, and her father, Dr. Annesley, a man of power and influence, "the St. Paul of the Nonconformists," secured for his children an education suitable to their birth. At twenty-one Susannah, a beautiful and gifted young woman, married Samuel Wesley and entered upon her career as wife of a rector of humble position and small means.
It is said that large families either submerge the individual, or result in characters of exceptionally fine discipline. From this test Susannah emerged triumphant. She was the twenty-fifth child of her father, and in the first twenty-one years of her married life she had nineteen children. So, as child and parent, she was always in close touch with many varied personalities, an experience the conditions of which demanded both firmness and flexibility.
Her married life seemed made up of difficulties. Most of it was passed in a remote rectory, at Epworth, in the Lincolnshire fens, among the crudest and most boorish people.[174] Not even the strictest economy could hold the outgo within the meager limits of the rector's stipend. There were fevers, small-pox, and other diseases to combat, and five of the children died young. There were also disasters through fire and flood and through the hostility of malicious parishioners, but Mrs. Wesley held herself steadfast to her ideals. Her spirit was never daunted. In the most unpromising environment, under the most adverse conditions, she created a family life remarkable for its order, serenity, good breeding, and aspiration. Even as a child the quality of her mind and character had been apparent. It is reported that at thirteen, having heard at home much discussion of the points at issue between the Nonconformists and the Church of England, she had reviewed the questions for herself and had decided in favor of the Church. Throughout her married life she showed the same independence and self-reliance. Mr. and Mrs. Wesley were always very happy together, but she was in no sense the ideal submissive wife of the eighteenth century. She wrote to her son John when he was in Oxford, "'T is a misfortune almost peculiar to our family that your father and I seldom think alike."[175] She considered King William a usurper and consistently refused to say Amen to the rector's prayers for the new monarch. Mr. Wesley celebrated the victory of Blenheim in a poem, but Mrs. Wesley disapproved of the war and she wrote: "Since I am not satisfied of the lawfulness of the war, I cannot beg a blessing on our arms till I can have the opinion of one wiser and a more competent judge than myself in this point; namely, whether a private person that had no hand in the beginning of the war but did always disapprove of it may, notwithstanding, implore God's blessing on it, and pray for the good success of those arms which were taken up, I think unlawfully." And she declined to join in the worship on the day appointed for prayers for the success of English troops.[176]
Mrs. Wesley had a natural genius for teaching and she became the school-mistress of her family. Her methods were uniform and rigorous. At five each child was given in one day, during two sessions of three hours each, such effective tutoring in the alphabet that by night he knew it and could begin reading the Book of Genesis the next day. The various studies counted necessary followed in due order. Each child was kept closely to the task in hand and the progress made was surprising. Mrs. Wesley said, "It is almost incredible what a child may be taught in a quarter of a year by a vigorous application if it have but tolerable capacity and good health." The virtues inculcated were prompt obedience, quiet manners, correct speech, and courtesy. The religious training of the children received especial emphasis. Mrs. Wesley wrote out for them a clear series of explanatory comments on the Catechism and the Creed, she trained them to take part in family devotions, and once a week she met each child for an hour of private religious conversation and instruction. So precious were these hours to the children that when John was a Fellow in Oxford, he wrote urging his mother to devote her thought and prayer to him during the Thursday evening hour that had been his.
Mrs. Wesley's devout ministrations to her own family, during her husband's absence, became known to some of the neighbors who desired to join her circle. The numbers increased so rapidly that on the first Sunday of February, 1712, more than two hundred were present and many went away for want of room. The curate objected to these meetings and Mr. Wesley wrote in deprecation of them. Mrs. Wesley, too, was seriously in doubt whether one of her sex could find Scripture authority for thus breaking the bread of life to the people. But the manifest needs of the poor parishioners and their eagerness for the gospel prevailed over all doubts and the meetings continued.
The power of Mrs. Wesley in her own home and immediate neighborhood was, through her son John, felt throughout England. Mr. Winchester says truly:
John Wesley was the son of his mother. From her he inherited his logical cast of mind, his executive capacity, his inflexibility of will, his union of independence of judgment with respect for authority, his deep religious temper. And all the characteristics were developed and fixed by his early training. His precision and order, his gift of organization and mastery of details, his notions of education, even some specific rules and customs of his religious societies, can be traced to his mother's discipline. It is often said that Methodism began in the University of Oxford: with more truth it might be said that it began in Susannah Wesley's nursery.[177]
The religious writers so far mentioned only partially represent the great amount of similar literary activity. In many homes where rank or wealth made social diversions an alluring possibility there was carried on by wives and daughters not only a life of austere piety and great practical benevolence, but a life also of intellectual ambitions and instincts. The fact that many of the questions which these ladies discussed are now dead issues cannot obscure the more significant fact that on questions then counted vital they wrote always with energy, often with logical acumen, and sometimes with effectiveness. The home and social life that emerges from scattered hints and records in these religious writings is as remote from that portrayed in contemporary court memoirs or diaries as is the general tone of Paradise Lost or Pilgrim's Progress, and is worth dwelling upon as illustrative of that body of almost unrecognized solid morality that gave to Jeremy Collier a background of public approval when he attacked the immorality of the stage, and through the stage, the immorality of the stage-going people.
WRITERS ON PRACTICAL BENEFICENCE
The piety that finds genuine expression in the writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had almost as frequent expression in the practical necessities of daily life. On the great ladies of the land was laid the responsibility for the physical well-being, the education, and the happiness of those beneath them in birth and wealth. Responsibilities now provided for by multifarious overworked organizations then devolved upon individuals. And many women in the distribution of their money and leisure showed so much insight and practical ability as to become ruling influences in their communities. The fame of some of these women spread through the nation. The combination which they showed of munificent giving, on the one hand, and of rigid self-discipline, on the other, exalted them almost into saints. The two ladies who most fully illustrate the type are Mrs. Bovey and Lady Elizabeth Hastings. Their learning was chiefly in the realm of theology.
Catherine Riches, Mrs. Bovey (1670-1726)
Mrs. Bovey,[178] the daughter of a London merchant, was a great heiress and a great beauty and was consequently much sought after. At fifteen she married William Bovey, Esq., Lord of the Manor of Flaxley, Gloucestershire. After seven years of unhappiness she was left a childless widow with a large fortune at her command. She refused to marry again, but entered into a close friendship with Mrs. Mary Pope. The two ladies lived together in retirement for thirty-two years, making it the purpose of their lives to manage Mrs. Bovey's fortune and estate and to dispose of most of the income in wisely regulated charities. Mrs. Bovey was the subject of much praise from all kinds of people. Mrs. Manley gives the following vivid picture of her:
She is one of those lofty, black and lasting beauties that strike with Reverence, and yet Delight; there is no Feature in her Face, nor any thing in her Person, her Air and Manner, that could be exchanged for any others, and she not prove a Loser: Then as to her Mind and Conduct, her Judgment, her Sense, her Stedfastness, her Reading, her Wit and Conversation, they are admirable; so much above what is most lovely in the sex, shut but your Eyes, (and allow for the Musick of her Voice) your Mind would be charmed, as thinking yourself conversing with the most knowing, most refined of ours; free from all Levity and Superficialness, her Sense is sold [solid?] and perspicuous. Lovely Porcia is so polite, so neat, so perfect an economist, that in taking in all the greater Beauties of Life, she does not disdain to stoop to the most inferiour; in short, she knows all that a Man can know, without despising what, as a woman, she should not be ignorant of.
In 1714 Steele dedicated the second volume of his Ladies' Library to her. With his genius for giving delightful compliments, he says: "Thus with the charms of your own sex, and knowledge not inferior to the more learned of ours, a closet, a bower, or some scene of rural nature, has constantly robbed the world of a ladies appearance, who never was beheld but with gladness to her visitants, nor ever admired but with pain to herself."
Dr. Hickes, in the Preface to his Linguarum Septentrionalium Thesaurus (1702), eulogized this præstantissima & honestissima matrona as the Angliæ nostræ Hypatia Christiana. She had received no formal education, yet by frequent converse with some of the most learned men of the day and by intense application to study she gained a great share of knowledge. She was interested in educational matters, and she gave with particular pleasure to organizations for the training of poor children. At her death Mrs. Pope, her executor, was instructed to pay large sums to such charitable schemes as the gray-coat school, the blue-coat school, the charity school of Christ's Church Parish in Southwark, and a college to be founded in the Island of Bermuda.
Mrs. Bovey's attractive personality may be further emphasized by the persistence of the rumor identifying her with "the perverse widow" whose charms and whose coldness destroyed the peace of Sir Roger de Coverley's heart. Her beauty, her wealth, her learning, her kindness of heart, her general beneficence, and, finally, her inaccessibility, made her admired, loved, and longed for, till she was idealized into something quite above human nature's daily food.
Catherine Riches's father belonged to the wealthy merchant class of London. It would be interesting if we could know the kind of home life and training given to this young city heiress. Was it the unhappy disciplinary years of her married life that turned her so decisively from the pomps and pleasures apparently awaiting one so young and beautiful and rich?
Lady Elizabeth Hastings (1688-1739)
Lady Elizabeth Hastings was the daughter of Theophilus, seventh earl of Huntingdon, by his first wife, through whom, in 1704, she came into a fortune and the possession of Ledstone Park, an estate near Pontefract, Yorkshire. From twenty-two to her death at fifty-seven Lady Elizabeth lived almost continuously at Ledstone. Of these thirty-five years not a striking event is recorded. Her days were "bound each to each by natural piety" and her tranquil life developed along an uninterrupted course of charity and devotion.
To live in Yorkshire, in the eighteenth century, was to be buried. Social and intellectual life were alike without sustenance. Yet from this remote home Lady Elizabeth's fame traveled to London and she became the subject of remarkable eulogies. Number 42 of The Tatler, written possibly by Congreve, appeared in 1709 when the "divine Aspasia" had been but five years at Ledstone. She must have gone there with well-formed ideas of life, for with no vacillations, no period of experimentation, she seems to have entered immediately on that career of religious contemplation and good works which had, in five years, given her the reputation of being a "female philosopher" of the most exalted type. The Tatler paper says that she put into practice the schemes and plans the ancient sages had thought beautiful but inimitable. Steele, in The Tatler, number 49, gave perfect expression to the reverent admiration with which Lady Elizabeth had come to be regarded:
Aspasia must therefore be allowed to be the first of the beauteous Order of Love, whose unaffected freedom, and conscious innocence, give her the attendance of the graces in all her actions. The awful distance which we bear towards her in all our thoughts of her, are certain instances of her being the truest object of love of any of her sex. In this accomplished lady, love is the constant effect, because it is never the design. Yet, though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose behaviour; and to love her is a liberal education.
A somewhat closer view of the life of the Lady Elizabeth comes from casual notes by Thoresby who, in his travels about the northern counties between 1711 and 1724, frequently spent a few days at Ledstone. From the unconnected details scattered through his letters and diaries there emerges a fairly clear picture of a great house exactly ordered on the basis of the religious life. Private prayers, family devotions in which all the servants were included, at several stated hours each day, preparation for church festivals, frequent assemblages for the reading of sermons and holy books, refreshing conferences on mooted points of doctrine, friendly communion on the present and future joys of the Christian, filled the days to the exclusion of worldly interests. No mother superior could have felt a responsibility more definite or have exerted a power more minutely organized for the promotion of the spiritual welfare of those under her charge.
Lady Hastings was also engaged in schemes of wider application. She became as noted for her benefactions as for the saintliness of her recluse life. "Human learning as the handmaid of religion" was the basis on which her gifts were made. She therefore became definitely associated with the new schemes springing up in England for the education of poor boys and girls. In one of Thoresby's visits they walked across the fields to see the new school she was building and endowing for the absolute maintenance and education of fourteen poor girls. The Victoria History of the County of Yorkshire records "Lady Hastings's Schools" at Thorp Arch, Ledsham, Collingham, and Wick. The formal deeds conveying these schools to trustees are dated in 1738, probably because at that time she knew she could not recover from the cancerous affection of which she died the following year. But some of these schools had been established and supported by her much earlier. The account given of the Ledsham school is typical of the others: "These schools are part of the general charity founded by Lady Elizabeth Hastings by deed 14 December, 1738. In a charity school for boys 20 scholars were to be taught and one youth between the ages of 17 and 23 as a charity school-master. The girls' school was for 20 scholars, who were to be clothed partly out of the proceeds of their spinning. The boys' school is now public and elementary, while the girls' school gives a free education in elementary subjects and household duties. The expenses of this school amount to about £400 a year, and this is wholly derived from the endowment." Lady Elizabeth also left a large bequest to Queen's College, Oxford, for poor scholars from schools in Yorkshire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland.[179] Berkeley's missionary project found in her one of its most generous supporters, and her name headed many a list of charities for educational and religious purposes.
So well known did she become that in 1735 a remarkable tribute to her was planned and partly executed. An anonymous donor offered to The Gentleman's Magazine a series of prizes for the four best poems entitled The Christian Hero. The chief prize was to be a "Gold Medal (intrinsic value about Ten Pounds) which shall have the Head of the Rt. Hon. the Lady Elizabeth Hastings on one Side, and that of James Oglethorpe Esq. on the other, with this Motto, England may Challenge the World, 1736."[180] This announcement was in December, 1735. In the January number for 1736 the editor expressed his great concern at having given offense to a Lady, whose name even they did not venture to mention again, by the publication of the proposed Gold Medal prize without her consent.[181] In February the donor humbly asked her Ladyship's pardon for the uneasiness he had so undesignedly caused her, saying that he had not the honor to know her personally, but had been animated solely by the feeling of respect and deference due to the eminence of her character.[182]
When Lady Hastings died, in 1739, The Gentleman's Magazine published a memorial notice said to be by Dr. Johnson. In heavy, analytic fashion it sums up her reputation for sanctity and benevolence, and closes with the statement that "scarce any age has afforded a greater Blessing to many, or a brighter Pattern to all."[183] The year after her death, Law, the noted author of The Serious Call, cited Lady Hastings as a sufficient refutation of the charge that saintliness was not a natural product of the English Church. In 1741 Wilford's stately folio contained a laudatory account of Lady Hastings, and in 1742 Mr. Barnard published An Historical Character, relating to the holy and exemplary Life of the Right Honourable Lady Elizabeth Hastings. To which are added, 1. One of the Codicils of her last Will, setting forth her Devise of Lands to the Provost and Scholars of Queen's College in Oxford, for the interest of 18 Northern Schools. 2. Some Observations therefrom. 3. A Schedule of her other perpetual Charities, with the Principal Rules for their Administration.
Few of the people who praised Lady Hastings knew her personally. Even more strongly than in the case of Mrs. Bovey there seems to have grown up in the public mind a kind of idealized picture of her. She was a saint set apart from the world, not only by a voluntary isolation, but by virtue of her beauty, beneficence, and nobility. She was enshrined. The reverence, affection, and praise accorded her have a definite note of Platonism. She becomes an embodiment of the highest charm and excellence, and the actual "Lady Betty" seems lost in the process.
What were the diversions at Ledstone? Lady Elizabeth's four younger half-sisters, Anne, Frances, Catherine, and Margaret, usually lived with her. After the death of Lady Elizabeth, Margaret, who had become a convert to Methodism, married one of the leaders in that new communion and it was through her influence that Selina, the wife of Theophilus, the brother of these young ladies, was likewise converted to Methodism. The five sisters were apparently a unit in their predisposition to a religious life. But they were too young and too free not to have had some other elements in their life. Had they any such relief as the book-binding at Little Gidding? Our knowledge of the life at Ledstone is tantalizingly incomplete because every one who wrote about Lady Elizabeth took at once an exalted tone, and generalized his picture into abstractions.
Lady Huntingdon (1707-91)
Closely connected with Lady Hastings and the life at Ledstone is another leader in the religious world, the famous Lady Huntingdon, the wife of Lady Hastings's brother Theophilus. Margaret Hastings had accepted the doctrines of the Methodists and through her influence Lady Huntingdon allied herself with the same obscure body. Lady Huntingdon was from childhood introspective and religious. As the daughter of Earl Ferrars and the wife of the Earl of Huntingdon, a brilliant social career was almost inevitable. But in the midst of the splendid scenes in which she took a vivacious and apparently happy part she was spiritually aloof. She was always resisting the encroachments of the world, and striving by self-denial, a rigid course of devotional exercises, and systematic beneficences, to secure inward peace. But she never came into a free and joyous religious consciousness till she accepted the new doctrines taught by the group of Oxford men known as Methodists.[184] In 1739 she sent for John and Charles Wesley to visit her and she became a fearless advocate of their views. After her husband's death in 1746 she devoted her time, her great wealth, and her influence to the cause of Methodism. With several clergymen, her two daughters, her sisters, Anne and Frances, and a few friends, she made a sort of home missionary tour from Bath through Wales for the purpose of studying the needs of the poor in the matter of religious education. In 1748-49 she opened her fine mansion in Park Street, London, for Methodist preaching services. The most distinguished men and women of the time attended these services, but not always as reverent listeners. The whole scheme was met with varying degrees of ridicule. Coventry wrote a description of the meetings at Park Lane, it is supposed, in his account of "Lady Harridan" and her assembly:
It was a sisterhood of the godly, met together to bewail the vanities of human life, and congratulate one another on their breaking from the enchantments of a sinful world.
The causes which had converted them to Methodism, were as various as the characters of the converts. Some, the ill success of their charms had driven to despair; others, a consciousness of too great success had touched with repentance.... But the greater part, like the noble president, were women fatigued and worn out in the vanities of life, the superannuated jades of pleasure, who, being grown sick of themselves, and weary of the world, were now fled to Methodism, as the newest sort of folly that had lately been invented.[185]
One particularly offensive element in Methodism to people who set store by birth and breeding was its leveling effect. Social position counted for little in the face of the all-important classification into saints and sinners. The Duchess of Buckingham wrote in violent protest: "The doctrines of these preachers are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl upon the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding."[186]
The fruition of Lady Huntingdon's remarkable work belongs later in the century, but its inception is between 1739 and 1760 and is of great importance.
DRAMATIC WRITERS
In July, 1867, there was dispersed at Sotheby's rooms the library of the Reverend A. J. Stainforth. "The collection was formed entirely of works of British and American poetesses and female dramatic writers. The books were arranged in over three thousand lots, and the catalogue extends to 166 pages." That Mr. Stainforth spared neither money nor diligence in securing the books for this collection is evident from a single illustration, namely, his search for so obscure a book as Eliza's Babes. "When Mr. Stainforth was forming his collection of Female Poets without regard to cost, he failed to procure a copy of Eliza's Babes, although the hue and cry was circulated far and near."[187] I have not had access to this catalogue and I do not know how many items the "three thousand lots" contain, nor how many individual names are catalogued. If the arrangement is chronological it would doubtless serve to indicate the very rapid spread of female authors after about 1750. Yet even the century from 1650 to 1750 is not without its large contribution. In the preceding sections of this study there has been some indication of the mass of devotional and polemical writing by women. Among poets, playwrights, essayists, novelists, and letter-writers we shall find not only an even greater volume of production, but work of higher intrinsic value.
The Duchess of Newcastle (cir. 1625-1673)
The Duchess of Newcastle wrote numerous plays. Twenty-one were published in 1662, and in 1668 five more appeared. They are described as hardly more than allegorical dialogues arranged in successive scenes, but without plot, and showing no power of dramatic portrayal. The Duchess herself is evidently the original of several of the characters. In her plays as in her scientific studies the particular boast of the Duchess is that whatever she writes is spun out of her own fancy:
But noble readers, do not think my plays
Are such as have been writ in former days;
As Johnson, Shakespear, Beaumont, Fletcher writ,
Mine want their learning, reading, language, wit.
The Latin phrases, I could never tell,
But Johnson could, which made him write so well.
Greek, Latin poets I could never read,
Not their historians, but our English Speed:
I could not steal their wit, nor plots out-take;
All my plays plots, my own poor brain did make.
From Plutarch's story, I ne'er took a plot,
Nor from romances, nor from Don Quixote.[188]
It goes without saying that these plays were not suited for stage presentation, and, in point of fact, very few of them were ever put into rehearsal. One of the plays that did appear drew a great crowd, but the motive was curiosity to see the Duchess rather than any interest in the play. Pepys, who went to hear this play March 30, 1667, wrote concerning it, and its author:
The whole story of this lady is a romance and all she does is romantic. Her footmen in velvet coats, and herself in antique dress, as they say; and was the other day at her own play, "The Humorous Lovers"; the most ridiculous thing that ever was wrote, but she and her Lord mightily pleased with it: and she at the end, made her respects to the players, and did give them thanks. There is as much expectation of her coming to Court, that so people may come to see her, as if it were the Queen of Sheba.
Aphra Amis, Mrs. Behn (1640-1689)
The only important dramatic work by a woman during the second half of the seventeenth century was by Mrs. Behn. She was born at Wye, in Kent.[189] While she was still very young the Amis family went to Surinam, West Indies, where Aphra's girlhood was spent. At about twenty-three[190] she returned to England and soon thereafter married Mr. Behn, a London merchant of Dutch parentage. At his death, before 1666, she was left nearly penniless. For a short time she was in Holland as a secret political agent for the English court. But her services received scant official recognition and the pay was so meager and uncertain that she returned to England and began to look about for other means of support. The new passion for the theater was not yet exhausted and she turned instinctively to play-writing as her most hopeful resource. During the years 1670-1689 her literary output extended into many other fields and shows continuous work at high pressure. Not only was she one of the chief assets of the Duke's Theater as a playwright, but she also translated French verse and prose; she wrote numerous occasional poems; she edited miscellanies; and she wrote novels. Her comedies had a most flattering contemporary vogue and some of them maintained their popularity well into the next century. She satisfied the taste of the day for rapid, bustling plots, with many and varied characters, and her intrigues were cleverly manipulated, while she surpassed most of her contemporaries in vivacious, easy, rapid dialogue. She is never dull or insipid. Her plays show that she had a vigorous mind, an overflow of spirits, a reckless mental energy. There is apparent a sense of power conscious of itself and careless of precedents or restrictions. In defiance of Ben Jonson, Dryden, and Shadwell she spoke contemptuously of "the musty unities." The material for her plays she took wherever she found it, from preceding plays, from romances, from real life, used it, made it over, and often so improved it that she could justifiably laugh at charges of plagiarism. One charge she could not evade and that had to do with the immorality of her writings. Dryden, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Etherege, and the audiences who applauded their plays, seemed to find the vis comica in an open indecency of character, situation, and conversation that is to-day almost unbelievable. And of Mrs. Behn it must be admitted that she vied with the most corrupt. She said, in extenuation, as Dryden also said in answer to Jeremy Collier's strictures, that she wrote to please. She did not consider comedy "a reforming or converting agent," it was meant to be "an entertainment." Her emphasis on the vicious elements of the life about her was a clear case of supply and demand, but it had an unhappy personal result. There early gathered about her name a hostile tradition based on the fact that she was not only a woman writer, but an eminently successful woman writer, and on the further fact that, being a woman, she had not the modest reserve for which the chaste Orinda was idolized, but presented debaucheries in the bold and open manner characteristic of contemporary male playwrights. This hostile tradition, crystallized by Pope in a witty couplet,[191] became a commonplace of adverse criticism, and Astræa's undeniable talents have sunk into oblivion. A general revival of Mrs. Behn's comedies would be impossible, undesirable, but by the student of social and political history in the Restoration period they cannot be ignored.
MRS. APHRA BEHN
From a picture by Mary Beale in the collection of his Grace the Duke of Buckingham.
Drawn by T. Uwins. Engraved by J. Fittler, A.R.A. From an engraving in Effigies Poeticae, London, 1824, Vol. II
Mrs. Behn's novels are now as little known as her plays, but in her own day were very popular. Oroonoko, the first and by far the best, was based on her life in Surinam. At a time when French heroic romances, with their high-flown adventures, unreal characters, and stilted dialogue, were the only works of fiction, Mrs. Behn's short, simple, vigorous, and affecting story of real life comes with a startling sense of novelty.[192] The vivid portrayal of the cruelties incident to the slave trade, though probably written without didactic intent, gives the story a modern humanitarian note not unprophetic of Uncle Tom's Cabin. And the description of the Indian Prince as the ideal natural man, his innate virtues in their pristine purity unvitiated by civilization, foreshadows the theories of Rousseau. The descriptions of nature, however exaggerated, are vivid and attractive, and show a delight in scenic detail not found again in fiction before Mrs. Collyer in 1730. Thus in four ways, choice of real life as a theme, interest in scenery, emphasis on the natural man, and on humanitarianism, Mrs. Behn's little story links itself with the novel of the future rather than with the romances of the past. In the plays Mrs. Behn showed exceptional ability in a realm in which women have seldom excelled. In her novels she marked out a path where women have gained marked literary success.
In one other way she is an important, outstanding figure. She was the first woman in England who made authorship a profession, the first one who definitely set out to earn her living by her pen. It is unfortunate that the first literary lady to achieve "economic independence" should likewise be the first whose writings were notably immoral. But it is a law of human nature that an unaccustomed freedom seldom contents itself in its early exercise of power with destroying merely the unjust bonds by which it has been confined. Freedom is likely to begin by being license. And when Aphra Behn so far defied convention as to compete with men as a playwright on the public stage, when she openly criticized her contemporaries and boasted that her comedies did not fall below most that she read, she had so set herself apart in an unfeminine realm that prudishness and decency fell together. Psychologically the actress and the writer of comedies seem to have gone through similar experiences.
Plays between 1696 and 1706
Mrs. Behn had no feminine contemporary rivals, but later in the century a number of women attempted to write for the stage. In Genest's record for Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields seven plays by six women are listed in 1696. In the ensuing ten years at least eighteen more plays by women appeared. This exceptional activity did not pass without satiric comment. In 1697 "W. M.'s" Female Wits,[193] with its attack on Miss Trotter, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Pix, was acted six times without intermission, a run showing exceptional popularity. In 1702 the hostility of the wits towards women playwrights was again voiced in Gildon's The Two Stages.[194] Genest says that about this time "prejudice against females rose so high that Mrs. Centlivre in Stolen Heiress and Mrs. Pix in Conquest of Spain spoke of their plays as if by men."[195] The authors of these twenty-five plays were Miss Trotter, Mrs. Pix, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Wiseman, "A Lady," "A Young Lady," "A Lady of Quality," and "A Club of Ladies." Fourteen of the plays were tragedies, the best one being, probably, Miss Trotter's Fatal Friendship, almost the only one of the fourteen that survived on the stage after its initial season. The writers of comedy were more successful.
Few of these authors need particular notice. Miss Trotter's work has already been discussed.[196] Mrs. Manley's three plays appeared at ten-year intervals, 1696, 1706, 1717. They were unsuccessful on the stage and they have no qualities that would claim the reader's attention. It is in fiction, not in drama, that Mrs. Manley gained her reputation.
Mrs. Pix (1666-1720?)
Mrs. Pix, daughter of the Reverend Roger Griffith, Vicar of Nettlested in Oxfordshire, and wife of George Pix, a merchant tailor of London, was thirty when she brought out her first play. During the ensuing ten years she put on the stage five tragedies, one comedy, and possibly other plays not under her name. Her tragedies, though written in blank verse, yet belong to the heroic genre, and their chief interest lies in the fact that they represent that genre in its dying throes. In Mrs. Pix's tragedies the heroic play of Dryden's day could look upon its enfeebled and distorted image. We have the war background, the remoteness of time and place, the historical source with free alterations of persons and events, that mark the heroic drama. The type characters are the same. The heroine is unapproachable in beauty, unassailable in virtue. The hero, godlike in personal prowess, the idol of the army, framed by nature to be the darling joy of womankind, cares for glory only that he may lay it at the feet of his beloved. Blest by her he will leave unenvied monarchs to "fight for this Dunghil Earth." This noble pair, joined by indissoluble vows or by a secret marriage, are subjected by the plot to the machinations of the beautiful wicked woman in whose heart has sprung into being a passion for the hero, and to the arrogant demands of the tyrant who claims the heroine as his prey. The result is disaster and the last act is a holocaust. Fights, murders, and suicides carry off all the important dramatis personæ. Disguises, mistaken identity, the ravings of sudden madness, ghosts, and secret documents, determine the events of the play. Passion is torn into exclamatory tatters from the first scene to the last. We have rant and bluster and tortured similes, until taste, good sense, and correct English suffer the same fate as the chief characters. The description of Mrs. Pix as "a fat female author," appropriately called "Mrs. Wellfed," would prepare us for something more placid than the chaos into which she leads us.
The one possible explanation of Mrs. Pix's acceptance year after year by the audiences of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields is that the business of her plays never lags. They are short, full of action and surprising turns. An event is never delayed by a disquisition. They also gave excellent opportunity for scenic effects of palaces, prisons, and camps.
Susanna Freeman, Mrs. Centlivre (1680?-1723)
The only woman writer of plays of real importance in this period is Susanna Centlivre.[197] She was the daughter of a Mr. Freeman of Holbeach, Lincolnshire. He is said to have had a considerable estate at the time of the Restoration, but being a zealous dissenter, he was persecuted, his estates were confiscated, and he was obliged to seek refuge in Ireland, where Susanna was born. Her early life is involved in obscurity, but there cling to her name biographical details of a picturesque and romantic sort, though of rather questionable authenticity. Left an orphan at nine and subjected to the ill-usage of a stepmother, the child, at twelve, finally escapes and makes her way to London which she enters penniless, innocent, beautiful. She is rescued by a Cambridge student, a Mr. Hammond, and disguised as a boy she accompanies him to the University. Later she marries the nephew of Stephen Fox, but is left a widow before she is sixteen. A second marriage to a Mr. Carroll results in a second widowhood before she is eighteen. At twenty her first tragedy is played at Drury Lane. She appears soon after this as an actress in country theaters. Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Haywood could ask no richer material for an adventure novel. Then suddenly the scene changes. The buffeted Susanna marries Mr. Centlivre, Queen Anne's chief pastry-cook, and settles down into a comfortable, orderly, and apparently happy domestic life, of which, however, we know in reality even less than of her early kaleidoscopic career.[198] The events of her life are the presentation and publication of her plays.
Before her marriage in 1706 she had begun the series of comedies of which, between 1703 and 1722, she wrote seventeen. They were all successful, and four of them, The Gamester (1705), The Busy Body (1709), The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714), and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), held a fairly prominent place on the stage through the century.
In 1761 there was published a fine edition of her works in three volumes. There is a preliminary address "To the World" in which an anonymous woman endeavors to do justice to "The Manes of the never to be forgotten Mrs. Centlivre." She thus recounts the difficulties Mrs. Centlivre encountered as a female author:
She was even ashamed to proclaim her own great Genius, probably because the Custom of the Times discountenanced poetical Excellence in a Female. The Gentlemen of the Quill published it not, perhaps envying her superior Talents; and her Bookseller, complying with national Prejudices, put a fictitious Name to her Love's Contrivance, thro' Fear that the Work shou'd be condemned if known to be Feminine. With modest Diffidence she sent her Performances, like Orphans, into the World, without so much as a Nobleman to protect them; but they did not need to be supported by Interest, they were admired as soon as known, their real Standard, Merit, brought crowding Spectators to the playhouses, and the female Author, tho' unknown, heard Applauses, such as have since been heaped on that great Author and Actor Colley Cibber.
Her play of the Busy Body, when known to be the Work of a Woman scarce defray'd the Expences of the First Night. The thin audience were pleased, and caused a full House the Second; the Third was crowded, and so on to the Thirteenth, when it was stopt, on account of the advanced Season; but the following Winter it appear'd again with Applause, and for Six Nights successively, was acted by rival Players, both at Drury Lane and at the Hay-Market Houses. See here the Effects of Prejudice, a Woman who did Honour to the Nation, suffer'd because she was a Woman. Are these things fit and becoming a free-born People, who call themselves polite and civilized! Hold! let my Pen stop, and not reproach the present Age for the Sins of their Fathers....
A Poet is born so, not made by Rules; and is there not an equal Chance that the Poetical Birth should be female as well as male?... I could wish that some young Ladies of my Acquaintance, now in Boarding Schools, had classical Education, which would improve their Minds, furnish them with a more general Knowledge, and of course better fit them for Conversation, and the Management of Business.
The author of "To the World" finds great satisfaction in the union of Mrs. Lennox with "Lord Corke and Mr. Samuel Johnson" in the translation of Brumoy's Greek Theatre.
This convinces me [she says] that not only that barbarous Custom of denying Women to have Souls, begins to be rejected as foolish and absurd, but also that foolish Assertion, that Female Minds are not capable of producing literary Works, equal even to those of Pope, now loses Ground, and probably the next Age may be taught by our pens that our Geniuses have been hitherto cramped and smothered, but not extinguished, and that the Sovereignty which the male Part of the Creation have, until now usurped over us, is unreasonably arbitrary: And, further, that our natural Abilities entitle us to a larger Share, not only in Literary Decisions, but that, with the present Directors, we are equally entitled to Power both in Church and State....
In 1764 Baker, in Biographia Dramatica, gave an account of Mrs. Centlivre's work, and most eighteenth-century dramatic collections included plays by her. In 1776 The New English Theatre, which professed to assemble "the most Valuable Plays which have been Acted on the London Stage," published The Busy Body, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, and The Wonder. Her plays were included by John Bell in various collections from 1776 to 1792. Mrs. Inchbald, in her British Theatre (1808), and Oxberry, in The New English Drama, 1818-1824, carried the publication of her plays into the nineteenth century. Such brief notices as occur are highly laudatory. Mr. Baker says: "In a word we cannot help giving it as our opinion, that if we do not allow her to be the very first of our female writers for the stage, she has but one above her, and may justly be placed next to her predecessor in dramatic glory, the great Mrs. Behn." Nearly half a century later Mrs. Inchbald gave even stronger praise when she said that Mrs. Centlivre "ranks in the first class of our comic dramatists." Of the Busy Body Mrs. Inchbald said: "This comedy is by far her best work. In excellence of fable, strength of character, and intricacy of occurrences, it forms one of the most entertaining exhibitions the theatre can boast." Of The Wonder she wrote: "Garrick thought Don Felix worthy his most powerful exertions, in describing the passion of jealousy; and his character was upon the lists with the favorite parts he performed.... Mrs. Centlivre has somewhere said 'the Muses, like most females, are least liberal to their own sex.' She was ungrateful if she did not acknowledge her obligation to them in the composition of this work; for they presided with no niggardly influence over the whole production."
Modern study of Mrs. Centlivre's work has taken a surprising turn. It has to do entirely with Quellen and Verhältnisse. In 1900-1905 there were seven German dissertations dealing with the sources of her plays.[199]
The impulse to play-writing seems to have expended itself with Mrs. Centlivre. Hannah Cowley's popular Belle's Stratagem (1782) is the only other play of even moderate importance through the rest of the century. The situation with regard to play-writing is rather curious. Virtuous ladies were at liberty to write tragedies because tragedies were supposed to be moral and elevating. But unfortunately none of these ladies succeeded in tragedy. On the other hand, ladies who were not virtuous wrote comedies and were eminently successful. The realm between tragedy and comedy, the sentimental comedy, in its combination of didacticism and morality with social studies from middle-class life and the opportunity for rapid intrigue, might have seemed the very medium in which women could most advantageously work. But the successful sentimental comedies from The Conscious Lovers to False Delicacy were written by men playwrights.
General Learning and Literary Work
Besides the women whose work was sufficiently specialized to be grouped under particular subjects or species there were many women to whom learning was itself an avocation with no thought of any literary outcome, and there were many more whose interests were in the general field of belles-lettres and who wrote either in verse or in prose, and on such varied themes as the occasion might suggest. Since no effective principle of classification suggests itself in connection with these writers, it will probably be in the interests of clearness to discuss them in an order as nearly chronological as may be.
Joan Philips (fl. 1679)
An early, almost unknown, little volume of poems, published in 1679 under the title, Female Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Ephelia, is the work of Joan Philips whose portrait accompanies the poems. Such of Miss Philips's poems as can be dated belong but a year or two before the publication of the book. She apparently had some rather close connection with court circles. Her little volume is dedicated to the "Most Excellent Princess Mary, Dutchess of Richmond and Lennox"; she sends a congratulatory poem to Charles II on the discovery of the Popish Plot; and she writes an elegy on Archbishop Sheldon.
Her poems are not, however, usually concerned with court and state. The "Several Occasions" calling forth her verse are chiefly amatory or friendly. Her love-poems are highly personal. From poem to poem the lady pursues the uneven and finally disastrous course of her love for "Strephon," sometimes less poetically addressed as "F. G." From "Love's First Approach" to Strephon's final decisive nuptials with a wealthier Fair One the hopes and despairs of Ephelia are spread before us. She can find no surcease from sorrow. Books fail her as a resource, and her pen proves as recalcitrant as that of the White King in Looking Glass Land.
Sometimes with Books I would divert my mind,
But nothing there but F's and G's I find.
Sometimes to ease my Grief, my Pen I take
But it no letters but F. G. will make.
Miss Philips's friendship poems, in their addresses to "the honoured Eugenia," "the beauteous Marinda," to "Damon," and to "Phylocles inviting him to friendship" show how definitely Ephelia formed herself on the model of the great Orinda whom she praises as having reached the summit of excellence.
Miss Philips also wrote in awe-struck admiration of "Madam Behn" whose "strenuous polite lines" seemed to her a union of "Strong and Sweet" such as might be envied by the wittiest men. And she followed in the footsteps of Mrs. Behn to the extent of writing one comedy, The Pair-Royal of Coxcombs which had the humble success of being acted at a dancing-school. The deprecatory Prologue and Epilogue were included in her poems together with some of the love-songs in the play.
Ephelia seems to spread her life before us, but as a personage in the real world she escapes us. She and Strephon have faded into obscurity. She is contemporary in comedy with Mrs. Behn. Had they some literary comradeship? But twelve years separate the published work of Joan Philips from that of Mrs. Katherine Philips. Were the two poetesses perhaps related? Lady Winchilsea was eighteen when the volume by Ephelia appeared. About fifteen years later we find Lady Winchilsea as "Ardealia" writing on Friendship to one "Ephelia." Could it possibly be this Ephelia? Did Ephelia publish the poems herself with her own portrait as frontispiece? If so she was strangely lacking in the reserve characteristic of Orinda and Ardelia. But even with no biographical data whereby to substantiate or correct the poems, the thin little volume holds its place of interest because of its early date and because of the literary ambitions it indicates.
Anne Killigrew (1660-1685)
Anne Killigrew came of a family prominent in the court of Charles II. Her uncle Thomas, the "court wit," was given a patent for the Theater Royal; her uncle Henry was admiral under James, Duke of York; her father was chaplain to James and Master of the Savoy; and Anne was maid of honor to Mary of Modena. She was born in St. Martin's Lane and died at her father's lodgings within the Cloisters of Westminster. London and the court were her habitat. Ballard says she had "a polite education," but no details are given. She apparently was taught the accomplishments counted necessary for a girl in her social position. That she went beyond mediocrity in painting we have already seen.[200] In poetry, also, according to Dryden, she excelled. The thin volume of her published verse (1686) scarcely justifies his eulogy, but Wood, in Athenæ Oxoniensis, says that Dryden in no way exceeds the truth. Her poems sent anonymously from hand to hand received high praise and were even at first attributed to the best poets of the age. They gradually came to be known as hers, but she gives no evidence of having suffered any contumely as a poetess. She has nowhere any complaint of undue or irritating feminine limitations. She is pessimistic, scornful, rather hard and drastic, in her judgments, but it is greed for gold, ambition for place or power, unbridled love, atheism, war, that are the subjects of her invective. There is not a light or playful, or even a happy, touch in her poems. They have a crude virility, what Dryden calls a "noble vigour," and a contemptuous outlook on "the truly wretched Human Race."
Personally Miss Killigrew must have been attractive. Her epitaph eulogizes her as a daughter and a sister:
In a numerous race
And vertuous, the highest place
None envy'd her: sisters, brothers,
Her admirers were and lovers:
She was to all s' obliging sweet,
All in one love to her did meet.
And she was an acknowledged favorite at court, especially with her royal master and mistress. Dryden emphasizes her beauty and charm. The portrait she painted of herself shows her in no sense averse to pomps and vanities of attire.[201] In actual life she must have moved along in fairly smooth accord with the life about her, but there could have been few ladies within the circle of the court more alien to it in spirit than Anne Killigrew. It is difficult to place her mentally amid the gayeties of London life. She presents an anomaly. To be young, beautiful, gifted, high in social opportunities, praised and loved, and yet to look out upon life with bitterness and distaste, to be conscious at twenty-five that all this world has to offer will turn to dust and ashes in the mouth—such is the curious combination we find in her. While the few accessible details concerning her indicate a considerable degree of lovableness, her poems are those of an implacable moral censor.
Anne Killigrew was but four when Mrs. Philips died, but the spell of the "Matchless Orinda" descended early upon her, and she gives one of the earliest of the many eulogies written by women concerning their distinguished ancestor among British Muses.
Orinda (Albion, and her sex's grace)
Ow'd not her glory to a beauteous face:
It was her radiant soul that shone within,
Which struck a lustre thro' her outward skin;
That did her lips and cheeks with roses dye,
Advanc'd her height, and sparkled in her eye.
Nor did her sex at all obstruct her fame.
But high'r 'mongst the stars it fixt her name;
What she did write, not only all allow'd,
But ev'ry laurel, to her laurel bow'd!
Mrs. Evelyn (1635-1709) and Mary Evelyn (1665-85)
John Evelyn's flattering letter to the Duchess of Newcastle, already quoted, with its list of learned women, his suggestion to Lord Cornbury that he add two ladies to his gallery of notables, the trouble he took to conduct a party of ladies to see the girls' "colleges" at Hackney, and various references in Numismata (1697) indicate a genuine interest in the intellectual achievements of women. Mrs. Evelyn seems at first to have been of a different temper. She wrote as follows to her son's tutor, Mr. Bohun, in 1672:
Women were not borne to reade authors, and censure the learned, to compare lives and judge of virtues, to give rules of morality, and sacrifice to the Muses. We are willing to acknowledge all time borrowed from family duties misspent; the care of children's education, observing a husband's commands, assisting the sick, relieving the poore, and being serviceable to our friends, are of sufficient weight to employ the most improved capacities amongst us. If sometimes it happens by accident that one of a thousand aspires a little higher, her fate commonly exposes her to wonder, but adds little to esteeme. The distaffe will defend our quarrels as well as the sword, and the needle is as instructive as the penne. A heroine is a kind of prodigy: the influence of a blazing starre is not more dangerous, or more avoyded. Though I have lived under the roofe of the learned, and in the neighborhood of science, it has had no other effect on a temper like mine, but that of admiration.
But these very letters, in which Mrs. Evelyn disclaims learning, would be a capital point in refutation of Macaulay's charge of general feminine illiteracy. In subject-matter, in style, and in the mechanics of writing they show a development not unworthy of that "roofe of the learned" under which she dwelt. At the time Mrs. Evelyn wrote the letter just quoted her daughter Mary was but six years old, but her literary and artistic tastes must have soon become manifest, for when she died of small-pox at nineteen she was an accomplished young woman, on the road, apparently, to be the dangerous "blazing starre" her mother decried, and her training must have been going on for ten or twelve years in the home with the active connivance of her parents. Her father was exceedingly proud, not only of her excellence in dancing and music, but especially, it would seem, of her passion for books. She had, he said, "read abundance of history, and all the best poets, even Terence, Plautus, Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid; all the best romances and modern poems." After her death they found among her papers a commonplace book in which she had entered "an incredible number of selections from historians, poets, travellers." Her piety and her impulse towards expression were both shown in the many "resolutions, contemplations, prayers and devotions" she left in written form. Of the extent to which both Mrs. Evelyn and her daughter carried their work in painting and enamel I have already spoken.[202]
The Evelyn household may stand doubtless as one of many where, without any tinge of pedantry or any especial outward manifestations of learning, there was yet a natural interest in arts and letters, an interest shared, in quite a simple, normal way by all the members of the family.
The Honorable Miss Dudleya North (1675-1712)
The Honorable Miss Dudleya North was a niece of the Honorable Roger North, and it is through the memorable Lives of the Norths that we come upon an account of her life. Dudleya and her two younger brothers were brought up together. She learned the same lessons and read the same books as her brothers, and joined in their amusements. When they went to the University, she carried on her studies at home and she became one of the most highly cultured and learned women of her time. After she had conquered Greek and Latin she advanced to Hebrew, and finally, "by a long and severe course of study," she gained "a competent knowledge in the whole circle of Oriental learning." Her uncle Roger laconically described her life as follows: "The eldest sister, Catharine, died ... and the youngest, named Dudleya, having emaciated herself with study whereby she had made familiar to her, not only Greek and Latin, but the Oriental languages, under the infliction of a sedentery distemper, died also."
The fine collection of Oriental books left by Miss North was given by her brother, Lord North and Grey, to the parochial library at Rougham in Norfolk. Her uncle wrote: "I have had a design to build a parochial library at Rougham, and now shall finish it this summer, and placing my niece's books there, entitle the Catalogue Ex dono, etc., e libris eruditissimæ virginis, etc., which will be a monument more lasting than marble."[203]
Anne Lee, Lady Wharton (1632?-1685)
Anne Lee, the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Lee, married in 1673 Thomas Wharton, whose chief interest in her was based on the large dowry she brought him. The unhappiness of her married life received some alleviation from the wise and steadfast friendship of Dr. Gilbert Burnet. In 1680-81, she was in France for her health and during this time she corresponded regularly with Dr. Burnet. He addressed to her various poems with titles such as The Secrets of Friendship, Friendship's Mysteries, Pure Love, and Love's Magnetism. She wrote a tragedy in blank verse on the love of Ovid for Julia, a number of Scripture paraphrases, and some occasional poems.[204] Some of these poems drew approving verses from Dryden in his Eleonora, a panegyrical poem on the death of Mrs. Wharton's elder sister, Lady Abingdon, in 1691, and from Waller, who, in his old age, was still equal to flattering a new "Chloris," under which name he celebrated her learning and her poetry.
Ann Baynard (1672-1697)
Ann Baynard had a natural propensity to learning and her father Dr. Edward Baynard, Fellow of the College of Physicians, London, gave her a very liberal education. Dr. Prude[205] says of her:
As for learning, whether it be to know and understand natural causes and events, to know the courses of the sun, moon, and stars; the qualities of herbs and plants; to be acquainted with the demonstrable verities of the mathematicks; the study of philosophy; the writings of the antients; and that in their own proper language, without the help of an interpreter: These and the like are the most noble accomplishments of the human mind, and accordingly do bring great delight and satisfaction along with them, these things she was not only conversant in, but mistress of, and that to such a degree, that very few of her sex did ever arrive at. She had from her infancy been trained up in the knowledge of these things, and had made a great progress therein; and even in her green years, at the age of 23, was arrived to the knowledge of a bearded philosopher.[206]
She was a "nervous and subtle disputant" in the "hard and knotty arguments of metaphysical learning." She was always coveting more knowledge, saying that it was a sin to be contented with but a little. She was exceedingly religious and learning was to her but a handmaid of piety. Her last words were a recommendation to women to study philosophy and the great book of nature which would give them a sound basis for wisdom in practical life. Women, she said, are capable of such study, and could accomplish much if they would "spend of that time in study and thinking, which they do in visits, vanity and folly." Mr. Collier, in the Great Historical Dictionary, says of her that it is doubtful whether the first Ralph Baynard, who for his conduct at the battle of Hastings was rewarded with eighty-five lordships, did more honor to the name of Baynard or the last Anne.
Mrs. Alicia D'Anvers (fl. 1691)
Academia: or the Humours of the University of Oxford in burlesque verse is a thin quarto by Mrs. Alicia D'Anvers. It was printed in May, 1691, and again with a fuller descriptive title in June of the same year. The poem is an account given to his fellow-servants by John who has recently visited Oxford. Mrs. D'Anvers puts herself in John's place. She uses his crude and even rough language, she gives his point of view, and relishes the misconceptions due to his ignorance. Heavy and clumsy as the poem is there is something refreshing and original in its tone. As an attempted realistic portrayal of a servant's experiences it stands quite by itself, except in comedies, in the decades before the novel widened human interests. Mrs. D'Anvers is neither patronizing nor didactic. She simply finds genuine humor and entertainment in the comic juxtaposition of John's mind and the ancient customs and glories of Oxford.
Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710)
Lady Chudleigh[207] was a lady of much repute in the eighteenth century for her writings in both prose and verse. Her Poems were published in 1703 and her Essays in 1710, but her chief literary activities belong in the late seventeenth century. Her Essays are disquisitions on Pride, Humility, Self-love, Friendship, Death, Anger, Avarice, Solitude, and kindred themes. Mr. Ballard says of them: "They appear to be, not the excursions of a lively imagination ... so much as the deliberate results of a long exercise in the world, improv'd with reading, regulated with judgment; softened by good breeding, and heightened with sprightly thoughts and elevated piety." Her prose style is fluent, energetic, and, for the most part, correct. In her Preface to her Song of Three Children Paraphrased she makes several points that indicate mental independence. In the height of the dominance of the heroic couplet she chooses Pindaric verse because she does not wish to be tied up to the rules of the couplet, and because she desires to give her fancy greater scope. She begs pardon for introducing into her poem ideas "not generally received," such as Dr. Burnet's conception of the "Ante-diluvian Earth as Smooth, regular, and uniform; without Mountains or Hills." Concerning her poetic use of the doctrine of preëxistence she says, "To me 't is indifferent which is true, as long as I know I am by the Laws of Poetry allow'd the Liberty of chusing that which will sound most gracefully in Verse." In regard to the stars she adopts "the Cartesian Hypothesis" because it makes the universe "appear infinitely larger, fuller, more magnificent." Her imagination is as genuinely excited as was Tennyson's by her conception of the "boundless Spaces" of the heavens and the splendor of the "huge Globes which roll over our Heads." She believes also in a millennial existence on "a new habitable earth." The poem itself is an unbroken ecstasy ninety long stanzas in duration, and becomes undeniably wearisome. But the woman who could spend months in a lonely country place absorbed in such religious and scientific reflections, who could maintain for so long a time so rapt and energetic a mental attitude towards abstract subjects, was far enough removed from the traditional hausfrau.
Though Lady Chudleigh rejoices in these learned topics she modestly disclaims any accurate knowledge. "But 't is not reasonable to expect that a Woman should be nicely skill'd in Physics: We are kept Strangers to all ingenious and useful Studies, and can have but a slight and superficial Knowledge of things." Two poems, Resolution and To Mr. Dryden on his excellent Translation of Virgil, give evidence of Lady Chudleigh's wide reading in poetry, history, drama, and divinity. Her literary dicta are of little value, for they do hardly more than echo the judgments of the day. According to her it was the poet Waller who, coming after the "transient Glimm'rings of Chaucer" and the "Lunar Beams of Spenser," announced the dawn of a new Morn, and with Dryden came "The Triumphs of refulgent Day." Taken as a whole the poems bitterly inveigh against life with its blighting sorrows, its fleeting, unreal joys, its injustice, its black despairs. The only break in the gloom comes in short periods of absorption in books, or in occasional religious ecstasies.
The first poem by which Lady Chudleigh became known is The Ladies' Defence: a sudden, angry outburst caused by a sermon on Conjugal Duty by a Mr. Sprint, a nonconformist in Sherbourn, Dorsetshire.[208] The personal animus in a little poem To the Ladies warning them against marriage, apparently grew out of her own matrimonial infelicities. And The Ladies' Defence has the same ring of indignant sincerity. The poem is in the form of a conversation between the parson who preached the sermon; Sir William Loveall, who, out of the ignorance of his unmarried state, endeavors to reconcile the warring parties; Marissa, Lady Chudleigh herself; and Sir John Brute, who thanks the parson for preaching against "those Terrors of our Lives, those worst of Plagues, those Furies call'd our Wives." The parson replies:
Not led by Passion, but by Zeal inspir'd,
I've told the Women what's of them requir'd:
Taught them their Husbands to Obey and Please,
And to their Humours sacrifice their Ease:
Give up their Reason, and their Wills resign,
And ev'ry look, and ev'ry thought confine.
Sure, this Detraction you can't justly call?
'T is kindly meant, and 't is address'd to All.
If you wou'd live as it becomes a Wife,
And raise the Honour of a marry'd Life,
You must the useful Art of wheedling try,
And with his various Humours still comply;
Whate'er he is, you still must think him best,
And boast to all that you are truly blest;
Also, to him you inward Reverence owe;
If he's a Fool, you must not think him so;
Nor yet indulge one mean contemptuous Thought,
Or fancy he can e'er commit a Fault.
Nor must your Deference be alone confin'd
Unto the hid Recesses of your Mind,
But must in all your Actions be display'd,
And visible to each Spectator made.[209]
After this sarcastic summary of Mr. Sprint's irritating sermon Lady Chudleigh in the person of Marissa, depicts the general condition of women and her own loftier ambitions:
'T is hard we should be by the Men despis'd
Yet kept from knowing what would make us priz'd.
Debarr'd from Knowledge, banish'd from the Schools,
And with the utmost Industry bred Fools.
Laugh'd out of Reason, jested out of Sense,
And nothing left but Native Innocence:
Or that my Sex would all such Toys despise;
And only study to be Good, and Wise:
Instead of Novels, Histories peruse,
And for their Guides the wise Ancients chuse,
Thro' all the Labyrinths of Learning go,
And grow more humble as they more do know.
Beauty's a Trifle merits not my Care.
I'd rather Æsop's ugly Visage wear,
Joyn'd with his Mind, than be a Fool, and Fair.
But spite of you, we'll to ourselves be kind:
Your censures slight, your little Tricks despise,
And make it our whole business to be wise.
The mean low trivial Cares of Life disdain,
And read and Think, and Think and read again,
And on our Minds bestow the utmost Pain.
Anne Kingsmill, Lady Winchilsea (1661-1720)
One of the important women of letters in the late seventeenth century was Anne Kingsmill.[210] Of her early life we have no definite details. That it was a gay and happy life may be inferred from one of her retrospective poems in which she says that in her youth "Pleasure's tempting Air" blew soft about her, and that she dedicated her "Prime" to "vain Amusements." Later she coveted a place at court which to her ambitious eye seemed "Paradice below." At what time this desire was realized we have no record, but in 1683 we find her listed as one of the maids of honor to Mary of Modena. Miss Strickland says that Anne Killigrew and Anne Kingsmill were "ladies of irreproachable virtue, members of the Church of England, and alike distinguished for moral worth and literary achievements," and she adds that Anne Kingsmill was "well-known as the beautiful and witty maid of honour." In 1684 Anne married Mr. Finch, gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York. At the coming of William and Mary, Mr. and Mrs. Finch went to the family place at Eastwell Park where they spent the rest of their uneventful lives in a retirement, embittered at first, doubtless, by their grief over Stuart disasters, but, as the years passed, rendered more and more delightful by the joys of country life, of books, and of friends. Mrs. Finch's best poems are those inspired by Eastwell and its associations. The Elizabethan house at Eastwell was set in a park of old yew trees and majestic beeches, forming "the very ideal of an ancestral park of the ancient noblesse," and it was by the extraordinary dignity and beauty of this park that Mrs. Finch's most imaginative work was inspired. Within doors the gathering of antiquities, the illuminating of books, the formation of a great library, and free literary productivity were the family interests. There were also many and close ties of friendship founded on natural causes of union such as loyalty to the Stuarts, devotion to the Church of England, high and even austere ideals of life. And family ties and ties of friendship received ardent acknowledgment. No woman of this period was more happily circumstanced in her home for the unhampered pursuit of literary tastes than was Lady Winchilsea. She began to write when she was a maid of honor, but it was with a nervous sense of the ridicule that would probably follow any disclosure of that fact. But at Eastwell the case was different. There are charming pictures of evening sessions when the authoress presented her work to an enthusiastic circle. A scribe entered her writings in a fair and clerkly hand in a majestic folio. With such encouragement the lady kept sedulously and joyfully to her task. And when her husband's accession to the title gave her a new position of dignity and authority she even ventured, in 1713,[211] to publish a selection from her verse, first under the pseudonym "Ardelia," and then, in a later impression, with her full name and title.
Lady Winchilsea's poems were composed between 1683 and 1720, and during this period she tried nearly all poetic forms. Songs, satires, fables, tragedies, translations, are fully represented. She was the most voluminous of the minor poets of her time, and in vigor and scope she outranks most of them. But her literary importance to-day rests not so much on the amount or variety of her work, as on the fact that in an age of didacticism and satire she delicately foreshadowed tastes that ruled in the romanticism of a century later. It was her Nocturnal Reverie, with its minute accuracy of observation, its sense of the mystery of nature and of the mystic union between man and nature, that secured Wordsworth's praise, gave her an honorable place in Ward's English Poets, and finally established her in the heaven of literary fame as, in Mr. Gosse's phrase, "a minor excelsitude."
In the present study quite other points are to be made concerning Lady Winchilsea. She is particularly interesting when considered as a heretic against certain prevailing social and educational ideals. In the gay dissipations of court life under Charles II she maintained a conception of life serious and even austere. In close association with Mary of Modena and James II she yet maintained her devotion to the Church of England. With the world of fashion flocking to the comedies of the Restoration dramatists she yet condemned the immoralities of the stage with the bitterness of a Jeremy Collier. There was, then, in Lady Winchilsea an independence of judgment, a stoutness of fiber in forming and defending her own views, which would lead one to expect some trenchant remarks on the contemporary attitude towards women. It is much to be regretted that the letters of Lady Winchilsea, if any are extant, have never been published. Her interests were so varied, her friendships so ardent, her hours of country leisure so numerous, her pen so facile, that she must have found, in what Anne Seward called "epistolary solicitudes," one of the most convenient outlets for a spirit often kicking against the pricks of social conventions, and her keenness of insight, her caustic phrasing, would make her letters worth many pages of pindarics. But in default of such letters we turn to the one prose essay and to the poems. From scattered passages we can build up the elements of her heresies. Though she loved her home and was the most devoted of wives, she utterly rejected the hausfrau theory of life. She declared that she, at least, was never meant for "the dull manage of a servile house." She asked little of her table except that it should be "set without her care." Rich food and elaborate service could be dispensed with, but leisure and a free mind she must have. The frivolous occupations of the town lady, the endless discussions of laces and brocades, the rivalries as to dishes and screens from China, the gossip and ill-natured jests at fashionable tea-tables, she found unendurable. Feminine accomplishments, such as embroidery, amateurish drawing and painting, awakened her active hostility.
This definite rejection of all that ordinarily filled the feminine mind, and a rejection, moreover, in the interests of books and writing, of course made Ardelia the unhappy victim of many a sneer. The attack on her by Pope and Gay, in Three Hours after Marriage, in 1717, may be taken as an extreme example of the indignities to which "a petticoat author" might be subjected, but there must have been many lesser evidences of social disapproval or the irritating theme would not so often recur in her poems. In "The Introduction" she says:
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem'd,
The fault, can by no vertue be redeem'd.
They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fassion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the Conquests of our prime.
She congratulates herself that she had at least had the good sense to keep her rhymes a secret while at court, where a "Versifying Maid of Honour" would have been looked upon "with prejudice, if not with contempt." During a visit to London she heard the young gossip Almeria describe a certain lady as "A Poetess! a woman who writes! A common jest!" Conscious of her growing folio at Eastwell, Ardelia resented the implied censure. What law, she asks, forbids women to think? Women, she protests, are "Education's and not Nature's fools." Ardelia had high praise from noted contemporaries and cordial appreciation at home. But these did not avail to conquer her morbid sensitiveness to criticism. She seemed to embody in herself two warring tendencies, a demand for complete intellectual freedom and the author's inevitable desire to spread his wares abroad, with the shrinking modesty of the lady to whom any sort of publicity was hateful.
The "Matchless Orinda," Lady Winchilsea tells us, was the model on whom, from her early girlhood she formed herself. The first verses she wrote were in honor of Orinda. By Orinda's example she justified the efforts and aims of her own muse, but she is in no sense a copyist. It was Orinda's fame as a noted and virtuous woman poet that inspired her rather than any close study of Orinda's work. Lady Winchilsea, in that small portion of her work on which her fame rests, is very delicately and truly original. Her spirit reacted against court life as definitely as did Anne Killigrew's, but she found no satisfaction in satiric comment. She shrank from any sort of contest. She argued and protested only when pushed to the wall. She was shy and easily intimidated, and her best work does not come from the heat of conflict or from bitterness of spirit. She is essentially contemplative. The poems on which her fame rests blossomed out quietly, exquisitely, under the gentle stimulus of a happy home life in the midst of lovely natural surroundings. She is typically a lady of letters because, without the spur of necessity, urged on by no popular applause, she yet, for more than thirty years, made the reading of books and the writing of books the central occupation of her life.
The Honorable Mrs. Monck (d. 1715)
The honorable Mrs. Monck[212] was the daughter of Lord Molesworth, a nobleman of Ireland. Mr. Ballard says of her learning: "She, purely by force of her own natural genius, acquired a perfect knowledge of the Latin, Italian and Spanish tongues: and by a constant reading of the finest authors in those languages, became so great a mistress of the art of poetry, that she wrote many poems for her own diversion." In 1716, after her death, Lord Molesworth published her poems under the title Marinda. Poems and Translations on Several Occasions. In his dedication to Caroline, the Princess of Wales, he says that the book represents the works of the leisure hours of a young gentlewoman in a remote country solitude, with no assistance but that of a good library, and with the daily care of a large family on her hands. In commending her character he says, "I loved her more because she deserved it, than because she was mine." Various slight poems show Marinda's knowledge of Italian and Spanish. Better than all these are two cleverly turned epigrams on "a lady of pleasure," and some affecting farewell lines written in her last sickness to her husband. Mrs. Monck's repute for learning comes largely by hearsay, her printed memorials are slight and unimportant, but she nevertheless gives an impression, elusive but real, of a most interesting personality.
Martha, Lady Giffard (1639-1722)
Lady Giffard was Sir William Temple's sister. She was twelve years younger than Dorothy. After her marriage and almost immediate widowhood, in 1661, she made her home with the Temples. Her Life and Correspondence has been published by Mrs. Longe as a sequel to the Letters of Dorothy Osborne. The volume contains letters from Lady Chesterfield, from Lady Sunderland ("Saccharissa"), and others, to Lady Giffard. The letters by Lady Giffard are few in number and are all written to her niece Lady Berkeley, later Lady Portland, and belong in the years 1697-1722. These letters have none of the sparkle and humor and literary charm of Dorothy's. But we get indications that Lady Giffard was a woman of intellectual interests. We find her reading Turkish history daytimes with recourse to Virgil, "as less exacting," for evenings. She knew Spanish and French, and one of the specific items in her will is a bequest of the books she had collected in these two languages.
Sarah Byng, Mrs. Osborne (1693-1775)
A third series of letters, published under the title Political and Social Letters of a Lady of the Eighteenth Century, though belonging later in the century, may be brought in here because they carry on the series of Osborne letters. Sarah Byng, the daughter of Admiral Byng, Viscount Torrington, married, in 1710, John Osborne of Chicksands Priory, the old home of Dorothy and the place from which she wrote most of her letters. Mr. John Osborne was Dorothy's grand-nephew. He died in 1719 and his father in 1720, leaving to Sarah Osborne an infant son, Danvers, the heir to the title and a heavily burdened estate. Her letters fall in several series, the first set from 1721 to 1739 being to her brother George on business matters concerning the property. Most interesting are the letters to Danvers from 1733 to 1751. When he came of age in 1736 she was able to turn over to him an unincumbered estate, and on his marriage in 1740 she superintended the establishment of the new household at Chicksands. A third set of letters has to do with the sentence and execution of her brother Admiral Byng, in 1757. Through the death of the wife of Danvers in 1743 and the death of Danvers in 1750 Mrs. Osborne was left with two grandsons to bring up, and her last letters are to John, one of these grandsons, who was traveling in Holland.
Through two generations Mrs. Osborne bore heavy administrative and financial burdens. She was both father and mother to her son, and then to her grandsons. And she was left single-handed to conduct the defense of her brother Admiral Byng. It is not strange that the letters are frequently hurried and harassed in tone. She is constantly vexed and baffled because, as a woman, she cannot conduct affairs directly. Some man must be her intermediary. She lays plans, foresees difficulties, writes explicit directions, and then she must urge and cajole her representative to due interest and prompt action. The especial interest in her letters is their abundant and exact account of social life and especially of domestic economy. Energetic, courageous, resourceful, keenly observant, and with a clear head for business, Mrs. Osborne shows herself to be. Perhaps if we had her letters before the burdens of life fell so heavily upon her we might find some hint of the charm in Dorothy's letters, for even Dorothy's letters after marriage became "tame and flat to what was before." As it is, Mrs. Osborne's letters are valuable for scattered social detail, not for any permanent charm of expression.
Elizabeth Singer, Mrs. Rowe (1674-1737)
Mr. Walter Singer, a dissenting minister of Frome, was early left a widower with three daughters. Two of these daughters showed while still young exceptionally good minds and a natural interest in study. One daughter, who died at nineteen, was devoted to medicine and collected books on that subject. Elizabeth preferred drawing and poetry. She began drawing when her fingers could hardly hold the pencil, and she squeezed out the juices of plants to make colors. Her father furnished her an excellent master, and she attained sufficient skill so that throughout her life her work was highly prized by her friends. She also loved music "to excess." But poetry was her chief delight. She began writing at twelve, and by the time she was twenty-two she had on hand a store of verse so pleasing to her friends that they insisted on its publication, and there accordingly appeared a thin little volume in 1696 under the title Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Philomela. The "Preface to the Reader," by one Elizabeth Johnson, is another of many contemporary indications of feminine irritation at the limitations imposed upon them. Miss Johnson allows "Mankind the Brutal Advantages of Strength," but when they "wou'd Monopolize Sence too, when neither that, nor Learning, nor so much as Wit" is granted the women, they are forced to protest against such "notorious Violations on the Liberties of Free-born English Women." "This makes the Meekest Worm amongst us all, ready to turn agen when we are thus trampled on; But alas! What can we do to Right our selves? stingless and harmless as we are, we can only Kiss the Foot that hurts us." But it sometimes pleases Heaven to succor a distressed people by sending them some bright genius, "an Epaminondas, a Timoleon, a Nassaw." "Nor is our Defenceless Sex forgotten—we have not only Banduca's and Zenobia's, but Sappho's, and Behn's, and Schurman's, and Orinda's, who have humbled the most haughty of our Antagonists, and made 'em do Homage to our Wit, as well as our Beauty." Miss Singer's consent to the publication of this volume was gained only by a promise of strict anonymity, and the "Philomela," then chosen as a pen-name through a naïve adaptation of "Singer," became her permanent appellation.
One interesting fact with regard to these early poems is the indication we have of a kind of poetical commerce maintained among the members of a group of persons similarly inclined to verse. Philomela writes a Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk which she sends to "The Athenians" and they respond with a poem beginning,
We yield! we yield! the Palm, bright Maid! be thine!
She sends a Poetical Question to the Athenians and gets a long answer. The Vanity of the World and The Wish are likewise addressed to the Athenians and have similar responses. In a Pindarick to the Athenian Society she brings as "Zealous Tribute," "The early products of a Female muse," praising especially their piety and heroic sentiments and the courage with which they have lashed the darling vices of the times.
A friendship so exalted and immense,
A female breast did ne'er before commence.
A little poem in humorous vein, To one that persuades me to leave the Muses, gives some account of her school-days. "I fairly bid the Boarding Schools farewell," "Old Governess farewell with all my heart," are lines indicative of her attitude.
Spite of her heart, Old Puss shall damn no more
Great Sedley's Plays, and never look 'em o're;
Affront my Novels, no, nor in a Rage,
Force Dryden's lofty Products from the Stage,
Whilst all the rest of the melodious crew,
With the whole System of Athenians too,
For Study's sake out of the Window flew.
But I, to Church, shall fill her Train no more,
And walk as if I sojurn'd by the hour.
In like vein she bids adieu to "dancing days," singing lessons, Japan work, and even her "esteemed Pencil," and vows to give herself to poetry. And true it is that the rest of her life is mainly of literary and pious significance. When young her beauty and charm had resulted in "a train of lovers," but no one of them, not even Mr. Prior, the poet, could lure her from her serene solitude—possibly because she was "destined by heaven for the possession of another gentleman." At any rate, she went smoothly on with her chosen literary life till she was thirty-six, when she married Mr. Thomas Rowe, thirteen years younger than herself, but of like tastes and himself an author. Their extraordinarily happy life together was brought to a close by his death in 1715, and, after this five years of happiness, she spent the twenty-seven years of her widowhood in a stricter solitude, a more absorbed religious communion, a completer devotion to literary pursuits, than before her marriage. Her essays, her poems, her letters, were the events of her life. She had early come to know the family of Lord Weymouth at Longleate. Mr. Thynne had taught her French and Italian; various members of the family and various family events were celebrated in her verse. She was on most intimate terms with the Countess of Hertford and corresponded with her for many years. Over a hundred of her letters to the Countess were published in The Works of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe and Mr. Thomas Rowe, and though they make dull and monotonous reading now were highly esteemed at the time. In fact, the modest and anonymous Philomela had great eighteenth-century vogue. She had the friendship of many in the great world, she was abundantly praised by poets and divines, and her works went through numerous editions. Her husband said that she combined the fire and passion of Aphra Behn with the chaste purity of Mrs. Katherine Philips. But Astræa's passion underwent some strange alchemy when it was transmuted into Philomela's religious ecstasy. Orinda's purity was fatal to the combination. Yet Mrs. Rowe's "divine transports" have—Mr. Watts admits it—sometimes a soft and passionate sound, even an amorous note, capable of misinterpretation, but evidently reminiscent of the Songs of Solomon, beloved of her youth. It was not an age for enthusiasms and ecstasies. That her "flights" were so popular may possibly be explained by the fact that through them all she was curiously prosaic and intellectually commonplace.
Mrs. Bland (1660?-1765?)
Mr. Ballard speaks of "Mrs. Bland,[213] a Yorkshire gentlewoman so well skilled in Hebrew that she taught it to her son and daughter." Mrs. Bland was born about 1660 and married Mr. Nathaniel Bland in 1681. Her instructor in Hebrew was Lord Van Helmont from whom she learned to write the language with great exactness. At the request of Mr. Thoresby she wrote a Phylactery in Hebrew and presented it to the Royal Society, where it was preserved among their curiosities. Mr. Bland became Lord of the Manor at Beeston and Mr. Thoresby visited him there. To the astonishment of the guest Martha Bland, the young daughter of the house, was translating Hebrew into English, having been taught by "that ingenious gentlewoman," her mother. Four years later Mr. Thoresby took his son Ralph to see "Mrs. Bland, the Hebrician." She had also studied Anglo-Saxon, for she borrowed Elizabeth Elstob's book from Mr. Thoresby and kept it long enough to copy out the grammar part.
Miss Jane Barker (fl. 1688-1723)
Miss Jane Barker is a literary lady whose productions belong in two epochs. Her collected poems appeared in 1688 under the title Poetical Recreations: Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, etc. With Several New Translations. In Two Parts, Part I. Occasionally Written by Mrs. Jane Barker. Part II. By Several Gentlemen of the Universities, and Others. Twenty-seven years after the publication of this verse Miss Barker again came before the public, this time as a writer of romances which proved very popular. They were collected under the title The Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker, and a second edition had appeared by 1719. In 1723 she brought out A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies; or Love and Virtue Recommended: In a Collection of Instructive Novels. Related after a Manner intirely New, and interspersed with Rural Poems, describing the Innocence of a Country Life. By Mrs. Jane Barker, of Wilsthorp, near Stamford, in Lincolnshire.[214]
The long silence between the verse of 1688 and the romances of 1715-26 is unbroken by any explanatory hint or reference. Yet Miss Barker had but one story to tell and that was told in her youth. In her novels she uses the characters, events, and emotions recorded in her early verse. Under the form of a sustained narration, with the addition of much in the way of romantic adventure, they make more entertaining reading, but offer no essentially new elements. The fifth novel, Clodius and Scipiana, is perhaps but an enlargement of a romance entitled Scipina, which had been published and concerning which she had received several congratulatory poems, before 1688.[215]
One persistent element in Miss Barker's verse and prose is autobiographic reference. Especially is this true of the poems, The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia and A Patch-Work Screen. From these sources various facts emerge concerning Miss Barker's life and personality.
She says that she was sent at first to the "Putney School," but that she was taken home at about ten by her mother who had come to consider such schools as "Academies of Vanity and Expense, no Way instructive in the Rudiments of a Country Gentlewoman's Life." At fifteen she was sent to London under the care of an aunt to learn "Town Politeness."[216] Her father lived near Cambridge,[217] and through her brother, a Cambridge man, she was well known in the younger literary set at the University. The praise accorded her verse was excessive. "Philaster" of St. John's hails her as the true heiress of the great Orinda. To "C. G." she is the Elijah for whose mantle meaner poets wait. "Exilius," also of St. John's, celebrates the miracles of her Almighty Pen. "S. C." wonders to see men "tug at Classic Oars" and "sweat over Horace" when along comes a lady who without effort utters "well-shapt Fancy and true Digested Thought." "Fidelius" rejoices to see "Physick and Anatomie done into purest Verse." And "J. N.," Fellow of St. John's, praises her Scipina as writ in lines,
More than Astrea's soft, more than Orinda's Chaste.
Another gentleman from St. John's said that she surpassed "the Scaroons and Scudderies of France" and showed that England could originate as well as translate.[218] Miss Barker was evidently in the stimulating and unusual position of being the temporary literary idol of an academic coterie.
There was a false lover in Miss Barker's early life who, as "Strephon" in verse[219] and as "Bosvil" in prose,[220] is copiously written up along with her own emotional experiences as "Galesia." The most interesting portion of the affair has to do with Galesia's original ways of reëstablishing her happiness. She found comfort in contemplating the wonderful works of Creation.[221] She wandered along shady paths, by little streams, and through the meadows. She loved the early morning, the evening dews, the starry night sky. There is no felicitous phrasing in the references to nature, but the fact remains that Galesia found in nature a satisfaction and sometimes an exaltation quite foreign to the heroines of her time.
Galesia's second resource is study. She says of this new occupation:
Finding myself abandon'd by Bosvil and thinking it impossible ever to love any Mortal more, resolv'd to espouse a Book, and spend my Days in Study ... I imagin'd my self the Orinda or Sapho of my Time. In order to this, I got my brother, who was not yet return'd to Oxford,[222] to set me in the way to learn my Grammar, which he really did, thinking it ... a Freak without Foundation to be overthrown by the first Difficulty I shou'd meet with in the Syntax, knowing it to be less easy to make Substantive and Adjective agree, than to place a Patch or Curl.[223]
Her indulgent brother, when he came back from his studies abroad, also taught her medicine. With him she went on long "simpling" excursions to gather flowers for the "large natural Herbal" they were making. With him she read "Bartholine, Walæus, Harvey, his Circulatio Sanguinis, and Lower's Motion of the Heart."[224] She learned to write prescriptions, or "bills" as she called them, in Latin, with the same "Cyphers and Directions as Doctors do," so that even the apothecaries were misled and filled her "bills" with those of the regular physicians.[225] She also ventured on something in the way of practice and gained some repute for curing cases of gout given up by the doctors.[226] She began to abandon the Muses for Paracelsus. Or if she wrote poems the processes of digestion and the circulation of the blood were her themes.[227] If the shackles of rhyme hindered scientific accuracy of statement, she squared herself with facts by abundant footnotes in which the proper Latin terminology was given full scope. Her interest in medicine was a vital one. She even thanks Strephon, through whose falsity she had been driven to study, and had so gained a joy beyond "the sottish ease" that waits on love. In her new love of learning she even took a vow of virginity:
In this happy life let me remain,
Fearless of twenty-five and all its train
Of slights or scorns, or being call'd Old Maid,
Those Goblings which so many have betray'd.[228]
Somewhat later Galesia gained a complete victory over her lovelorn self by a most original and sensible method. She took entire charge of her father's farm. She planned the work, hired the laborers, superintended in person the occupations of each day, paid the wages, and kept the accounts. The wholesome interests of each day and equally wholesome fatigue at night left no intervals in which to regret her lost lover.[229]
Galesia's recourse to hard study and responsible farm management as a cure for a wounded heart sets her as a heroine in a class by herself. She is so sensible and reasonable as to seem out of place in a romance. It is therefore something of a surprise to find her out-distancing the most sentimental in sighs and sobs and tears. Her utterance in recounting the baseness of Bosvil, "It is fitting that I should weep on all occasions," might serve as her permanent order of business. "My sighs alternately blew up my Tears and my Tears allay'd my Sighs" till "fresh Reflections rais'd new Gusts of Sorrow," describes her stormy woes. Sometimes she is able to restrain "the briny Ebullition," but usually "a new Flux of Tears" breaks down all barriers.
With the death of her brother the joy of Galesia's life went out. Books and medicine lost their charm. Without his inspiring presence all her occupations became insipid. Her view of learned women also changed. She says a learned woman is as ridiculous as a spinning Hercules; that books are as unfit for women as paint, washes, and patches are for a man; that a studious woman and an effeminate man may be classed together as out of their sphere. A learned woman is "like a Forc'd Plant that never has its due or proper Relish but is wither'd by the first Blast," or "like the Toad in the Fable, that affected to swell itself as big as the Ox," and burst in the enterprise.[230] This bitter view of learning comes only in the novels, and probably indicates some unhappy experiences on Miss Barker's part since the days when her muse was honored by the University wits.
Celia Fiennes (fl. 1691-1703)
Celia Fiennes was the daughter of Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes and the sister of the third Viscount Saye and Sele. The one book by which she is known is Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, Being the Diary of Celia Fiennes, first published in 1888 by the Honorable Mrs. Griffith, to whom the original manuscript was given by her father, the thirteenth Baron Saye and Sele. In her interesting "To the Reader" Miss Fiennes explains that these journeys were undertaken that she might regain her health by "variety and change of aire and exercise"; that she picked up such information as came in her way because her mind could not remain totally unoccupied; and that she wrote down her observations merely for the pleasure of her near relations, the manuscript not being designed for more public use. She then proceeds to justify her travels:
Now thus much without vanity may be asserted of the subject, that if all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to Inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would be a souveraign remedy to cure or preserve ffrom these Epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness?—it would also fform such an Idea of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds and cure the evil Itch of over-valueing fforeign parts; at least ffurnish them with an Equivalent to entertain strangers when amongst us, Or jnform them when abroad of their native Country, which has been often a Reproach to the English, ignorance and being strangers to themselves. Nay the Ladies might have matter not unworthy their observation, soe subject for conversation, within their own compass in each country to which they relate, and thence studdy now to be serviceable to their neighbours especially the poor among whome they dwell, which would spare them the uneasye thoughts how to pass away tedious dayes, and tyme would not be a burden when not at a card or dice table, and the ffashions and manners of fforeign parts less minded and desired.... But now I may be justly blamed to pretend to give acc: of our Constitution, Customs, Laws, Lect, matters farre above my Reach or capacity, but herein I have described what have come within my knowledge either by view and reading, or relation from others which according to my conception have faithfully Rehearsed, but where I have mistaken in any form or subject matter I easily submitt to a correction and will enter such Erratas in a supplement annext to ye Book of some particulars since remark'd; and shall conclude with a hearty wish and recommendation to all, but Especially my own Sex, the studdy of those things which tends to Improve the mind and makes our Lives pleasant and comfortable as well as proffitable in all the Stages and Stations of our Lives, and render suffering and age supportable and Death less fformidable and a future State more happy.[231]
Miss Fiennes's separate journeys are not dated, but we know that they began before 1691 because the earlier trips from her home at Newtontony in Wiltshire to Bath, to Oxfordshire, to "Salsebury," were taken with her mother, and her mother died in 1691. The description of the coronation of Queen Anne would indicate that the travels extended beyond 1703. "My Northern Journey in May 1697" was one of the most important of her travels. She thus records its close: "Thence to Highgate 6 miles, thence to London 4 miles where I returned and all our Company Blessed be God very well wthout any disaster or trouble in 7 weeks tyme about 635 miles that we went together."[232] Cambridge, Ely, Peterborough, Nottingham, Lincoln, Hull, and Scarborough, indicate their general route north. Encouraged by the success of this difficult trip, Miss Fiennes determined upon a still more hazardous enterprise. "My great Journey to Newcastle and to Cornwall"[233] records a remarkable achievement. She went north to Peterborough; then west to Chester; then north by way of Liverpool, Preston, Lancaster, Kendall, Lake Windermere, Ambleside, Ulswater, Penrith, Carlisle, and so over into the edge of Scotland; then east to Newcastle; then southwest by Durham, Manchester, Worcester, Exeter, Plymouth, Land's End; and finally home to Newtontony.
Arthur Young is famous for his English tours, but his travels are nearly three quarters of a century later than those of Miss Fiennes.[234] Gray's notable visit to the Lakes was in 1769. In 1756-1766 Amory, in his Life of John Buncle, described the Lake Region, and as early as 1760 Dr. Brown wrote a letter praising the Lakes. But Celia Fiennes's visit and description belong at the very beginning of the century and confer upon her the honors belonging to the pioneer. Her book has also a distinctive interest of its own. I cannot forbear to quote her account of her journey through the Westmoreland Hills:
Thence I Rode almost all the waye in sight of this great water [Windermere], some tymes I lost it by reason of ye great hills interposeing and so a Continu'd up hill and down hill and that pretty steep, even when I was in that they Called bottoms wch are very rich good ground, and so I gained by degrees from Lower to higher hills wch I alwayes went up and down before I came to another hill. At last I attained to the side of one of these hills or ffells of Rocks, wch I passed on the side much about the Middle, for Looking down to the bottom it was at Least a Mile all full of those Lesser hills and jnclosures, so Looking upward I was as farre from the Top which was all Rocks, and something more barren tho there was some trees and wood growing in ye Rocks and hanging over all down ye Brow of some of the hills. From these great ffells there are severall springs out of ye Rock that trickle down their sides, and as they meete with stones and Rocks in the way, when something obstructs their passage and so they Come with more violence, that gives a pleaseing sound and murmuring noise.... As I walked down at this place I was walled on both sides by those inaccessible high rocky barren hills wch hangs over ones head in some places and appears very terrible, and from them springs many Little Currents of water from the sides and Clefts, wch trickle down to some Lower part where it runs swiftly over the stones and shelves in the way, wch makes a pleasant Rush and murmuring noise.[235]
Wordsworth's "And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters," has here an interesting early statement. Of Ulswater, she says:
I rode the whole Length of this water by its side, sometyme a Little higher upon the side of the hill and sometyme just by the shore.... I observed the boundaries of all these great waters (which are a sort of deep Lakes or kind of standing waters) are these sort of Barren Rocky hill wch are so vastly high. I Call this a standing water because its not like other great Rivers as ye Trent, Severne, Hull or Thames, etc. to appear to Run wth a streame or Current but only as it Rowles from side to side Like waves as the wind moves it.[236]
As a rule scenery is but slightly touched upon. Miss Fiennes's interest was in roads, bridges, markets, dwellings and grounds, churches; in the quality and price of food, in dress, in pictures and furniture, in manners and customs; in pageantry, processions, and ceremonials. Her description of the customs at Bath, of the funeral of Queen Mary, of the Lord Mayor's Day in London, may be taken as illustrative of her method of writing. Her manuscript was printed verbatim, and that was, indeed, the only course to pursue. Any attempt to correct or methodize, or modernize it, would result almost in rewriting it. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a generation later, was a keen observer of affairs in Turkey, but Miss Fiennes surpasses her in fullness of detail. Nothing escapes her quick, accurate eye, her sharply retentive memory, and her unwearied pen. The facts crowd in upon each other with breathless haste. There is no such thing as grace or melody or beauty of style. There is hardly anything so tranquilizing as order and clearness. There is no time for any personal reactions on the things seen. There is only here and there a reflection, there are only the scantiest notes on people. But there is an astounding assemblage of external facts, undiscriminating, uninterpreted, unenlivened by a spark of emotion or imagination, but, in their total effect, genuinely impressive. What energy, what courage, what endurance, it required for a woman to make these unusual and very difficult journeys! And yet at first reading the dry, rapid, confused narrative is as uninspiring as a guidebook. It is only gradually that we become conscious of the burning enthusiasm that kept Miss Fiennes at her self-imposed task. She had the zeal of a devotee with the intellectual method of a chronicler or maker of inventories. But whatever may be the counts against her style, there can be no deductions from the high estimate of her book as a contribution to social history. And still more must it stand to her credit that not only no other woman, but no man of her day knew so much about England as did this earliest of the women travelers.
Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756)
A lady who can in the strictest interpretation of the word be called learned is Elizabeth Elstob. For this reason and because she is very little known, I shall give as full an account as I have been able to obtain. In Ballard's Collection of Original Letters, in the Bodleian Library are several to him from Miss Elstob, and among them is the following brief memoir of her life, in her own handwriting, enclosed in a letter dated November 23, 1738:
Elizabeth Elstob, Daughter of Ralph and Jane Elstob,[237] was born in the Parish of St. Nicholas, in New Castle upon Tyne, September the twenty ninth, sixteen hundred and eighty-three. From her childhood she was a great lover of books, which being observed by her mother, who was also a great admirer of learning, especially in her own sex, there was nothing wanting for her improvement, so long as her mother lived. But being so unfortunate as to lose her when she was about eight years old, and when she had but just gone thro' her accidence and grammar, there was a stop put to her progress in learning for some years. For her brother being under age when her mother died, she was under the guardianship of a relation, who was no friend to women's learning, so that she was not suffered to proceed, notwithstanding her repeated requests that she might, being always put off with that common and vulgar saying that one tongue is enough for a woman. However, this discouragement did not prevent her earnest endeavours to improve her mind, in the best manner she was able, not only because she had a natural inclination to books herself, but in obedience to her excellent mother's desire. She therefore employed most of her time in reading such English and French books (which last language she with much difficulty obtained leave to learn) as she could meet with till she went to live with her brother, who very joyfully and readily assisted and encouraged her, in her studies, with whom she laboured very hard as long as she lived. In that time she translated and published an Essay on Glory, written in French by the celebrated Mademoiselle de Scudery, and published an English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory, with an English translation and Notes, etc. Also the Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue. She designed, if ill fortune had not prevented her, to have published all Ælfrick's Homilies, of which she made an entire transcript, with the various readings from other manuscripts, and had translated several of them into English. She likewise took an exact copy of the Textus Roffensis upon vellum, now in the library of that great and generous encourager of learning, the Right Honourable the Earl of Oxford. And transcribed all the Hymns, from an ancient Manuscript belonging to the Church of Sarum. She had several other designs, but was unhappily hindered, by a necessity of getting her bread, which with much difficulty, labour, and ill health, she has endeavoured to do for many years, with very indifferent success. If it had not been that Almighty God was graciously pleased to raise her up lately some generous and good friends, she could not have subsisted, to whom she always was, and will, by the grace of God, be most faithful.[238]
ELIZABETH ELSTOB
From a drawing by herself engraved in an initial for her translation of The Pastoral of St. Gregory, 1709, and used also in her Grammar in 1713
The brother of whom Miss Elstob speaks was William Elstob, who was ten years older than she. At eleven he was sent to Eton. At sixteen he went to Cambridge, and later to Oxford, where he was finally, in 1696, elected fellow of University College. In 1702 he became rector of the united parishes of St. Swithin and St. Mary Bothaw, in London, where he died in 1715 at the age of forty-two. He was a highly trained linguist, a great lover of antiquities, and one of the most promising Anglo-Saxon scholars of his time. He apparently had liberal sentiments concerning the education of women, so that as soon as his sister came under his care all her desires for study were gratified. Just when she went to Oxford is not certain, but it was probably about the time he took his fellowship, when she was thirteen. She gives the date of her entrance upon her Anglo-Saxon studies as 1698, when she was fifteen. In that year her brother had made a transcript of King Alfred's version of the Latin historian Orosius which he designed to publish. She wished to understand it and says, "Having gained the Alphabet, I found it so easy, and in it so much the grounds of our present Language, and of a more particular Agreement with some Words which I had heard when very young in the North, as drew me to be more inquisitive after Books written in that Language." Her brother was well pleased and recommended the Saxon Heptatuch. From this she went on to other treatises, and finally began to divert herself with taking transcripts of such ancient manuscripts as she could find.[239] She proved to be particularly facile with her pen. The copies she made of the old manuscripts were said to be marvels in the way of beauty and accuracy of lettering. Her copy of the Textus Roffensis is described by Nichols as "one of the most lovely specimens of modern Saxon writing that can be imagined." She was well received in the University, for Mr. Rowe Mores speaks of her as "the indefessa comes of her brother's studies, a female student in the University and a favourite of Dr. Hudson and the Oxonians."[240] In 1702 she went with her brother to London and they kept on in their work together with great eagerness and satisfaction. There gradually grew up in Miss Elstob's mind a desire to translate and publish some Anglo-Saxon manuscript. She was encouraged in this not only by her brother, but by Dr. Hickes, "the great patron of the Septentrional Studies," who said that by publishing somewhat in Saxon she might invite "the ladies to be acquainted with the Language of their Predecessors, and the Original of their Mother Tongue." The text finally determined upon was the Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory. Dr. Hudson, "a man of so generous a mind as not to discourage learning, even in the female sex," gave her access to the ancient parchment Book of Homilies in the Bodleian. The book on St. Gregory appeared in 1709 under the title, An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St. Gregory: Anciently used in the English-Saxon Church. Giving an Account of the Conversion of the English from Paganism to Christianity. Translated into Modern English, with Notes. It was a stately and dignified volume with a full-page engraving by Gribelin, and many engraved letters and head and tail pieces. In the capital "G" of Gregory was a portrait of Miss Elstob done by herself.[241] The Dedication to Queen Anne apologizes for using a language so "out-dated and antiquated," a language which "few Men and none of the other Sex have ventured to converse with" since the time when it was the current speech. But she adroitly pays the necessary compliment and at the same time recommends her theme, by pointing out that Anglo-Saxon was the language in which the Pious Progenitors of Queen Anne had received the Orthodox Faith of which the Queen was the undoubted Defender. The Preface, sixty pages long, is a learned account of the introduction of Christianity into England. In the text the Saxon and English are in parallel columns, and there is a brave apparatus of notes and comments. Following the English-Saxon Homily is a Latin version by William Elstob which he presents to his sister with the following Latin letter:
Gulielmus Elistobius
ELIZABETHÆ
Sorori suæ carissimæ
S. D.
Dum tu, soror mea dilectissima, Homiliæ Saxonicæ, de gentis nostræ Conversione paras versionem Anglicam fæminis liberalibus: nonnulli forte ex amicis nostris, tum Academicis tum aliis, Latinam postulant hominibus eruditis. Id te velle accomodare venis ad me dicens, bene autem posse negâsti. Verecundius sane id quam verius. Sed favendum omnino verecundiæ, præsertim muliebri: maximè autem tuæ, cum in te virtus illa sit notissima. Quare, quod poscis, dulcis & indefessa studiorum meorum comes, do tibi Latinè. Non Ciceronianè, ut tu velis, id est ornatè, at non ineptè tamen: iisdem ferè verbis repositis quæ in Saxonica olim tansfusa, vel ex Turonensi Gregorio, vel tuo, vel ex Beda nostrate, vel utroque Diacono, & Johanne & Paulo. Eadem plane ratione, qua jam pridem Orosium à nobis elucubratum scis, & qua Gregorii tui Curam Pastoralem, Deo favente, & adjutrice te, Eruditis perlibenter darem. Vale.
Kal. Jun. MDCCIX.
The book was published by subscription and the list of subscribers is an interesting one. We, of course, find the Anglo-Saxon scholars, such as Mr. Thwaites[242] and Dr. Hickes, various Oxonians, the Elstobs of Canterbury and Durham, and others who were in the same religious or learned circles. Various letters to Ralph Thoresby[243] show his interest. In March, 1708-09, she sent him the frontispiece to the Homily saying there would be other ornaments in the way of borders and letters "which will make the book somewhat dear, but I would willingly have it as beautiful as possible." In May, 1709, she thanks him for procuring "so noble a number of encouragers" to her work. Nearly half of the two hundred and sixty subscribers are women. Lady Elizabeth Hastings and Lady Catharine Jones, Mary Astell's friends, are there; and Lady Winchilsea's friends, the Thynnes, the Worseleys, and the Thanets, but not Mary Astell or Lady Winchilsea. The literary set—Pope, Swift, Gay, Addison, Steele—is not represented. Women of title, clergymen, and scholars make up the list.[244]
The Preface is of personal as well as learned interest. Miss Elstob did not enter upon the career of authorship without an uneasy recognition of the opprobrium she might bring upon herself by aspirations so unfeminine. She was, in her own mind, fortified by the elegant Latin treatise in which "Mrs. Anna Maria à Schurman, that Glory of her Sex," had answered, with due scholastic form and dignity, the usual objections made by Gentlemen to Women's Learning, but in deference to the readers of her Homily she felt the necessity of a few words of self justification:
For first, I know it will be said, What has a Woman to do with Learning? This I have known urged by some Men, with an Envy unbecoming that greatness of Soul, which is said to dignify their Sex.... Where is the Fault in Womens seeking after Learning? why are they not to be valu'd for acquiring to themselves the noblest Ornaments? what hurt can this be to themselves? what Disadvantage to others? But there are two things usually opposed against Womens Learning. That it makes them impertinent, and neglect their household Affairs. Where this happens it is a Fault. But it is not the Fault of Learning, which rather polishes and refines our Nature, and teaches us that Method and Regularity, which disposes us to greater Readiness and Dexterity in all kinds of Business. I do not observe it so frequently objected against Womens Diversions, that They take them off from Household Affairs. Why therefore should those few among us, who are Lovers of Learning, altho' no better account cou'd be given of it than its being a Diversion, be deny'd the Benefit and Pleasure of it, which is both so innocent and improving.... I shall not enter into any more of the Reasons why some Gentlemen are so eager to deny us this privilege: I am more surprised, and even ashamed, to find any of the Ladies were more violent than they, in carrying on the same charge. Who despairing to arrive at any eminent or laudable degree of knowledge, seem totally to abandon themselves to Ignorance, contenting themselves to sit down in Darkness, as if they either had not Reason, or it were not capable by being rightly cultivated, of bringing them into the Light.... Admit a Woman may have Learning, is there no other kind of Learning to employ her time? What is this Saxon? What has she to do with this barbarous antiquated Stuff? so useless, so altogether out of the way?... I fear, if things were rightly consider'd, that the charge of Barbarity would rather fall upon those who, while they fancy themselves adorn'd with the Embellishments of foreign Learning, are ignorant, even to barbarity, of the Faith, Religion, the Laws and Customs, and Language of their Ancestors.[245]
It was inevitable that the learning in Miss Elstob's work should be thought of by many as in reality the work of her brother. On this point, towards the close of the Preface, she comments rather ambiguously as follows:
I have been askt the Question, more than once, whether this Performance was all my own? How properly such a Question may be ask'd by those who know with whom I live, I shall not dispute: But since some there are who may have a Curiosity to know the same thing, who yet suspect the Decency of such a Question: that they may be under no Uneasiness on this account, they may be pleas'd to understand that I have a kind Brother, who is always ready to assist and encourage me in my Studies. I might say much of my Obligations on this account: wou'd he permit me to express my self at large on that Subject. But as I think it no shame to me to take any Advice where it may be so easily obtain'd: so I should think it unpardonable to be guilty of such a Silence, as might make me seem averse to all Acknowledgement.
After the publication of the Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory Miss Elstob made a visit to Canterbury where her uncle was prebendary. The number of Canterbury names in her list of subscribers shows that her fame for learning had preceded her. She was very favorably received, especially by some ladies of rank, one of whom expressed a desire to study Anglo-Saxon under her direction. In pursuance of this project Miss Elstob began at once on the preparation of an Anglo-Saxon Grammar.[246] In 1715, when the Grammar finally appeared, Miss Elstob wrote thus in a Preface addressed to Dr. Hickes:
I was more particularly gratified with the new Friendship and Conversation, of a young Lady, whose Ingenuity and Love of Learning is well known and esteem'd, not only in that Place, but by yourself: and which so far indear'd itself to me, by her promise that she wou'd learn the Saxon Tongue, and do me the Honour to be my Scholar, as to make me think of composing an English Grammar of that Language for her use. That Ladies Fortune hath so disposed of her since that time, and hath placed her at so great distance, as that we have had no Opportunity, of treating farther on this Matter, either by Discourse or Correspondence. However, though a Work of a larger Extent, and which hath amply experienced your Encouragement, did for some time make me lay aside this Design, yet I did not wholly reject it.... But considering the Pleasure I my self had reaped from the Knowledge I have gained from this Original of our Mother Tongue, and that others of my own Sex might be capable of the same Satisfaction: I resolv'd to give them the Rudiments of that Language in an English Dress.
The long Preface to the Grammar is chiefly taken up with an attack on John Brightland, author of the Whole System of English Education, and other wise grammarians who had spoken lightly of Anglo-Saxon and especially of the Thesaurus of Dr. Hickes. One of the aspersions cast by the gentlemen on their mother tongue was that the Northern Languages "consist of nothing but Monosyllables," and Miss Elstob plunges into a lengthy defense of monosyllables with so many quotations from English verse as to show that being "mistress of eight foreign languages" did not prevent her from being exceedingly well read in the poetical literature of her own tongue. This portion of the Preface is followed by a diatribe against those who consider the study of antiquities and of the Saxon tongue as belonging to a lower order of mind, and not contributing to a "just stile" as do the classics.[247] This topic, also, is illustrated by literary characterizations so numerous and apt as to show wide and discriminating reading in English prose.[248]
Miss Elstob was a redoubtable champion in the cause of Anglo-Saxon learning. At the beginning of her career, in 1709, just as her Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory was coming from the press, Swift had spoken of her as one of the Professors in the College of Madonella, ascribing to her the publication of "two of the choicest Saxon novels, which are said to have been in as much repute at Queen Emma's Court, as the 'Memoires from the New Atalantis' are with those of ours."[249] This disparaging allusion may have predisposed Miss Elstob to answer Swift with exceptional energy when he ranged himself with the scorners of Anglo-Saxon learning. In 1737 Mr. Ballard, in expressing surprise at the appearance of some new opponent of Saxon, wrote: "Indeed I thought that the bad success Dean Swift had met with in this affair from the incomparably learned and ingenious Mrs. Elstob, would have deterred all others from once opening their mouths on this head."[250]
The Homily and the Grammar gave Miss Elstob, at thirty-two, a distinguished place in the world of scholarship. She had also shown unusual skill with her pencil. Not only were her transcripts of manuscripts noted for their beauty, but she also drew admirable portraits. In 1737 Mr. Ballard wrote Mr. Joseph Ames:
I design, if possible, to make a tour to London this Winter, just to peep upon a few choice friends, and will bring Miss Elstob's Life of her Brother along with me, to pleasure you with. But you must be silent in the affair, for some particular reasons not proper here to be mentioned. Besides the above mentioned Life, I have a dozen pieces of this fine accomplished gentlewoman's drawings, amongst which are pictures of herself, Dr. Hickes, Mr. Dryden, and Johannes Ogilvius, etc. very masterly done, and, as I am told, very extraordinary true likenesses.[251]
We get no further completed work from Miss Elstob after the Grammar of 1715, but the six years between the Homily and the Grammar were rich in study and plans. In February, 1708-09, Mr. Thoresby wrote to Dr. Richardson:
Amongst the Authors, I might have mentioned some of the female sex; as the Bishop of Sarum's lady, and Miss Elstob; the former has writ a Method of Devotion, the latter translated a piece of Mons. Scudery from the French, and added some of her own: and is for giving us a more correct Edition of Sir John Spelman's Saxon Psalms, in which tongue she is a great proficient, and has writ that in my Album, etc.[252]
The "work of larger extent" for which Miss Elstob temporarily set aside her Grammar was the proposed publication of a Saxon Homilarium with English translations and notes. That this Homilarium, which was to have been her great work, was well under way by 1712 is indicated by the following letter, December 23, 1712, from Dr. Hickes to Dr. Charlett:
I suppose you may have seen Miss Elstob, sister to Mr. Elstob, formerly fellow of your Coll. and the MSS. she hath brought to be printed at your press. The University hath acquired much reputation and honour at home and abroad, by the Saxon books printed there, as well as by those printed in Latin and Greek, and the publication of the MSS. she hath brought (the most correct I ever saw or read) will be of great advantage to the Church of England against the Papists; for the honour of our Predecessors the English Saxon Clergy, especially of the Episcopal Order, and the credit of our country to which Miss Elstob will be counted abroad as great an ornament in her way, as Madam Dacier is to France. I do not desire you to give her all encouragement, because I believe you will do it of your own accord from your natural temper to promote good and great works. But I desire you to recommend her, and her great undertaking to others, for she and it are both very worthy to be encouraged, and were I at Oxford, I should be a great solicitor for her. And had I acquaintance enough with Mr. Vice-Chancellor I had troubled him with a letter in her behalf. I will add no more but to tell you that the news of Miss Elstob's encouragement at the University will be very acceptable to me, because it will give her work credit here, where it shall be promoted to the utmost power by your Philo-Sax. and Philo-Goth. and most faithful, humble Servt.[253]
In February, 1713, Bedford wrote to Mr. Hearne: "I am to desire yo from him to give all ye assistance & encouragement yo can to Mrs. Elstob's work, who is now going down to ye University again abt it."[254] Mr. Hearne responded in March: "I wish Mrs. Elstob good success. Tho' if she meet with no better Encouragement here than I have done as yet 't will not be great."[255]
In the same year Mr. Bowyer printed "Some Testimonies of Learned Men in favour of the intended edition of the Saxon Homilies, concerning the learning of the author of those Homilies, and the advantages to be hoped from an edition of them."[256] And three letters from Miss Elstob to the Lord Treasurer show that he solicited and obtained the Queen's Bounty towards printing the Homilies.[257]
In spite of all this encouragement the publication of the Homilies hung fire for many months. It is possible that the death of Mr. Elstob and of Dr. Hickes in 1715 delayed matters by depriving Miss Elstob of able advocates and counselors. In July, 1716, Sir P. Sydenham indicates his concern that the book had not yet appeared.[258] In November of that year Mr. T. Baker writes apologetically to Mr. Hearne that he is "deep in Mrs. Elstob and Mr. Strype," and that the work does not admit of haste.[259] Later in the same month Mr. Hearne gives the cheering news that "Mrs. Elstob's book is going on at last."[260] But only five of the Homilies were actually printed off at Oxford.[261] The great scheme failed for want of money. Miss Elstob's own fortune was apparently involved, for in 1718 Mr. T. Baker wrote to Hearne that Miss Elstob was "lately gone off for debt."[262]
Except these few facts concerning the Homilies very few details are known concerning Miss Elstob's life after 1715. Bishop Smalridge[263] aided her for a time, but she could not endure the thought of being a burden on her friends, and she finally went to Evesham, Worcestershire, where she started a little school. Mr. Tindale, in his History of Evesham, says that he was credibly informed that her weekly stipend in this school was at first but a groat a week. She was in this very contracted and difficult way of life for nearly twenty years. When relief came it was as the result of the efforts of an obscure young Anglo-Saxon scholar, Mr. George Ballard, a lady's-stay-maker, who became acquainted with Miss Elstob and described her situation so effectively to one of his customers, a Mrs. Chapone, that this lady wrote a circular letter representing Miss Elstob's extensive learning, her service to literature, her multiplied distresses, her meekness and patience, and sent it to the neighboring gentry. An annuity of twenty guineas was raised, and Miss Elstob was enabled to keep an assistant so that she could again "taste of that food of the mind from which she had been so long oblig'd to fast."
Another result of Mrs. Chapone's letter was a possible appointment for Miss Elstob as mistress of a charity school kept up by Lady Elizabeth Hastings. With regard to this plan Miss Elstob wrote the following very interesting letter to Mr. George Ballard:
Since you desire to know if I have accepted Mrs. Capon's proposal, I do, though I am very sensible it is not commendable to expose a private correspondence, venture to communicate to so good a friend, a copy of the worthy gentleman's letter, sent her in answer to her vastly kind recommendation of me, and the charming letter she sent to me. In answer to hers, after I had received your answer, I assured her of my readiness to serve that excellent lady, as far as lyes in my power. But there are some things to be taught in such a school, which I cannot pretend to: I mean, the two accomplishments of a good housewife, spinning and knitting. Not that I would be thought to be above doing any commendable work proper for my sex; for I have continually in my thoughts the glorious character of a virtuous woman, Proverbs XXXI, 13; "She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands." And as an instance of the truth of this, the gown I had on when you gave me the favour of a visit was part of it my own spinning, and I wear no other stockings but what I knit myself: yet I do not think myself proficient enough in these arts to become a teacher of them. As to your objection on the meanness of the scholars, I assure you, Sir, I should think it as glorious an employment to instruct those poor children, as to teach the children of the greatest. But I must tell you that mine may be termed a life of disappointments from my cradle till now, nor do I expect any other while I live. This, and hearing no more of that affair, makes me think her ladyship is provided with a mistress before now, there being many more deserving than myself, that are in want of such an employment. Nor do I repine; for I am so inured to disappointments, that I expect nothing else, and I receive them with as much easiness as others do their greatest prosperity.... I often compare myself to poor John Tucker, whose Life I read when a girl in Winstanley's Lives of the Poets, which affected me so much that I cannot forget it yet. He is there described to have been an honest, industrious, poor man, but, notwithstanding his indefatigable industry, as the author writes, "no butter would stick on his bread."[264]
The Mrs. Chapone who wrote the circular letter concerning Miss Elstob was Sarah Kirkham, an intimate girlhood friend of Mary Granville, afterward Mrs. Pendarves, but better known as Mrs. Delany. Sally Kirkham is described by Mrs. Delany as a girl of "extraordinary understanding, lively imagination, and humane disposition," of "uncommon genius and intrepid spirit." In 1725, at the age of twenty-four she married the Reverend John Chapone, and they went to live in Stanton, Gloucestershire, and little more is heard of her until the writing of this letter before 1734. Mrs. Chapone meant the letter for the neighboring gentry, but it finally reached a more distinguished audience. Mrs. Pendarves writes:
I told you in my last I had left Sally's letter with Mrs. Pointz. She gave it to her husband, who desired the Duke to read it to the Queen. The Queen was so touched with the letter that she immediately sent for Mrs. Pointz, to inquire into some more particulars about the person mentioned in it, and the person who wrote it. Mrs. Pointz said she knew no more than what the letter told, but that Mrs. Chapone was a friend of ours. The Queen said she never in her life read a better letter, that it had touched her heart, and ordered immediately an hundred pounds for Mrs. Elstob, and said she "need never fear a necessitous old age whilst she lived, and that when she wanted more to ask for it, and she should have it." I think this was acting like a queen, and ought to be known.... I hope this may be the means of serving our friend Sally, the letter was the whole discourse of the drawing-room. The Queen asked the Duke "When he should be able to write such a letter." He answered, honestly, "Never." Mrs. Pointz has asked many particulars about Mr. Chapone, and I did him justice.[265]
Queen Caroline's interest was so genuinely aroused that she not only ordered the £100 to be at once sent to Miss Elstob, but promised to repeat the same every five years. This was evidently with the idea that she should be taken from the little school at Evesham and put into her proper station as "mistress of a boarding-school for young ladies of a higher rank." Such might have been the outcome had not the money lapsed with the death of the Queen in 1737.
All plans for Miss Elstob seemed to end in failure till "Sally's historical epistle," as Mrs. Pendarves called it, was sent to the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode.[266] The result in this case was of permanent value, for Miss Elstob was invited by the Duchess to make her home at Bulstrode as instructor of the children. Of this appointment Mrs. Pendarves wrote, December 12, 1738, to her mother:
The Duchess has now a thousand fears, lest my Lord and Lady Oxford should have any objections against taking her, but I hope they will all prove false.... Mrs. Elstob seems, out of modesty and diffidence of herself, to decline coming, but it would be most imprudent of her to decline such an offer, when no fatigue will be imposed upon her, but all imaginable care will be taken of her. I own I long to have you see her, that I may really know what sort of woman she is. My Lord Oxford objects to her not speaking French, but the Duchess answers she shall have a master for that, or a maid to talk, and all she requires and hopes of Mrs. Elstob is to instruct her children in the principles of religion and virtue, to teach them to speak, read, and understand English well, to cultivate their minds as far as their capacity will allow, and to keep them company in the house and when her health and strength will permit to take the air with them. All this she is surely well qualified to do, and it would be a sincere joy to me to have our worthy Duchess possest of so valuable a person.[267]
Ten days later Mrs. Pendarves wrote again from Bulstrode:
The Elstobian matter is quite fixed, and she expressed the utmost satisfaction at having secured such a worthy woman to educate her children; I wrote last post to Mrs. Elstob to tell her that the Duchess looked on her as engaged to her, and that her salary should begin on Xmas Day next, though she could not conveniently take her into her family till Midsummer. I hope she will write to the Duchess, and suppose she will of course; I gave her a little hint but would not have it mentioned that I did.... I think your advice to Mrs. Elstob quite right about paying debts; a person of such principles as hers cannot enjoy any advantages without doing that justice when it is in her power to do it.[268]
In August, 1739, Miss Elstob was in Evesham and several times met her benefactor, Mrs. Chapone, of whom she gives a lively picture showing that letter-writing was not Mrs. Chapone's only title to fame. Miss Elstob writes:
The last time she was here, I had an exceeding pleasure, though not without some concern, at hearing a long and warm dispute between that charming woman, and Mr. Ben Seward, on some methodistical notions, in which it was by better judges than myself agreed that the female antagonist had much the advantage over him.[269]
Miss Elstob spent the remaining seventeen years of her life with the Duchess of Portland. They were comfortable, leisurely, studious years, a delightful haven after her twenty years of hardship, penury, and intellectual starvation. But she was fifty-six when she went to Bulstrode, and the ease and security of her life there came too late to rouse into life the mental activity so long dormant. Miss Elstob's real life was the twenty years with her brother, years of plain living and high aspirations while they worked together in the realms of pure scholarship. It would be difficult to find a more satisfying example of literary comradeship than that offered by the learned young curate and the learned young sister, the "dulcis & indefessa comes" of his studies.[270]
Elizabeth Blackwell (fl. 1739)
In 1739 Mrs. Elizabeth Blackwell published in two folio volumes A Curious Herbal, containing Five Hundred Cuts, of the most useful Plants, which are now used in the Practice of Physick, engraved on folio Copper Plates, after Drawings taken from the Life, by Elizabeth Blackwell. To which is added, a short Description of the Plants and their common Uses in Physick. Printed for John Nourse at the Lamb without Temple Bar. The first of these magnificent volumes is dedicated to the famous Dr. Richard Mead, "Physician to Kings," as the one who first advised the publication of the work. The dedication of the second volume is to Isaac Rand, an apothecary and Fellow of the Royal Society, and Curator of the Botanical Garden at Chelsea, as the one to whom she went for assistance in all difficult botanical questions. The short descriptions of the plants were taken mainly from Mr. Joseph Miller's Botanicum Officinale with his consent. She lived near the Botanical Garden and made all her drawings from life. She also etched them on copper, and colored them herself. The book received high recognition. Much of the work must have been done by 1735, for on October 1 of that year the following testimonial, now one of the title-pages, was written:
We whose names are underwritten, having seen a considerable Number of the Drawings from which the Plates are to be engraved, and likewise some of the Coloured Plants, think it a Justice done the Publick to declare our Satisfaction with them, and our good Opinion of the Capacity of the Undertaker.
R. Mead, M.D.
G. L. Tessier, M.D.
Alexander Stuart, M.D.
Ia. Douglas, M.D.
James Sherard, M.D.
W. Cheseldon
Joseph Miller
Isaac Rand
Rob. Nicholls
This statement was repeated in French and the names again signed.
A further endorsement on the completion of the book was dated July 1, 1737. It is as follows:
Imagines hasce Plantarum Officinalium per Dominam Elizabetham Blackwell delineatas ceri incisas & depictas, iis qui Medicinæ Operam dant, perutiles fore judicamus.
| Thomas Pellet, Præs. | |||
| Henricus Plumptre | } | Censores. | |
| Richardus Tyson | } | ||
| Peircuis Dod | } | ||
| Gulienius Wasey | } | ||
In 1757-73 there was a fine republication of the work in Nuremberg with an addition of a hundred plants, and a highly laudatory Preface. The work was recognized at once as of great practical value because of the accuracy of the drawings and the large number of plants represented. The charm of the plates is beyond question so far as delicacy of outline and beauty of coloring are concerned. They are superior to the plates in Darwin's Botanic Garden, nearly half a century later. The Blackwellia race of plants was named after Mrs. Blackwell in recognition of her admirable work.[271]
Mrs. Blackwell is herself an enigma. She emerges into public notice for three years, but her life before and after sinks into obscurity. She was said to be "a virtuous gentlewoman, daughter of a worthy merchant," who gave her a handsome portion. Her husband was Alexander Blackwell, a printer. He was a well-educated and able man, but generally counted an adventurer. He at one time entered upon a project of conducting a printing establishment of his own. His failure in this landed him in a debtor's prison where he was confined several years. Mrs. Blackwell's Herbal was made by her for the purpose of securing his release. He is said to have aided her in the foreign terminology and in the abridgments from Miller. When he was free her object was accomplished and we hear of no further work. It would be interesting to know how she came to have so much skill. It would be more interesting to know the psychology of her prompt abandonment of work by which she won both fame and money, and in which she took such evident delight.[272]
Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper (fl. 1735-40)
It is to be regretted that so few facts are accessible concerning Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper. Her works seem to offer interesting points of departure for investigation into her life and education, but we know little about her except that her literary ventures belong between 1735 and 1740. She was the wife of Thomas Cooper,[273] who was either an auctioneer or a book-seller, or possibly both, and she was married before 1735. Beyond these meager facts our knowledge of her must be gleaned from her books. Apparently her first literary venture was a comedy. It was entitled The Rival Widows; or, the Fair Libertine, and was brought out at the Covent Garden Theater in 1735. It had a successful run of nine nights. Baker says that "allowing for the too common freedom of female dramatists, this is far from a bad comedy."[274] Genest, after briefly outlining the play and commenting on various passages that seem to him borrowed from preceding dramatists, says: "It is on the whole a tolerable play, but it wants incident sadly." But he does not agree with Baker as to the moral tone of the play, for he says of Lady Bellair, the heroine, "Lady Bellair is gay and extravagant, but of good principles at bottom ... it is with much impropriety that she is called a Fair Libertine—she is only above vulgar prejudices."[275] In her preface to the play Mrs. Cooper says that it was designed "an Offering to the Sex" in that the chief character is a woman "capable of thinking for herself, and acting on the principles of Nature and Truth." Some indications of the characteristics of Lady Bellair may be found in the fact that Mrs. Horton was chosen to create the part. Millamant in Congreve's Way of the World, Lady Dainty in Burnaby's The Reform'd Wife, Lady Betty Modish in Cibber's Careless Husband, and Lady Townly in his Provoked Husband, were the parts in which Mrs. Horton's beauty and her elegance of dress and manner found their fitting opportunity. Lady Bellair belongs evidently to this class of fine lady coquettes, and a further point of interest concerning Mrs. Cooper is that on her benefit night she herself played the part of Lady Bellair. Either Mrs. Cooper had already shown enough ability as an amateur actress to warrant her appearance on the stage of one of the leading theaters, or she was well enough known as a writer or as a personality to make her presence in the cast a drawing card. That she could venture on the inevitable comparison with Mrs. Horton may indicate some possibilities in the way of her own attractive qualities. And it is to be further noted that she "unexpectedly and surprizingly" eclipsed Mrs. Horton. The Prompter endeavors to explain Mrs. Cooper's success by saying that she "looked" the character and represented with great "naturalnes," the somewhat bold and libertine heroine.[276]
Mrs. Cooper's second dramatic attempt was a tragedy which was not successful. It was acted but one night and was never printed.
This theatrical work was, however, only on the fringe of Mrs. Cooper's real interest. In 1737 she published a book entitled The Muses Library; Or, a Series of English Poetry, from the Saxons, to the Reign of King Charles II containing, The Lives and Characters of all the known Writers in that Interval, the names of their Patrons; Complete Episodes, by way of Specimen of the larger Pieces, very near the intire works of some, and large Quotations from others. Being a General Collection of almost all the old valuable Poetry extant, now so industriously enquir'd after, tho' rarely to be found, but in the Studies of the Curious, and affording Entertainment on all Subjects, Philosophical, Historical, Moral, Satyrical, Allegorical, Critical, Heroick, Pastoral, Gallant, Amorous, Courtly and Sublime. But one volume of this projected work was published. The early Georgian public was not trained to an interest in the past. Mrs. Cooper suffered the not infrequent fate of pioneers. There was even difficulty in working off one edition of the first volume, as is evident from its appearance in 1738 and 1741 with changed title-pages.[277] That Mrs. Cooper expected to publish the second volume, including the poets from Samuel Daniel to the time of Charles II, is shown not only by the statement in her Preface, but by interesting notes in the Diary of William Oldys (1696-1761), the famous antiquary. In 1736 he was in London employed in seeing through the press a new edition of Raleigh's History of the World. His Chambers were in Gray's Inn and he was frequently consulted there "on obscure and obsolete writers by eminent men of letters." Two of the people in whom he was particularly interested were Thomas Hayward, who was compiling his British Muse, and Mrs. Cooper. In his Diary are the following records:
1737, June 22. Mrs. Cooper came to my chambers: said she would return Puttenham's Art of Poesy, Browne's Pastorals, and Sir Henry Wotton, when she had finished her extracts for the second volume of her Muses' Library to be published by Christmas.
July 4, Monday. Returned Sir T. More's works: some of his English poetry therein might be for Mrs. Cooper's work, or Mr. Haywards, on Fortune, etc.
Aug. 13. Rec'd letter from Mrs. Cooper to borrow old Marlowe's poem of Hero and Leander for the continuation of her Muses' Library; sent by the servant a very scarce collection of old poetry, called The Paradise of Dainty Devices, in which are several pieces by the old Lord Vaux in King Henry the Eighth's time, the Earl of Oxford, Sir W. Raleigh, Mr. Edwards, Jasper Haywood, Hunis, Churchyard, Kinwelmarsh, Lloyd, Whetstone, etc., printed 4o. 1578. To borrow one of Caxton's books of Sir Hans Sloane and remember to apply the story of Absyrtus in the preface for Mr. Hayward's Collection of select thoughts from our old poets.[278]
Mrs. Cooper frequently comments on the difficulty and expense of gathering material for her enterprise and gratefully acknowledges "the generous Assistance of the Candid Mr. Oldys." Biographical data were also obtained only through most patient effort. The only Lives of the Poets to which she could have access were Wood's Athenæ Oxoniensis and the works of Phillips, Winstanley, and Jacob. Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum appeared in 1675. Its first volume gave brief biographical and critical notes on sixty-four authors from Robert of Gloucester to George Chapman, thus covering about the same ground as Mrs. Cooper's first volume which closes with Samuel Daniel. William Winstanley's Lives of the English Poets was published in 1687. It includes notes on poets from William the Conqueror to James II with occasional brief illustrative extracts. The Poetical Register of Giles Jacob (1724) is, in the first volume, confined to dramatists and is based on Langbain. The second volume, The Lives and Characters of the English Poets, extends about a century and a quarter later than Mrs. Cooper's volume. In the period before 1600 about half the names in her volume are included and briefly commented on. Jacob also gives an occasional extract.
Mrs. Cooper was not, then, without predecessors in her undertaking. The novelty in her book was her assumption that people would not only like to know about the old poets, but that there would be many lovers of literature who would rejoice in reading the old poems, and very nearly in their original antiquated form. She gives ten pages from Langland, eleven from Barclay, twenty-eight from Sackville, twenty-four from Churchyard, thirty-five from Fulke Greville, thirty-one from Fairfax, and so on. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare are less fully represented, as being already well known. The selections are the result of wide reading and are made because they pleased Mrs. Cooper's own taste. "What has given me Pleasure in my Closet," she says, "I have undertaken to recommend to the Publick; not presuming to inform the Judgment, but only awaken the Attention." That she failed to "awaken Attention" was the fault of the age. Her selections were representative and interesting.
Mrs. Cooper's book shows not only wide research and a full knowledge of extant criticism, but it also manifests a personal zest in reading and an unusual independence of literary judgment. This independence is shown in her choice of authors. Phillips, Winstanley, and Jacob had omitted Langland, but she says, "In my Judgment, no Writer, except Chaucer, and Spenser, for many Ages, had more of real Inspiration." Or take the case of Lydgate. Phillips mentions him, but not, apparently, from any personal knowledge of his work. Winstanley and Jacob praise him highly. Mrs. Cooper says of him: "Many Authors are so profuse in his Praise as to rank him very little below his Master, and, often, quote them together; which rais'd my Curiosity so high, that I gave a considerable Price for his Works, and waded thro' a large Folio, hoping still to have my Expectation gratified.... But I must, either confess my own want of Penetration, or beg leave to dissent from his Admirers." She gives a long quotation from Lord Brook's A Treatise of Humane Learning, because his name has "never yet received the Honours it deserved." She is indignant at the general indifference to the work and fame of Edward Fairfax and writes a eulogy of several pages. Her comments on Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare are brief, since all agree on their preëminence. Mr. Lounsbury, after noting one or two errors in the book, says of it: "I know of no similar work produced at that period in which the knowledge displayed is so accurate and comprehensive, or the critical estimates so uniformly good and just. There was exhibited in it not merely freshness of judgment but the independence that springs from the study of writers at first hand."[279] Mrs. Cooper had in her the making of a scholar. She allowed herself no generalities. Whatever she said was based on a thorough study of the material under discussion. Furthermore, she acquainted herself with all extant critical opinion without thereby losing the power to form an opinion of her own.
Mrs. Cooper's Preface is an excellent, even an eloquent, piece of writing, in justification of poets as a nation's glory. She recognizes that "Merit is not its own Preservative" and wishes in her book to set up if possible "a Bulwark which shall preserve Merit from the attacks of Time." She considers her "Series of Poetry (which has never been aim'd at anywhere else) ... one of the most valuable collections that ever was made publick." She has no apologies to make. In introducing to the moderns this august company of ancient poets she is saved from any possible self-consciousness by the dignity of her enterprise. The same tone pervades her Dedication. No single name is glorious enough to appear at the head of her list. She chooses rather a dedication to "the truly Honourable Society for the Encouragement of Learning."[280] That Society was then in the hey-day of its brief glory. Mrs. Cooper had, apparently, no thought of personally benefiting by her Dedications. On the contrary she counted this an opportunity to express what all authors and lovers of literature must feel towards a design "so great, seasonable, and humane" as that of this new organization, a design applauded by "all who have Generosity, Benevolence or Politeness."
As dramatist and actress Mrs. Cooper would deserve at least passing mention, but as a scholar, as an ardent advocate of early English poetry, she must take high rank, not only among the learned women, but also among the learned men of her day.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
No woman of the first half of the eighteenth century had a more active mind or facile pen than Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Although almost none of her work appeared in print in her lifetime, her personality made its own way, and she was early recognized as of note for genius and learned acquirements. It is, therefore, of especial interest to inquire into the particulars of her education, and to find out her status as a woman of letters.
The materials for such an inquiry are fairly abundant, and are mainly: her miscellaneous letters, first published in 1803; a fragmentary autobiographical romance, of which she says "not a sillable" except the names is feigned; and the Introductory Anecdotes by her granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart,[281] included in Lady Mary's Letters and Works brought out by Lord Wharncliffe, her great-grandson, in 1887. The important groups of letters containing personal details are those written to Mr. Montagu from about 1709 till their marriage in 1712, and the very large group to her family and friends, chiefly to Lady Bute, her daughter, during Lady Mary's stay in Italy from 1739 to 1761.
Lady Mary's mother died when she was eight, and her father, too much a man of pleasure to trouble himself with the education of girls, gave his three young daughters into the care of "an old governess, who, though perfectly good and pious, wanted a capacity for so great a trust."[282] In commenting on the evil effects of an ignorant education, Lady Mary said: "My own was the worst in the world, being exactly the same as Clarissa Harlowe's; her pious Mrs. Norton so perfectly resembling my governess, who had been nurse to my mother. I could almost fancy the author was acquainted with her. She took so much pains from my infancy, to fill my head with superstitious tales and false notions, it was none of her fault I am not at this day afraid of witches and hobgoblins, or turned methodist."[283] But at least there were no hindering home influences, and Lady Mary had what Charles Lamb would call the luck to be "tumbled early into a closet of good old English books." Forsaking the dolls of her sisters she took refuge in her father's fine library and there she read with the absorption of a youthful Coleridge. She "got by heart all the poetry that came in her way," and she "read every romance as yet invented." Lady Louisa says she "possessed and left after her, the whole library of Mrs. Lenox's Female Quixote—Cleopatra, Cassandra, Clelia, Cyrus, Pharamond, Ibrahim, etc., etc.—all, like the lady Arabella's collection, 'Englished,' mostly, 'by persons of honour.' The chief favourite appeared to have been a translation of Monsieur Honoré d'Urfé's Astrea, once the delight of Henri Quatre and his court, and still admired and quoted by the savans who flourished under Louis XIV. In a blank page of this massive volume (which might have counterbalanced a pig of lead of the same size) Lady Mary had written in her fairest youthful hand the names and characteristic qualities of the chief personages thus:—the beautiful Diana, the volatile Climene, the melancholy Doris, Celedon the faithful, Adamas the wise, and so on; forming two long columns."[284] Among Lady Mary's earliest attempts at authorship were romantic stories in imitation of these her favorite authors.
But along with her romances, and soon superseding them, were sterner studies. She early began to teach herself Latin. In her account of herself under the name Lætitia, she said:
Her appetite for knowledge increasing with her years, without considering the toilsome task she undertook, she began to learn herself the Latin grammar, and with the help of an uncommon memory and indefatigable labour, made herself so far mistress of that language as to be able to understand almost any author. This extraordinary attachment to study became the theme of public discourse. Her Father, though no scholar himself, was flattered with a pleasure in the progress she made, and this reputation which she did not seek (having no end in view but her own amusement) gave her enviers and consequently enemies among the girls of her own age.
Lady Mary was but fourteen when her "just and knowing" criticism of a play, her knowledge of Latin, and her relish for the classics, excited the wonder and admiration of Mr. Wortley Montagu. He was as amazed "as if he had heard a piece of wax work talk."[285] But the envy of her girl companions and the liberal praise of Mr. Wortley are not the only proofs that Lady Mary's shining talents and learned tastes met early recognition. Her uncle, Mr. William Fielding, "perceived her capacity, corresponded with her, and encouraged her pursuit of information." Bishop Burnet showed himself most friendly, and condescended to direct her studies. Mr. Wortley also kept up a kind of scholarly guidance. Lady Mary said to Spence in Rome in 1741: "When I was young I was a great admirer of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and that was one of the chief reasons that set me upon the thoughts of stealing the Latin language. Mr. Wortley was the only person to whom I communicated my design, and he encouraged me in it. I used to study five or six hours a day for two years in my father's library; and so got that language, whilst everybody else thought I was reading nothing but novels and romances."[286] By the time she was twenty Italian had been added to her accomplishments. In an early undated letter to Mrs. Hewet she wrote: "I have begun to learn Italian, and am much mortified I cannot do it of a signor of Monsieur Resingade's recommendation; but 'tis always the fate of women to obey, and my papa has promised me to a Mr. Cassotti. I am afraid I shall never understand it as well as you do." By 1710 she was quoting Italian verse, and in the following year she corresponded with Mr. Resingade in Italian. That she was still working under Mr. Cassotti in 1712 is apparent from her request that Mr. Wortley should send one of his letters to her under the care of Mr. Cassotti, her "Italian master." At this period, or a little later, she also learned French, so that she wrote letters and essays in that language. Her continued devotion to study is shown by a letter from Thoresby to Anne Wortley in 1709: "I am now so much alone, I have leisure to pass whole days in reading.... My study is nothing but dictionaries and grammars. I am trying whether it be possible to learn without a master; I am not certain (and dare hardly hope) I shall make any great progress; but I find the study so diverting. I am not only easy, but pleased with the solitude that indulges it."[287]
Lady Mary's diligence resulted in 1710 in a translation of the Latin version of the Enchiridion of Epictetus which she sent to Bishop Burnet with a notable letter. Of the translation she says: "Here is the work of one week of my solitude—by the many faults in it your lordship will easily believe I spent no more time upon it; it was hardly finished when I was obliged to begin my journey, and I had not leisure to write it over again. You have it here without any corrections with all its blots and errors." Bishop Burnet returned the document with emendations which in the present printed form are given in italics.[288] In spite of the numerous changes suggested as closer to the original, the translation remains as a remarkable production for a self-educated girl of twenty. Even more remarkable as evidencing maturity of thought and command of an admirable English style is the letter, which is of particular significance in connection with the contemporary attitude towards the learned woman:
My sex is usually forbid studies of this nature, and folly reckoned so much our proper sphere, we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to reading or good sense. We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weakening and effeminating of the mind. Our natural defects are every way indulged, and it is looked upon as in a degree criminal to improve our reason, or fancy we have any. We are taught to place all our art in adorning our outward forms, and permitted, without reproach, to carry that custom even to extravagancy, while our minds are entirely neglected, and, by disuse of reflections, filled with nothing but the trifling objects our eyes are daily entertained with. This custom, so long established and industriously upheld, makes it even ridiculous to go out of the common road, and forces one to find as many excuses as if it was a thing altogether criminal not to play the fool in concert with other women of quality, whose birth and leisure only serve to render them the most useless and most worthless part of the creation. There is hardly a character in the world more despicable, or more liable to universal ridicule, than that of a learned woman: those words imply, according to the received sense, a tattling, impertinent, vain, and conceited creature. I believe nobody will deny that learning may have this effect, but it must be a very superficial degree of it. Erasmus was certainly a man of great learning and good sense, and he seems to have my opinion of it when he says, Fæmina qui (sic) vere sapit, non videtur sibi sapere; contra, quæ cum nihil sapiat sibi videtur sapere ea demum bis stulta est. The Abbé Bellegarde gives a right reason for women's talking overmuch: they know nothing, and every outward object strikes their imagination, and produces a multitude of thoughts, which, if they knew more, they would know not worth their thinking of. I am not now arguing for an equality of the two sexes. I do not doubt God and nature have thrown us into an inferior rank; we are a lower part of the creation, we owe obedience and submission to the superior sex, and any woman who suffers her vanity and folly to deny this, rebels against the law of the Creator, and indisputable order of nature: but there is a worse effect than this, which follows the careless education given to women of quality, its being so easy for any man of sense, that finds it either his interest or his pleasure, to corrupt them.[289]
In 1712 Lady Mary married Mr. Wortley Montagu, in 1713 her son was born, and in 1715 she started with her husband on their journey to Turkey. The six years between the Enchiridion and the Embassy present Lady Mary to us in an enviable position. The reputation of her youth was augmented. "The wittiest as well as one of the most beautiful women of her day, she numbered among her admirers the most powerful of the statesmen, and the most brilliant of the littérateurs; while, for a time at least she was a favourite at the rival Courts of the King and the Prince of Wales."[290] The only literary output of this period is a long, rather stilted and perfunctory criticism of Addison's Cato which she undertook at her husband's request,[291] and some Court Poems which she wrote with great zest, in conjunction with Pope and Gay, in pursuance of Gay's plan to ridicule the pastoral by keeping the form, but making it the vehicle of corrupt court and town life. Of the seven poems so written four were by Lady Mary. In them we come for the first time on her power of combining picturesque detail and caustic comment. Not Gay himself was richer in local color; and Pope and Swift were almost equaled in contemptuous social portraiture.
During the six years before the Embassy Lady Mary's activities were essentially those of a social leader and the mistress of a household. But all her interests were focused to one point when she found that she could go to Turkey with Mr. Montagu. Travel "is the thing on earth I most wish," she had written in 1710, and now that her husband was sent as Ambassador to the Porte, her dreams could be realized. She must have been a perfect traveling companion. She had great courage, great endurance; no hardships or dangers daunted her. During the fifteen months of their absence she had her three-year-old son to care for, and her daughter was born while they were in Constantinople, but nothing interfered with her zest for experiences. Each day was a new adventure. Each day her insatiable desire to learn and to know some new thing received some new satisfaction. During the journey she kept a full diary which, though not published till after her death, became known in manuscript soon after her return. Certainly by 1725 she had prepared a copy with an eye to publication. To this manuscript Mary Astell wrote a Preface, signed "M. A.," and dated 1725. Mary Astell was twenty-two years older than Lady Mary for whom she had a strong personal affection, as well as a very sincere pride in her reputation as a learned woman. The Preface would seem to indicate that Lady Mary's "enviers" and "enemies" had not decreased since her girlhood days:
In short [says Mary Astell] let her own sex, at least, do her justice; lay aside diabolical Envy, and its brother Malice, with all their accursed company, sly whispering, cruel backbiting, spiteful detraction, and the rest of that hideous crew, which, I hope, are very falsely said to attend the Tea-Table, being more apt to think they attend those public places where virtuous women never come. Let the men malign one another, if they think fit, and strive to pull down merit, when they cannot equal it. Let us be better-natured, than to give way to any unkind or disrespectful thought of so bright an ornament of our sex merely because she has better sense; for I doubt not but our hearts will tell us, that this is the real and unpardonable offense, whatever may be pretended. Let us be better Christians, than to look upon her with an evil eye, only because the Giver of all good gifts has entrusted and adorned her with the most excellent talents. Rather let us freely own the superiority of this sublime genius, as I do in the sincerity of my soul, pleased that a woman triumphs, and proud to follow in her train. Let us offer her the palm which is so justly her due; and if we pretend to any laurels, lay them willingly at her feet.
After Lady Mary's return to England in 1718 we come upon a long period of quiescence. Domestic affairs, events of social and political life, her friendships and hatreds, her economies and stock speculations, completely occupied her. During the first part of this period she was extravagantly praised. Steele said of her in his essay on Inoculation:
This ornament of her Sex and Country, who ennobles her own Nobility by her Learning, Wit and Virtues, accompanying her consort into Turkey, observed the Benefit of this Practice, with its frequency, even among these obstinate Predestinarians, and brought it over for the service and safety of her native England, where she consecrated its first effects on the persons of her own fine children.
In 1720 Pope wrote
In beauty and wit
No Mortal as yet
To question your empire has dared:
But men of discerning
Have thought that in learning
To yield to a lady was hard.
Impertinent schools,
With musty dull rules,
Have reading to females denied;
So Papists refuse
The Bible to use,
Lest flocks should be wise as their guide.
But if the first Eve
Hard doom did receive
When only one apple had she,
What a punishment new
Shall be found out for you,
Who, tasting, have robbed the whole tree.
And in 1727 he wrote in Sandys' Ghost:
Ye ladies, too, draw forth your pen,
I pray where can the hurt lie?
Since you have brains as well as men,
As witness Lady Wortley.
Before 1724 Dr. Young had sent her his tragedy The Brothers, requesting her criticism. In 1725 Richard Savage dedicated his Miscellanies to her as one through whose elevated and immortal wit England had been honored, and who had firmly established the fact that women have "strength of mind in proportion to their sweetness." And Henry Fielding, her second cousin, sent her his comedies, "exceedingly anxious" for her opinion of them.
But after 1724 or 1725 the years seem to slip on in an aimless fashion, the only breaks in the monotony coming from the intermittently virulent quarrels with Pope, the religious and medical animosities roused by the inoculation process, family sorrows and family discords, with no literary output to mark any personal achievements. From thirty to fifty should have been harvest years after so brilliant a beginning. But the early promise faded into a middle age disillusioned, unambitious, and rather commonplace. The only writing of any importance was in the correspondence kept up in a desultory fashion with various friends. Such of the letters of this period as have been preserved are so vivid and picturesque, so witty, and so pleasantly caustic in their comment, that we can only regret their small number. Take for instance the following description of a feminine riot in the House of Commons:
At the last warm debate in the House of Lords, it was unanimously resolved there should be no crowd of unnecessary auditors; consequently the fair sex were excluded, and the gallery destined to the sole use of the House of Commons. Notwithstanding which determination, a tribe of dames resolved to show on this occasion that neither men nor laws could resist them. These heroines were Lady Huntington, the Duchess of Queensberry, the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Westmoreland, Lady Cobham, Lady Charlotte Edwin, Lady Archibald Hamilton, and her daughter, Mrs. Scott, and Mrs. Pendarves, and Lady Frances Saunderson. I am thus particular in their names, since I look upon them to be the boldest asserters, and most resigned sufferers for liberty, I ever read of. They presented themselves at the door at nine o'clock in the morning, where Sir William Saunderson respectfully informed them the Chancellor had made an order against their admittance. The Duchess of Queensberry, as head of the squadron, pished at the ill-breeding of a mere lawyer, and desired him to let them upstairs privately. After some modest refusals, he swore by G—— he would not let them in. Her grace, with a noble warmth, answered, by G—— they would come in in spite of the Chancellor and the whole House. This being reported, the Peers resolved to starve them out; an order was made that the doors should not be opened till they had raised their siege. These Amazons now showed themselves qualified for the duty even of foot soldiers; they stood there till five in the afternoon, without either sustenance or evacuation, every now and then playing volleys of thumps, kicks, and raps against the door, with so much violence that the speakers in the House were scarce heard. When the Lords were not to be conquered by this, the two duchesses (very well apprised of the use of stratagems in war) commanded a dead silence of half an hour; and the Chancellor, who thought this a certain proof of their absence (the Commons also being very impatient to enter), gave order for the opening of the door; upon which they all rushed in, pushed aside their competitors, and placed themselves in the front rows of the gallery. They stayed there till after eleven, when the House rose; and during the debate gave applause and showed marks of dislike, not only by smiles and winks (which have always been allowed in these cases), but by noisy laughs and apparent contempts; which is supposed the true reason why poor Lord Hervey spoke miserably.[292]
In 1739 Lady Mary drifted, without settled plan, to Italy, and there her self-elected exile lengthened itself insensibly into a habit of absence, so that she did not return to England till 1761, the year before her death. During this period she kept a full journal, and projected other work, but brought nothing to fruition.[293] Her chief occupation was reading. Her voracious appetite for fiction passed over from her girlhood absorption in French romances to the novels crowding the presses of the mid-eighteenth century. The events of her placid life were boxes of books from England, and the novels she read would make an adequate list even for Polly Honeycomb. Lady Orford said she wondered how any one could find pleasure in the books Lady Mary chose. But Lady Mary confessed herself "a rake in reading," and said, in 1750: "I thank God my taste still continues for the gay part of reading. Wiser people may think it trifling but it serves to sweeten life to me."[294] In 1752 her daughter sent her Peregrine Pickle (1751), Lady Vane's Memoirs (1750), The Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), Pompey the Little (1751), Eleanora's Adventures (1751) and the Life of Mrs. Constantia Philips, as among the interesting new books. In a letter to Lady Bute Lady Mary wrote:
I see in the newspapers the names of the following books: Fortunate Mistress, Accomplished Rake, Mrs. Charke's Memoirs, Modern Lovers, History of Two Orphans, Memoirs of David Ranger, Miss [Mos]tyn, Dick Hazard, History of a Lady Platonist, Sophia Shakespear, Jasper Banks, Frank Hammond, Sir Andrew Thompson, Van a Clergyman's Son, Cleanthes and Celimena. I do not doubt at least the greatest part of these are trash, lumber, etc.; however, they will serve to pass away the idle time, if you will be so kind to send them to your most affectionate mother.[295]
And she read English drama from Gammer Gurton's Needle to Lillo's George Barnwell, her prime favorite.[296]
During the twenty-two years in Italy Lady Mary was practically alone, but she says time never hung heavy on her hands. She wrote letters constantly, and her interest never flagged in the affairs of England in general and of Lady Bute's family in particular. As the daughters grew up, Lady Mary wrote often about their education, and we see that the ideas of the letter to Bishop Burnet persist. In 1753 she wrote concerning Lady Mary, the eldest granddaughter, who had shown herself excellent in arithmetic:
Learning, if she has a real taste for it, will not only make her contented, but happy in it. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions, nor regret the loss of expensive diversions, or variety of company, if she can be amused with an author in her closet. To render this amusement extensive, she should be permitted to learn the languages. I have heard it lamented that boys lose so many years in mere learning of words: this is no objection to a girl, whose time is not so precious: she cannot advance herself in any profession, and has therefore more hours to spare; and as you say her memory is good, she will be very agreeably employed in this way. There are two cautions to be given on this subject: first, not to think herself learned when she can read Latin, or even Greek. Languages are more properly to be called vehicles of learning than learning itself, as may be observed in many schoolmasters, who, though perhaps critics in grammar, are the most ignorant fellows on earth. True knowledge consists in knowing things, not words. I would wish her no further a linguist than to enable her to read books in their originals, that are often corrupted, and always injured by translations. Two hours application every morning will bring this about much sooner than you can imagine, and she will have leisure enough besides to run over the English poetry, which is a more important part of a woman's education than it is generally supposed.... If she has the same inclination (I should say passion) for learning that I was born with, history, geography, and philosophy will furnish her with materials to pass away cheerfully a longer life than is allotted to mortals. I believe there are few heads capable of making Sir I. Newton's calculations, but the result of them is not difficult to be understood by a moderate capacity. Do not fear this should make her affect the character of Lady ——, of Lady ——, or Mrs. ——: These women are ridiculous, not because they have learning, but because they have it not. One thinks herself a complete historian, after reading Echard's Roman History; another a profound philosopher, having got by heart some of Pope's unintelligible essays; and a third an able divine, on the strength of Whitfield's sermons: thus you hear them screaming politics and controversy.[297]
In the next letter Lady Mary shows some doubt as to the wisdom of giving advice so outspoken on the subject of learning. She says:
I cannot help writing a sort of apology for my last letter, foreseeing that you will think it wrong, or at least Lord Bute will be extremely shocked at the proposal of a learned education for daughters, which the generality of men believe as great a profanation as the clergy would do if the laity should presume to exercise the functions of the priesthood. I desire you would take notice, I would not have learning enjoined them as a task, but permitted as a pleasure, if their genius leads them naturally to it.[298]
Later in the same letter she says:
There is nothing so like the education of a woman of quality as that of a prince: they are taught to dance, and the exterior part of what is called good breeding, which, if they attain, they are extraordinary creatures in their kind, and have all the accomplishments required by their directors. The same characters are formed by the same lessons, which inclines me to think (if I dare say it) that nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity; though, I am persuaded, if there was a commonwealth of rational horses (as Doctor Swift has supposed), it would be an established maxim among them, that a mare could not be taught to pace.
In October of the same year she wrote further on the subject of the learned woman:
I confess I have often been complimented, since I have been in Italy, on the books I have given the public. I used at first to deny it with some warmth; but, finding I persuaded nobody, I have of late contented myself with laughing whenever I heard it mentioned, knowing the character of a learned woman is far from being ridiculous in this country, the greatest families being proud of having produced female writers; and a Milanese lady being now professor of mathematics in the University of Bologna, invited thither by a most obliging letter, wrote by the present Pope, who desired her to accept of the chair, not as a recompense for her merit, but to do honor to a town which is under his protection. To say truth, there is no part of the world where our sex is treated with so much contempt as in England. I do not complain of men for having engrossed the government: in excluding us from all degrees of power, they preserve us from many fatigues, many dangers, and perhaps many crimes. The small proportion of authority that has fallen to my share (only over a few children and servants) always has been a burden and never a pleasure, and I believe every one finds it so who acts from a maxim (I think an indispensable duty), that whoever is under my power is under my protection. Those who find a joy in inflicting hardships and seeing objects of misery, may have other sensations; but I have always thought corrections, even when necessary, as painful to the giver as to the sufferer, and am therefore very well satisfied with the state of subjection we are placed in: but I think it the highest injustice to be debarred the entertainment of my closet, and that the same studies which raise the character of a man should hurt that of a woman. We are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason; if some few get above their nurse's instructions, our knowledge must rest concealed, and be as useless to the world as gold in a mine. I am speaking now according to our English notions, which may wear out, some ages hence, along with others equally absurd.[299]
Lady Montagu died in London in 1762. Her Turkish Letters were published the next year. Her miscellaneous correspondence came out in 1807. Nor was her real significance apparent until both publications were accessible. It was then at once recognized that no English letter-writer had surpassed Lady Mary in brilliancy and wit. Her eye was so quick and accurate that no interesting details of dress or manner escaped her. As a chronicler and critic of social faults and foibles she was cool, keen, merciless. She was graphic in phrase, homely and direct in figures of speech, racy and idiomatic. The whole tone of her writing was free, lively, energetic, and she could make any topic entertaining. As a person there seems to be ground for two opposite opinions concerning Lady Mary. People admired her and praised her, or they hated her and told scandalous stories about her. But as a writer there could be but one opinion. She was not the first woman of letters to be eulogized, but she was the first woman, not in fiction or drama, whose writings every one wished to read.
Mrs. De la Rivière Manley (1672-1724)
Mrs. Manley,[300] a gentlewoman of good family, the daughter of Sir Roger Manley, was left an orphan while still young. Her guardian, a cousin twenty years older than herself, tricked her into a false marriage, and then, on the birth of a child, announced the cheat and disappeared. Most of the fortune left by her father had also vanished. The details of her life after this until she began her career of authorship are but vaguely known. In 1696 she made a threefold appeal to the public in Letters written by Mrs. Manley;[301] The Lost Lover, a comedy written in seven days, produced at Drury Lane, and not successful; and The Royal Mischief, successfully brought out at Lincoln's Inn Fields. In the Preface to her Letters (1696) Mrs. Manley spoke of the eager contention between the theaters as to which should bring her on the stage, but drama was not her natural medium. When, after a silence of nine years, she again appeared as an author, it was with The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705), a precursor of the scandalous personal and political memories for which she became known. In 1709 she published Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. The popularity of this book brought a second volume the same year. In 1710 appeared Memoirs of Europe towards the Close of the Eighth Century. This and a second volume were afterwards reprinted as the third and fourth volumes of The New Atalantis. The sixth edition of The New Atalantis had a Key at the end of the fourth volume.
This book purported to be by an Italian and put into English by an anonymous translator. The plan of the romance is that of a journey where Astræa (Mrs. Behn revisiting the earth), Fame, and Virtue are conducted invisibly about while their guide, "Intelligence," tells them the secret histories of the persons they meet. Under this thin disguise the statesmen, wits, and beauties of the reign of William and Mary and Queen Anne were at once recognized. Mrs. Manley, the publisher, and the printer, were arrested. On her own testimony, however, the blame was counted hers and she was examined before the court, but after about three months she was discharged. And the later volumes followed with no public expression of disapproval.
In 1711 Mrs. Manley succeeded Swift as editor of The Examiner. In 1714 appeared The Adventures of Rivella, or, the History of the Author of Atalantis, by Sir Charles Lovemore. In 1724 Curll brought this out as Mrs. Manley's History of Her own Life and Times, and it was probably written by her. In 1720 The Power of Love in Seven Volumes, and Verses, in Anthony Hammond's New Miscellany, close her contributions to literature. She died at the house of Alderman Barker whose mistress she had been for several years.
A fact of central interest about Mrs. Manley's personal and literary career is her quarrel with Steele which kept up with long lulls and acrimonious crises from before 1709 to 1717. In the first volume of The New Atalantis[302] she gave an account of Steele as "Monsieur le Ingrate," narrating in detail her aid in rescuing him from the impostors who were leading him into ruinous expenses in search of the philosopher's stone, and bitterly assailing him for his later ingratitude in the time of her own distresses. In the same year The Tatler, No. 35, possibly referred to Mrs. Manley under the description of the snuff-eating lady. Certainly in September Swift represented her, under the name of "Epicene," as one of the professors in Madonella's college. Mrs. Manley, assuming that the paper was by Steele, wrote a denunciatory letter, which he answered in mild fashion, owning his former indebtedness to her and explaining his inability to aid her when she appealed to him. In the third and fourth volumes of The New Atalantis (1710) were further attacks on Steele.[303] This third volume was dedicated to him as "Isaac Bickerstaffe." She quoted his letter, but omitted some of the mitigating sentences. Of the "mighty Tatlers" leveled at her she says: "A weak, unlearn'd Woman's Writings, to employ so great a Pen! Heavens? how valuable am I? How fond of that Immortality, even of Infamy, that you have promised! I am ravished at the Thoughts of living a Thousand Years hence in your indelible lines, tho' to give Offence.... I shall be proud of furnishing Matter towards your inexhaustible Tatler, and of being a perpetual Monument of Mr. Bickerstaffe's Gallantry and Morality."
In August, 1713, (The Guardian, No. 128), Steele entered the controversy concerning the demolition of Dunkirk. Mrs. Manley answered with a pamphlet in which the "honour and Prerogative of the Queen's Majesty" were defended "against the unexampled Insolence of the Author of the Guardian." This closed the open hostilities, and by 1717 there were handsome apologies and frank admissions of error on both sides, and the reconciliation seems to have been complete. The chief interest we find in Mrs. Manley's play is the fact that Steele wrote the Prologue and that the play was dedicated to him. In this Dedication she said, "I have not known a greater mortification than when I have reflected upon the severities which have flowed from a pen which is now, you see, disposed to celebrate and commend you."[304]
Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas (1677-1731)
Dryden conferred upon Mrs. Thomas the title of "Corinna" and says, "I would have called you Sapho, but that I hear you are handsomer." The young poetess had received no regular education, but she improved her mind by reading the politest authors, and finally, at twenty-two, she ventured forth as a poet herself. She sent two poems to Mr. Dryden asking his critical judgment of them. He responded with the following letter:
Fair Corinna,
I have sent your two poems back again, after having kept them so long from you: They were I thought too good to be a woman's; some of my friends to whom I read them, were of the same opinion. It is not very gallant I must confess to say this of the fair sex; but, most certain it is, they generally write with more softness than strength. On the contrary, you want neither vigour in your thoughts, nor force in your expression, nor harmony in your numbers; and methinks, I find much of Orinda in your manner, (to whom I had the honour to be related, and also to be known) but I am so taken up with my own studies, that I have not leisure to descend to particulars, being in the meantime, the fair Corinna's
Most humble, and
Most faithful servant
John Dryden.
Nov. 12, 1699.
The poetical career thus auspiciously begun with the praise of the great poet ended in disaster. After the death of Mr. Gwinnet, who had courted her for sixteen years, in 1717, and of her mother in 1719, she was always in financial straits and used almost any means to avoid her creditors. During the time when she was living under the protection of Mr. Henry Cromwell, she gained possession of twenty-five letters written to him by Mr. Pope. These she sold to Curll, who published them in 1726, and she thus gained a disgraceful place in The Dunciad. Her Poems were published in 1722, 1726, 1727, but she does not seem to have been rewarded with either fame or money. Besides other unimportant literary work she wrote an autobiography entitled Pylades and Corinna; or, Memoirs of the Lives, Amours, and Writings of Richard Gwinnet, Esquire, and Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, junior.... To which is prefixed the Life of Corinna, written by herself. This was published in 1731 in two volumes. The autobiography in an abridged form appears in Cibber's Lives of the Poets.[305]
Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756)
Miss Eliza Fowler, the daughter of a small shopkeeper in London, was married before she was twenty to the Reverend Valentine Haywood.[306] In 1721 she left her husband[307] and thereafter she had her own way to make. A few unimportant attempts as an actress[308] and some occasional unsuccessful attempts as a playwright may be set aside as not belonging to her real career. It was as a writer of romantic tales and novels that she achieved success. This vein once tapped, the ore, such as it was, seemed inexhaustible. From 1719 to 1756 Mrs. Haywood published about seventy single works, nearly all of them "fictitious tales."[309] If we should count various editions, the numbers of times she was privileged to see some work by her issue from the press during her thirty-seven years of authorship would exceed one hundred and fifty. Her most prolific years were 1724 to 1728, thirty-three new books appearing during this short time.
This crowding of book after book through the press, the numerous editions of the more popular novels, and the fact that four "Collections" of her works had appeared by 1729, sufficiently attest her extraordinary contemporary popularity. Mrs. Haywood's fecundity is not a matter for great surprise. It is easy to understand that if she could write one novel like Love in Excess, she could write half a hundred more without seriously taxing her creative spirit. But to the present-day reader her popularity seems incredible. Of what sort was the reading public that stimulated her and her publishers to such activity? According to Mr. Gosse's conjecture in "What Ann Lang Read," "Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, by seamstresses, by basket-women, by prentices of all sorts, male and female, but chiefly the latter."[310] But Mr. Whicher points out that Mrs. Haywood's novels were never issued in cheap form, and that one to three shillings for a slender octavo would put the books beyond the purses of the servant class.[311] In all probability Ann Lang, the milliner's apprentice, is less truly representative of Mrs. Haywood's readers than is Polly in Colman's Polly Honeycomb (1760). Polly did not begin her career as a novel-reader till more than a decade after the appearance of Pamela, so that a fairly wide range of fiction was open to her, and Mrs. Haywood could be but one element of her possible literary joys. But we know that The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless was one of her favorites, and the extracts she gives from Mrs. Haywood's previous novels and the names she cherishes, read like satires on that lady's heroics. If Polly may be counted as typical of Mrs. Haywood's public, we have readers distinctly above the servant class. Mr. Honeycomb was a well-to-do tradesman with clerks in the office and a fairly elaborate domestic establishment. Polly may even have been to a finishing school. There are also indications of a class of readers higher still. The ladies of fashion who so attentively pursued Mrs. Manley's New Atalantis could hardly be supposed indifferent to the social scandal in Mrs. Haywood's Memoirs of a Certain Island and The Court of Carimania. In Leonora's library there was a Book of Novels which would doubtless appeal to the same taste as Mrs. Haywood's tales. Furthermore, the impassioned protests against novel-reading in all didactic addresses to young ladies would indicate a widespread devotion to fiction in the higher social ranks.
Mrs. Haywood's popularity was certainly contributed to by a lack of important competitors. Before the advent of Pamela the young girl eager for stories must read French romances, Defoe's novels, or Mrs. Haywood's novels. Defoe was not particularly attractive to the Pollys of the age, and the taste for the many-volumed romances, beloved of ladies from Dorothy Osborne and Mrs. Pepys to Biddy Tipkin and Arabella,[312] was gradually dying out. So Mrs. Haywood had her chance. Her "little Performances," as she called them, offered in brief compass the love and adventure of the long romance without its tax on the reader's patience.
Mrs. Haywood's short romances have but one theme. "Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires," is a correct analysis by one of her admirers. She is the self-appointed chronicler of Love and all its attendant passions. She sets herself to trace "The Wild Career of untamed Love in the proud Heart of Arbitrary Man"; to note the thrilling ardors, the languishments, the ecstasies and violent agitations on the part of the adored one; to depict with extravagant emphasis the jealousy, rage, despair, of disappointed affections. These experiences of the heart take place in the midst of adventures of the most melodramatic sort. Flights over land and sea are complicated by storms and shipwreck, by bandits and pirates. The heroic play itself is less prolific in elopements, seductions, duels, murders, and suicides. The sword, the dagger, and the poison cup play an active part in cutting Gordian knots too intricately tied. There is small effort to make the story probable. The whole effort is to make it exciting. The reader is plunged from adventure to adventure with no breathing place in which to be critical, and it is by this headlong speed that the attention is held. But after reading several of the tales it becomes apparent that to know one is to know all. The passions, the situations, the obstacles, the dénouements recur. Nor are the people differentiated. The ardent lovers, their yielding or temporarily obdurate fair ones, the jealous lovers and mistresses, hard-hearted fathers, faithless friends, and mercenary confidants, make up the personnel of each story. Among the hundreds of characters there is not one that remains in the memory as a real person. They are but puppets through whose convulsive starts and unnatural tones Mrs. Haywood vainly endeavors to make genuine passion speak.
Nor have these novels any additional points of interest such as might come from witty dialogue, pungent comment, or beautiful description. Mrs. Haywood's English is fluent, intelligible, and fairly correct, but it never attains distinction. The total effect of these tales of passion is one of almost stupefying dullness and monotony. It is painful to reflect on the blunted moral, emotional, and æsthetic sensibilities of a generation of readers who found their solace in The Excess of Love and its congeners.
Mrs. Haywood's activities suffered something of a check after 1729, possibly owing to the savage attacks on her by Pope in The Dunciad (1728).[313] At any rate, for some reason or combination of reasons, no new original works of any importance by her appeared between 1729 and 1751. Among various expedients to earn a livelihood during this period the most notable is her attempt to establish herself as a publisher in 1742, but since only two books are recorded as published by her she probably quickly found herself without the business training for such an enterprise.[314] A more notable undertaking is The Female Spectator edited and at least partly written by Mrs. Haywood in April, 1744—May, 1746.
She entered again the field of authorship with her best novels, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, in four volumes (1751), and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, three volumes (1752), which have the merit of faintly foreshadowing the domestic novel of a later day.[315]
The paper is professedly modeled on the work of Addison and Steele. The writing purports to be by an editorial group of four ladies with Mrs. Haywood as editor-in-chief. A vivacious widow in whom lovers confide; Euphrosine, so called because of her brightness and charm; and Mira, a lady of hereditary wit, complete the quadrumvirate. Their avowed purpose is to give entertaining items of news, discuss dress, decorum, and social foibles in friendly admonition, and analyze the human heart. But there is no real emphasis except on the last of these topics. The Tenderillas, Claribellas, Elismondas, Dorindas, and the rest, pursue their amorous way from volume to volume, unconscious that the world holds any interest but love, that "noblest, softest, and the best" of all the passions.
THE SUPPOSED EDITORS OF THE FEMALE SPECTATOR BY MRS. ELIZA HAYWOOD
From Vol. I of the seventh edition, 1771
Mrs. Haywood is the scribe; the lady in black is the vivacious widow of quality; the lady standing is "Euphrosine"; the other lady is "Mira"
But now and then the editors or some contributor break out of the charmed circle, and we get a glimpse of women who, along with their overworked hearts, have at least rudimentary minds. A certain "Cleora" urges that women's best qualities are often stifled by a wrong education, and that "the world would infallibly be happier than it is if women were more knowing than they generally are." The studies suggested are history, geography, some of the more agreeable parts of mathematics, and "Enchanting Philosophy, its path strewd with Roses." Music, poetry, dancing, and novels are suggested by way of relaxation. For solid reading the recommendation includes translations of Latin historians and French books of travel, and closes with Bailey's Dictionary, "a library of itself since there was never person, place or action of any note, from the creation down to the time of its being published, but what it gives a general account of." In another essay "Philo-Naturæ" spends impassioned pages urging ladies to study natural history, but nullifies her eloquence by the narrow limit she assigns to their work. "It is easy to see, that it is not my ambition to render my sex what is called deeply-learned." Women need only "a kind of general understanding" of science, such as will enable them to take an agreeable part in conversation. They are not called to abstruse and difficult researches, but merely to those light and charming observations that catch the watchful eye on little excursions such as ladies make in fields, meadows, and gardens.
In The Wife (1755) Mrs. Haywood is less liberal than in The Spectator. The married lady is particularly warned against the dangers of an active mind or speculative disposition. She may be so misguided as to "attempt to investigate those things that Heaven has hidden from human understanding," in which case her brain will be distracted by books of controversy. Or she may strangely busy her mind about the planets, wondering whether those vast and luminous orbs are habitable, and if so, whether possessed by men or angels or the ghosts of the departed. A lady so fantastically engaged is likely to waste her time over such books as Fontanelle's Plurality of Worlds.
A woman who once gets either of these fancies into her head, is lost to everything besides; her husband, children, family, friends, acquaintances, with all the necessary avocations and duties of her station, seem altogether unworthy her regard; she lives in the clouds, and it is with difficulty she is dragg'd down to the performance of anything requir'd of her below.
Methinks it is down-right madness to waste any part of time in seeking after things impossible to be attain'd; or if attain'd could be of no real service:—a married woman, above all others, should avoid this error:—it best becomes her to center her whole studies within the compass of her own walls,—to enquire no farther than into the humours and inclinations of her husband and children, to the end she may know how to oblige those she finds in him, and rectify whatever is amiss in them, and not attempt to extend her speculations beyond her family, and those things which are entrusted to her management.
Mrs. Haywood's programme reads like a combination from Molière's Chrysal and Mrs. Barbauld.
In 1729 Swift wrote from Dublin to Pope:
Mrs. Mary Barber (1690?-1757)
There are three citizens' wives in this town; one of them whose name is Grierson, a Scotch book-seller's wife. She is a very good Latin and Greek scholar, and has lately published a fine edition of Tacitus, with a Latin dedication to the Lord Lieutenant; and she writes Carmina Anglicana non Contemnenda. The second is one Mrs. Barber, wife to a woolen draper, who is our chief poetess, and, upon the whole, has no ill genius. I fancy I have mentioned her to you formerly. The last is the bearer hereof, and the wife of a surly rich husband, who checks her vein; whereas Mrs. Grierson is only well to pass, and Mrs. Barber, as it becomes the chief poetess, is but poor. The bearer's name is Sykins. She has a very good taste of poetry, has read much, and, as I hear, has writ one or two things with applause, which I never saw, except about six lines she sent me unknown, with a piece of sturgeon, some years ago, on my birthday. Can you show such a triumfeminate in London?[316]
Soon after Swift added Mrs. Pilkington to his list of Dublin writers, but it still remains a triumfeminate, because we hear no more of Mrs. Sykins, the surly rich husband having apparently been successful in checking her vein. Her proposed visit to Pope was also a failure. She went to Twickenham and delivered Swift's letter, but, for some unknown reason, returned to London two hours before the time Pope had appointed to receive her. His irritation found expression in the reference to "an Irish poetess" as among his troublesome visitors in one version of The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.[317]
Mrs. Mary Barber would hardly be so much as a name to-day were it not for Swift. He first met her in about the year 1729, and from that time to 1736 letters to and from him have much to say concerning her career. She was then nearly forty, most of her poems existed in manuscript, she was already something of a celebrity in Dublin, and her one desire was a subscription publication of her work. In pursuance of this wish she went to London late in 1730 and Swift sent kindly letters in her behalf to several of his London friends. In the summer of 1731 a mysterious letter to the Queen, purporting to be from Swift, contained this passage: "Mrs. Barber, the best female poet of this or perhaps any age, is now in your majesty's capital; known to Lady Hertford, Lady Torrington, Lady Walpole, etc.; a woman whose genius is honoured by every man of genius in this kingdom, and either honoured or envied by every man of genius in England."[318] Pope sent a copy of this letter to Swift, who immediately and indignantly, in letters to Pope and the Countess of Suffolk, disavowed it. Such a letter, he said, would be "a folly so transcendent, that no man could be guilty of, who was not fit for Bedlam." In his letter to Pope Swift said of Mrs. Barber:
Dr. Delany has been long her protector; and he, being many years my acquaintance, desired my good office for her, and brought her several times to the deanery. I knew she was poetically given, and, for a woman, had a sort of genius that way. She appeared very modest and pious, and I believe was sincere; and wholy turned to poetry. I did conceive her journey to England was on the score of her trade, being a woollen-draper, until Dr. Delany said, she had a design of printing her poems by subscription, and desired I would befriend her: which I did, chiefly by your means, the doctor still urging me on: upon whose request I writ to her two or three times, because she thought my countenancing her might be of use. Lord Carteret very much befriended her, and she seems to have made her way not ill.[319]
The perpetrator of the forged letter and the purpose in sending it to the Queen have never been discovered, but the irritation arising from it might well have destroyed Swift's interest in Mrs. Barber's subscription list. He apparently recognized, however, that she was innocent of offense and continued his efforts in her behalf. Dr. Arbuthnot writes that he has shown "as much civility as he could" to Mrs. Barber.[320] Gay has "made a visit to Mrs. Barber."[321] Lady Betty Germain says Mrs. Barber "goes on in her subscription very well."[322] But the list was incomplete by the summer of 1732 and dragged slowly on till 1734 in spite of the aid of Mr. Barber, Lord Mayor of London, Mrs. Worsley, Mrs. Cæsar, Mrs. Conduitt, Miss Kelly, Lord Carteret, Lord Orrery, and the Duchess of Queensberry, all of whom in response to applications from Swift wrote to him concerning the progress of Mrs. Barber's affairs. In 1733 Mrs. Conduitt wrote that "the town had already been so long invited into the subscription that most people had already refused or accepted."[323] It was not till 1734 that the list was considered long enough to make publication safe.
Swift crowned his service by writing a dedicatory letter to Lord Orrery. In this letter he spoke of Mrs. Barber as follows:
She desireth your protection on account of her wit and good sense, as well as of her humility, her gratitude, and many other virtues. I have read most of her poems; and believe your Lordship will observe, that they generally contain something new and useful, tending to the reproof of some vice or folly, or recommending some virtue. She never writes on a subject with general unconnected topics, but always with a scheme and method driving to some particular end: wherein many writers in verse, and of some distinction, are so often known to fail. In short, she seemeth to have a true poetical genius, better cultivated than could be expected, either from her sex, or the scene she hath acted in, as the wife of a citizen. Yet I am assured, that no woman was ever more useful to her husband in the way of his business. Poetry hath only been her favorite amusement; for which she hath one qualification that I wish all good poets possess'd a share of; I mean, that she is ready to take advice, and submit to have her verse corrected, by those who are generally allow'd to be the best judges.[324]
But for the persistent efforts of Swift the subscription would never have been completed. Yet Mrs. Barber had gained incidentally such a retinue of supporting friends that her poems were republished in 1735 and 1736. There was apparently a touch of personal venom in the passage where Mrs. Pilkington chronicles the generous aid given Mrs. Barber and emphasizes the final small success of the poems:
Mrs. Barber ... was at this time writing a volume of Poems, some of which I fancy might, at this Day, be seen in the Cheesemungers, Chandlers, Pastry-cooks, and Second-hand Book-sellers' Shops: However, dull as they were, they certainly would have been much worse, but that Dr. Delany frequently held what he called a Senatus Consultum, to correct these undigested materials; at which were present sometimes the Dean, (in the Chair) but always Mrs. Grierson, Mr. Pilkington, the Doctor, and myself.[325]
A poem in which they were summoned to one of these meetings began:
Mighty Thomas a solemn Senatus I call,
To consult for Saphira, so come one and all.
In 1736 Mrs. Barber was again in financial straits. A scheme for letting lodgings, and another scheme for selling Irish linens at Bath having proved impracticable, she made a final appeal to Swift. Dr. King of Oxford and Mrs. Cleland had spoken so warmly of Swift's Treatise on Polite Conversation that many people wished to see it, and Lady Worsley with many other of Mrs. Barber's patronesses urged her to ask Swift to let her publish it for her own benefit. After apologies for asking such a favor she says:
I humbly beseech you, sir, if you do not think it proper not to be offended with me for asking it; for it was others, that out of kindness to me, put me upon it. They said you made no advantage for yourself, by your writings; and that, since you honoured me with your protection, I had all the reason in the world to think it would be a pleasure to you, to see me in easy circumstances; that everybody would gladly subscribe for anything Dr. Swift wrote; and indeed, I believe in my conscience, it would be the making of me.[326]
Dean Swift presented her with the copy and the sale proved advantageous.
The career of a mediocre writer like Mrs. Barber would hardly justify chronicling were it not for the interesting exemplification it offers of the system of patronage. Swift and his influential friends manifest no particular interest in Mrs. Barber's "moral and not inelegant verse," but responsibility for her welfare seems to have been accepted by them without demur, nor does she seem to have felt any hesitancy about accepting any aid that might be forthcoming.
The most vivid introduction to Mrs. Grierson comes from the pen of her early friend Mrs. Pilkington:
Mrs. Constantia Grierson (1706?-33)
About two years before this a young Woman of about eighteen years of age, was brought to my Father, by a Stationer to be by him instructed in Midwifery.[327] She was Mistress of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, understood the mathematicks, as well as most men. And what made these extraordinary Talents yet more surprizing was, that her Parents were poor illiterate Country People; so that her learning appeared like the Gift poured out on the Apostles, of speaking all languages, without the Pains of Study; or, like the intuitive Knowledge of Angels: Yet in as much as the Power of Miracles is ceased; we must allow she used human Means for such great and excellent Acquirements: And yet in a long Friendship and Familiarity with her, I could never obtain a satisfactory Account from her on this Head; only she said, "she had received some little Instruction from the Minister of the Parish, when she could spare time from her Needlework, to which she was closely kept by her Mother." She wrote elegantly both in Verse and Prose; and some of the most delightful Hours I ever past, were in the Conversation of this female Philosopher.
My Father readily consented to accept her as a Pupil; and gave her a general Invitation to his Table, so that she and I were seldom asunder. My Parents were well pleased with our Intimacy, as her Piety was not inferior to her Learning. Whether it was owing to her own Desire, or the Envy of those who survived her, I know not; but of her various and beautiful Writings except one Poem of her's in Mrs. Barber's Works, I have never seen any published; 't is true, as her turn was chiefly to philosophical or divine Subjects, they might not be agreeable to the present Taste.[328]
A eulogy of Mrs. Grierson was written by Henry Brooke (1703?-1783) the author of a tragedy, Gustavus Vasa, and various popular novels, in a poem on "The Art of Printing," and an account of her, derived from his notes, was published in Brookiana in 1804.
Mr. Brooke has celebrated the learning, piety, and virtue, of Mrs. Grierson, in a poem which he wrote on the Art of Printing. This lady was born in the city of Kilkenny. Such is the vanity of man, that he thinks he pays a sufficient compliment to woman, when he says, she has a masculine mind, when, in truth, it is known that there are many females on record, who have rivalled the lords of the creation in every branch of science, and department of learning. In this constellation the name of Mrs. Grierson will shine with increasing luster. Her father observed, that his daughter, while yet a child, was very fond of books, and not-withstanding his circumstances were narrow, he was determined to furnish her with all those that he thought were suited to her years; but he soon found, to his great joy, that her capacity was not to be measured by her years, it flew before them; and that her genius and inclination would triumph over every difficulty, even without the aid of a master. In a time that is almost too short to be mentioned, she was allowed by competent judges, to be a perfect mistress of the Greek and Roman tongues; and whilst other young women were proud of carrying the keys of closets, etc., she carried the keys of science, which she unlocked and surveyed, not with a transient eye, but with the warmth and constancy of one that fell in love with their beauties, and could duly appreciate their charms, so that all her attainments may be said to have been dictated by nature, aided by laudable curiosity and industry. She was early married to George Grierson, Esq., the king's printer. As he had a good library, she had an opportunity of indulging her literary pursuits.[329]
After her marriage Mrs. Grierson carried on her studies with such ardor that at twenty-one she brought out an edition of Terence and at twenty-three an edition of Tacitus. When she died at twenty-seven, she left a partially completed edition of Sallust. Mrs. Barber says that she also wrote an unpublished Abridgment of the History of England. Her Tacitus has received high praise. Dr. Harwood, a learned bibliographer, commented on it in the following terms:
This is one of the best edited books ever delivered to the world. Mrs. Grierson was a lady possessed of singular erudition, and had an elegance of taste and solidity of judgment, which justly rendered her one of the most wonderful as well as amiable of her sex. Prefixed to this edition of Tacitus, is a dedication to Lord Carteret, in most elegant Latinity.[330]
Mrs. Grierson also wrote occasional verse a few specimens of which appear in Mrs. Pilkington's Memoirs, in Poems by Eminent Ladies, and in Mrs. Barber's edition of her own poems. Mrs. Barber in her Preface praised Mrs. Grierson and gave many of the facts used by later writers. Mr. Ballard was anxious to give a full account of Mrs. Grierson, and he wrote in 1747 to Mrs. Barber for further information. "I likewise," says Mr. Ballard, "got the same friend to apply to a learned and eminent dignitary in the church in Ireland; one who is thoroughly acquainted with all the various circumstances of her life and is every way qualified for the performance." The eminent churchman promised an account of her life, but it never came to hand, so Mr. Ballard was obliged to content himself with a general eulogy. He says, "If Heaven had spared her life, and blessed her with health, which she wanted for some years before her death, there is good reason to think she would have made as great a figure in the learned world, as any of her sex are recorded to have done." Mrs. Grierson, "the learned Nymph Whom Curiosity engaged every Person to see,"[331] was on intimate terms with Swift, Thomas Sheridan, and Dr. Delany, and it is singular that a more exact account of her life should not have been preserved.
Lætitia van Lewen Pilkington (1712-50)
Lætitia Pilkington, the daughter of Dr. Van Lewen, a physician of Dublin, was about twenty-two years younger than Mrs. Barber, but Mrs. Barber's work came so late in her life and Mrs. Pilkington was so precocious that they were in effect poetical contemporaries. Lætitia's love for literature and her lively mind were in evidence before she was five. She thus describes the beginning of her education:
My mother strictly followed Solomon's Advice, in never sparing the Rod; insomuch that I have frequently been whipt for looking blue of a frosty Morning; and whether I deserved it or not, I was sure of Correction every Day of my life.
From my earliest Infancy I had a Disposition to Letters; but my Eyes being weak after the Small-pox, I was not permitted to look at a Book; my Mother regarding more the Beauty of my Face, than the Improvement of my Mind; neither was I allowed to learn to read: This Restraint, as it generally happens, made me but more earnest in the Pursuit of what I imagined must be so delightful. Twenty times a Day have I been corrected, for asking what such and such Letters spelt; my Mother used to tell me the Word, accompanying it with a good Box on the Ear, which, I suppose, imprinted it on my Mind.... I do assure you, it had this Effect on me, that I never forgot what was once told me; and quickly arrived at my desired Happiness, being able to read before she thought I knew all my Letters; but this Pleasure I was obliged to enjoy by Stealth with Fear and Trembling.
I was at this Time about five Years of Age; and my Mother being one Day abroad, I had happily laid hold on Alexander's Feast and found something in it so charming, that I read it aloud; but how like a condemned Criminal did I look, when my Father, softly opening his Study-door, took me in the very Fact; I dropt my Book and burst into Tears, begging Pardon and promising never to do so again: But my Sorrow was soon dispelled, when he bade me not to be frightened, but read to him, which to his great Surprize, I did very distinctly, and without hurting the Beauty of the Numbers. Instead of the whipping, of which I stood in dread, he took me up in his Arms, and kissed me, giving me a whole Shilling, as a Reward, and told me, "He would give me another as soon as I got a Poem by Heart," which he put into my Hand, and proved to be Mr. Pope's sacred Eclogue; which Task I performed before my Mother returned Home. They were both astonished at my Memory, and from that Day forward, I was permitted to read as much as I pleased; only my Father took care to furnish me with the best, and politest Authors; and took Delight in explaining to me, whatever, by Reason of my tender Years, was above my Capacity of Understanding.
But chiefly was I charmed and ravished with the Sweets of Poetry; all my Hours were dedicated to the Muses; and, from a Reader, I quickly became a Writer; I may truly say with Mr. Pope,
I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came.
My Performances had the good Fortune to be looked on as extraordinary for my Years; and the greatest and wisest Men in the Kingdom did not disdain to hear the Prattle of the little Muse, as they called me, even in my Childish Days. But as I approached towards Womanhood a new Scene opened to me; and by the Time I had looked on thirteen Years, I had almost as many Lovers.
At seventeen Lætitia married a penniless Irish parson, Mr. Matthew Pilkington. Soon after their marriage they became well known in the Dublin literary set. Constantia Grierson who was the first to congratulate Lætitia on her marriage, and who witnessed the cruel treatment the couple received from Mrs. Van Lewen, introduced them to Dr. Delany who befriended them. Through Dr. Delany they met Swift, who was much taken by the "little poetical parson and his littler poetical wife." He called them "The Mighty Thomas Thumb and her Serene Highness of Lilliput,"[332] and for a short time they were evidently much at the deanery. The most famous portions of her Memoirs have to do with Swift. His early biographers were apparently unwilling to own how much of their vivid, picturesque material came from a source so little esteemed, but Mr. Craik credits Mrs. Pilkington with "a picture of the Dean which is probably more true to the life than many that are more pretentious."[333] The young lady's wit, vivacity, courage, and independent mind brought a new and piquant element into Swift's life. He scolded her till she fled in tears, but at his imperious summons she always came back in new, adoring subjection. On one occasion, after an exceptionally severe castigation, he wrote sharply but with an underlying compliment: "You must shake off the Leavings of your Sex. If you cannot keep a Secret, and take a Chiding, you will quickly be out of my Sphere. Corrigible People are to be chid; those who are otherwise, may be very safe from any Lectures of mine: I should rather choose to indulge them in their Follies, than attempt to set them right."[334] Usually her wit could turn an impending quarrel into some sort of gay banter. On one occasion Swift began to reprimand her for having copied out one of his manuscript poems. But she interrupted, saying she did not copy it, but knew it by heart from one reading. Whereupon there ensued a memory contest. The test given her was from Shakespeare, all of whose works she said she could repeat. "The Line he first gave me, he had purposely picked out for its Singular Oddness: But [sic] rancours in the Vessel of my Peace. Macbeth. I readily went on with the whole Speech, and did so several times, that he tried me with the different Plays. The Dean then took down Hudibras, and ordered me to examine him in it, as he had done me in Shakespeare; and, to my great surprize, I found he remembered every Line from Beginning to End of it."[335]
When Swift first saw little Mrs. Pilkington as a bride he exclaimed, "What, this poor little Child married! God help her, she is early in Trouble."[336] The words were prophetic, for the troubles began very soon. They were engendered by literary jealousy, for Mr. Pilkington was a poet on his own account. Compliments to the wife became as wormwood to the husband, especially when such compliments were accompanied by frank depreciation of his own talents. Swift once put a question to Mrs. Pilkington and received her answer. Mr. Pilkington then entered the room and was asked the same question and gave an unsatisfactory answer. "P-x on you for a Dunce," said the Dean. "Were your Wife and you to sit for a Fellowship, I would give her one, sooner than admit you a Sizar." From that time on Mr. Pilkington viewed his wife "with scornful yet with jealous eyes."[337]
On another occasion the two wrote odes in imitation of Horace. Angered at her success Mr. Pilkington told her that a Needle was more becoming to a Woman's Hand than a Pen, and was placated only when the lady consigned her own ode to the flames and highly praised his. Her comment is: "And here let me seriously advise every Lady, who has the Misfortune to be poetically turned, never to marry a Poet.... If a Man cannot bear his Friend should write, much less can he endure it in his Wife; it seems to set them too much on a Level with their Lords and Masters; and this I take to be the true Reason why even Men of Sense discountenance Learning in Women, and commonly choose for Mates the most illiterate and stupid of the Sex; and bless their Stars their Wife is not a Wit."[338] Jealousy was, however, the least of Mr. Pilkington's faults. He soon proved himself "the arrantest rogue in England." The action he brought against his wife for divorce was not sustained by the courts, but the outcome of it was that he abandoned her and her two children, and she was left penniless. She went to London where she lived a life compounded of misfortunes and misdemeanors.
In the Memoirs she gives in extenso the various expedients whereby she tried to get a living. One of the most successful was as a public letter-writer for which she issued the following card:
Letters written here on any Subject, except on the Law, Price Twelvepence; Petitions also Drawn at the same Rate. Mem. Ready Money, no Trust.[339]
Under cover of getting subscriptions for the Memoirs, she really lived on the charities of the charitable and what she euphemistically termed "contributions from the great." Colley Cibber[340] especially befriended her and urged her to push forward the Memoirs. But spite of all aid her course was downward. At one time she was even imprisoned for debt.[341] On her release she tried to keep a print and pamphlet shop,[342] but failed. And finally she wandered back to Dublin where she died at thirty-eight.
The one book by which Mrs. Pilkington is known is her Memoirs, the three volumes of which appeared in 1748. In 1754 a third edition appeared with an additional volume by her son. Shortly after her death there appeared a compilation entitled The Celebrated Mrs. Pilkington's Jests; or, The Cabinet of Wit and Humour. In the Memoirs the early happy life in Dublin and the later tricks and shifts and intrigues of the London life are described with equal frankness. The result was a tarnished fame as a woman, but an undisputed reputation as a clever writer. When the Earl of Chesterfield wondered that she could write English so well, she sent word to his lordship that Dr. Swift had been her tutor.
As a literary critic Mrs. Pilkington is especially severe on the immorality of some contemporary women writers. Speaking of a lady who had refused to subscribe to her book she said:
She would have purchased my Book sooner than the Bible, to indulge her private Meditations, Especially if I had the wicked Art of painting up Vice in attractive Colours, as too many of our Female Writers have done, to the Destruction of Thousands, amongst whom Mrs. Manly and Mrs. Haywood deserve the foremost Rank.
But what extraordinary Passions these Ladies may have experienced, I know not; far be such Knowledge from a Modest Woman: Indeed Mrs. Haywood seems to have dropped her former luscious Stile, and, for Variety presents us with the insipid: Her Female Spectators are a Collection of trite Stories, delivered to us in stale and worn-out Phrases: Bless'd Revolution!
Yet of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence
To tire the Patience, than mislead the Sense.
And here give me leave to observe, that amongst the Ladies that have taken up the Pen, I never met with but two who deserved the Name of a Writer; the first is Madam Dacier, whose Learning Mr. Pope, while he is indebted to her for all the notes on Homer, endeavoured to depreciate; the second is Mrs. Catherine Philips, the matchless Orinda, celebrated by Mr. Cowley, Lord Orrery, and all the Men of Genius who lived in her Time.
I think this incomparable Lady was one of the first Refiners of the English Numbers. I cannot, except my own Country-woman Mrs. Grierson, find out another female Writer, whose Works are worth reading; she indeed had a happy and well-improved Genius!
The last glimpse we have of Mrs. Pilkington is most effective in the dramatic contrast it presents. On Thursday, April 12, 1750, John Wesley wrote in his Dublin Diary: "I breakfasted with one of the Society, and found she had a lodger I little thought of. It was the famous Mrs. Pilkington, who soon made an excuse for following me up stairs. I talked with her seriously about an hour: we then sung, 'Happy Magdalene.' She appeared to be exceedingly struck: how long the impression may last, God knows."[343]
Mrs. Mary Davys (fl. 1725)
Mrs. Mary Davys wrote a comedy produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1716, and a didactic novel, The Reform'd Coquet, which appeared in 1724. Her Works, in two volumes, appeared in 1725. Miss Morgan says that the young lord who is the hero of The Reform'd Coquet, is one of the earliest examples in fiction of "the perfect prig of which Sir Charles Grandison is the consummate example."[344] She was the wife of the Reverend Peter Davys, master of the free school of St. Patrick's, Dublin, so she came into the circle of Swift. Dr. Ewen of Cambridge formerly had thirty-six letters from Swift to Mr. and Mrs. Davys. Mr. Davys died in 1698 and Mrs. Davys was "left to her own endeavours." In 1713 she wrote to Swift complaining that he had not written to her for four years. "I have honestly told her," he said, "it was my way never to write to those whom I am never likely to see, unless I can serve them, which I cannot her, etc. Davis the schoolmaster's widow."[345] She was not so fortunate as Mrs. Grierson and Mrs. Pilkington.
Mrs. Mary Mitchell Collyer (1716?-1762?)
Mrs. Collyer's publications were anonymous and she has been hardly more than a name in literary history. Recent investigations have, however, shown her to be of genuine importance, not merely as a writer of considerable ability, but especially as an author in whom romantic tendencies found early and well-defined statement.[346] Mrs. Collyer was the wife of Joseph Collyer, a compiler, translator, and publisher to whom her books have sometimes been attributed. Her son was Joseph Collyer, an engraver of merit. Mr. Collyer's income was apparently small, for Mrs. Collyer wrote for the support of her family. In the Dedication to her Death of Abel she said: "Placed by the hand of Providence at an humble distance from the Great, my cares and pleasures are concentrated within the narrow limits of my little family, and it is in order to contribute to the support and education of my children, I have taken up my pen."
The seven works attributed to Mrs. Collyer fall between 1743 and 1763. It is unnecessary to consider these works here in detail except so far as may serve to indicate their historical significance. For this purpose we may take up first the last of her books, the translations from the German, for it is on these that her modicum of fame has rested. When Mrs. Collyer translated Gesner's Der Tod Abels in 1761 and began Klopstock's Messiah the year after, she was a pioneer in a new kind of learning. The professed linguists seldom included German in their list, and German literature was practically unknown.[347] Mr. Haney, in his study of "German Literature in England before 1790," gives William Taylor of Norwich as "the first literary critic to attempt a systematic introduction of German literature into England," and Mr. Taylor's period of literary activity did not begin until 1790. Of the sporadic translations before that period, aside from scientific and theological works and a few hymns, Mr. Haney cites but two anterior to Mrs. Collyer's Death of Abel. There were few more popular works in the eighteenth century than this translation. There were eighteen editions in twenty-one years, and many later editions. It satisfied alike the pious reader and the lover of fiction. The Quarterly Review for 1814[348] says: "No book of foreign growth has ever become so popular in England as the Death of Abel. Those publishers whose market lies among that portion of the people who are below what is called the public, but form a far more numerous class, include it regularly among their 'sacred classics': it has been repeatedly printed at country presses with worn types and on coarse paper; and it is found at country fairs, and in the little shops of remote towns almost as certainly as the Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe." Miss Hughes quotes numerous other testimonies to the same effect.
This remarkable popularity was due, of course, to the original author rather than to the translator. Mrs. Collyer's version received high contemporary praise, but according to modern ideas it would be counted loose and inaccurate. Miss Reed characterizes the style as unnatural and affected, and she thinks that while the translation made Gesner widely known, it in reality injured his fame. But the excellence of the work, or its defects, are not so significant in a study of Mrs. Collyer as are the facts that she was sufficiently well trained in German to give even a fairly adequate version, and that she should be the first to present a German poet of the new school to an English public.
Mrs. Collyer died before completing her translation of Klopstock and her husband carried it to a conclusion. He said in his Preface that his wife's fatal illness was brought on by her agitation of mind in connection with her work on the Death of Abel.
Mrs. Collyer's Christmas Box is another instance of pioneer work. Its full descriptive title is A Christmas Box, Consisting of Moral Stories, adapted to the Capacities of Little Children and calculated to give them early impressions of Piety and Virtue. Two volumes. Adorned with cuts. The Christmas Box and Miss Fielding's Little Female Academy appeared in 1749, five years after Newbery's first child's book, The Little Pretty Pocket Book, of 1744. In 1745 he brought out three volumes of The Circles of the Sciences, and in 1751-52 The Lilliputian Magazine. Thus a new class of literature was definitely started, with Mrs. Collyer and Miss Fielding as important contributors to the spread of the idea at its inception.[349]
Two of Mrs. Collyer's novels are translations from the French, and are of slight importance in comparison with her one original novel the full title of which is Felicia to Charlotte: Being Letters from a Young Lady in the Country, to her Friend in Town. Containing A Series of the most interesting Events, interspersed with Moral Reflections; chiefly tending to prove that the Seeds of Virtue are implanted in the Mind of Every Reasonable Being. Volume one appeared in 1744 and a second volume in 1749. Miss Hughes in her analysis of this novel[350] points out various elements that forecast ideas not dominant till some decades later. It was a novel of purpose, written for ethical and religious ends, and as such antedates John Buncle by twelve years. It is also a novel of feeling. Its hero, Lucius, must wait for Sterne before he can find his true kin. The courtship of Lucius is punctuated with sighs and tears, with the overwrought emotions of a sensitive heart. Steele's Conscious Lovers offers an early sentimental parallel, but the type was not fully developed till in the seventies. The first volume ends with the marriage of Felicia and Lucius. In the second volume the happy pair, now quite sane and sensible, are able to discuss with fluency and precision their ideas on the nurture and education of children. This volume was thus a pedagogic romance of the sort that became popular after Rousseau.
The most interesting of all the new ideas brought forward by Felicia and Lucius is their love of nature and of country life. They choose the country as a place of residence and justify their choice on rational grounds. And Mrs. Collyer has a surprising fullness and ardor of description, and a sincere joy in nature not equaled in fiction before John Buncle (1756-66), and she is a decade earlier.[351] It was only in poetry or in philosophical theory that Mrs. Collyer could have found sources for her literary use of nature. Spenser, Milton, and Thomson were well known to her and they doubtless influenced her.
Connected with this love of nature are Mrs. Collyer's ideas on gardening. When she and Lucius bought their estate it was in the formal style, but they at once changed it to make it appear as much like nature as possible. In this Mrs. Collyer was not entirely original, for the Spectator and the Guardian, Pope, Switzer, and Batty Langley had decried the stiff regularity of the formal garden, and Kent's great gardens came between 1730 and 1748. But Mrs. Collyer promptly took up the new ideas and she ranks among their early defenders.
Mrs. Collyer is very interesting because she showed herself in these various ways so sensitive to new ideas. She seemed to know what was in the air even before it had had any but the most casual expression. She sat down very modestly and with much trepidation to write anonymous translations and novels for the support of her family, but she was, quite unconsciously it may be, treading the path of the pioneer.
Sarah Fielding (1710-1768)
Sarah Fielding's first and most important novel, The Adventures of David Simple in search of a Faithful Friend (1744), received extraordinary commendation from the two contemporary authors whose judgments might be counted authoritative, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. Fielding's satiric picture of Mrs. Western in Tom Jones is more than offset by his utterances in connection with his sister Sarah's books. When David Simple appeared, Joseph Andrews had been two years before the public, and it was natural that her popular little book should be attributed to Fielding. But when the second edition came out (also 1744) he took occasion to disavow his supposed authorship, and likewise to commend the book.
A third, and indeed the strongest, reason which hath drawn me into print, is to do justice to the real and sole author of this little book; who, notwithstanding the many excellent observations dispersed through it, and the deep knowledge of human nature it discovers, is a young woman; one so nearly and dearly allied to me, in the highest friendship as well as relation, that if she had wanted any assistance of mine I would have been as ready to have given it to her as I would have been just to my word in owning it; but, in reality, two or three hints which arose on the reading it, and some little direction as to the conduct of the second volume, much the greater part of which I never saw till in print, were all the aid she received from me. Indeed, I believe there are few books in the world so absolutely the author's own as this....
And as the faults of this work want very little excuse, so its beauties want as little recommendation; though I will not say but they may sometimes stand in need of being pointed out to the generality of readers. For as the merit of this work consists in a vast penetration into human nature, a deep and profound discernment of all the mazes, windings, and labyrinths, which perplex the heart of man to such a degree that he is himself often incapable of seeing through them; and as this is the greatest, noblest, and rarest of all the talents which constitute a genius; so a much larger share of this talent is necessary even to recognize these discoveries when they are laid before us than fall to the share of a common reader....
As to the characters here described, I shall repeat the saying of one of the greatest men in this age,—"That they were as wonderfully drawn by the writer as they were by Nature herself." There are many strokes in Orguiel, Spatter, Varnish, Levif, the Balancer, and some others which would have shined in the pages of Theophrastus, Horace, or La Bruyère. Nay, there are some touches which I will venture to say might have done honour to the pencil of the immortal Shakespeare himself.[352]
For a continuation of David Simple in 1747,[353] Fielding wrote a dedication and five letters. In this Preface he gave his opinion on learning for women:
The objection to the sex of the author hardly requires an answer; it will be chiefly advanced by those who derive their opinion of women, very unfairly, from the fine ladies of the age; whereas, if the behavior of their counterparts, the beaux, was to denote the understanding of men, I apprehend the conclusion would be in favour of the women, without making a compliment to that sex. I can, of my own knowledge and from my own acquaintance, bear testimony to the possibility of those examples which history gives of women eminent for the highest endowments and faculties of mind. I shall only add an answer to the same objection, relating to David Simple, given by a lady of very high rank, whose quality, is however, less an honour to her than her understanding. "So far," said she, "from doubting David Simple to be the performance of a woman, I am well convinced it could not have been written by a man."[354]
Miss Fielding's own views on the woman question are slightly indicated in this story. In the course of his peregrinations David Simple meets the charming Miss Cynthia, who tells him the story of her life and leads him to reflect upon the irritation and unhappiness which result from the undue restrictions imposed upon women. Miss Cynthia had always been subject to repression. Whenever she asked questions she was told, such things were not proper for girls of her age to know. She was not allowed to read, for Miss Cynthia must not inquire too far into things lest it should turn her brain. She was to mind her needlework and such things as are useful to women. Reading and poring over books would never get her a husband. Cynthia's restlessness doubtless well represents the state of mind of many a contemporary girl eager for learning, but not able to escape from the feminine conventions.
In 1749 Miss Fielding published a work quite new in form and intention. It was entitled The Governess; Or, The Little Female Academy. Calculated for the Entertainment and Instruction of Young Ladies in their Education. It was so popular that a seventh edition appeared in 1760. This little book represents the happenings of nine days in the school of Mrs. Teachum, a gentlewoman who taught young ladies "in Reading, Writing, Working, and in all proper Forms of Behavior." The oldest of her nine young ladies was fourteen, the youngest was six, and the others between six and twelve. The book was professedly written, not for the Mrs. Teachums of the age, but for little girls under twelve. And the instruction embodied was thrown into story form to make it more acceptable to young readers. I know of no earlier similar attempt. Such books as had been written for children were serious and religious in tone. But Miss Fielding's book was lively and entertaining. Each little girl told the history of her life and analyzed her adventures and emotions, particularly her faults and their outcome, in true romance style. But all is kept pretty near to a child's understanding. And there are some occurrences—as a fracas in which the genteel young ladies "fought and scratched and tore like young cats," for the possession of an apple redder and bigger than its companions in the basket, a collation at a dairy farm, sewing-parties in an arbor with Miss Jenny Peace, the fourteen-year old girl, as story-teller and as umpire in all disputes, that must have had extraordinary charm for young misses who had never before seen even a semblance of their own lives in print.
Miss Fielding's other works are of less significance except for her translation of Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates; with the Defence of Socrates before his Judges (1762), which indicates a knowledge of Greek more exact than was common in her day.
The most interesting fact in Miss Fielding's life is her close friendship with Richardson. She was one of the most ardent admirers of his work. She says of Clarissa: "When I read of her I am all sensation; my heart glows; I am overwhelmed; my only vent is tears.... Often have I reflected on my own vanity in daring but to touch the hem of her garment." In 1756 Richardson wrote to her:
Why did you not tell Lady Bradshaigh ... that you were my much-esteemed Sally Fielding, the author of David Simple? She knows my opinion of you, and of your writing powers.... I have just gone through your two vols. of Letters. Have re-perused them with great pleasure, and found many new beauties in them. What a knowledge of the human heart! Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother's knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours. His was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while your's was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.[355]
The most popular work by Miss Fielding was The Little Female Academy. David Simple, to be sure, went through two editions in 1744. But the indications of contemporary recognition are not at all commensurate with the praise from her brother and Richardson and other high authorities. Of foreign appreciation of her work there are more proofs. David Simple was translated into German[356] in 1746 and into French in 1755,[357] and The Countess of Gräfin was translated into German in 1761.[358] The French translator of David Simple commented on the approbation générale which this romance had found.[359]
Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804)
Charlotte Rumsey was the daughter of Colonel James Rumsey, Lieutenant-Governor of New York. At fifteen she was sent to England as the protégé and probable heiress of an aunt. But the aunt became insane, and the girl was left penniless. The only facts that emerge concerning the difficult years before her marriage to Mr. Lennox in about 1748 have to do with her very mediocre career as an actress.
Except for a volume of poems in 1747, it was not till after her marriage that Mrs. Lennox came forward prominently as an author. Her two-volume novel, The Life of Harriet Stuart, Written by Herself, appeared in 1751. But in literary circles she was evidently well known before this, for Johnson was her especial friend. When her manuscript was ready for publication, he arranged a celebration at his Club. The festivities were to last all night. Mrs. Lennox was ceremoniously crowned with laurel, and there was a magnificent hot apple-pie stuck with bay leaves.[360] This first novel is probably in part autobiographical inasmuch as the heroine, Harriet Stuart, is the daughter of a man of high official rank in America, and goes to England at fifteen to live with an aunt who becomes insane and leaves her penniless. But this is merely a slight framework for a series of love adventures. Miss Stuart's wit and beauty gather about her lovers of all varieties, army officers, sea-captains, pirates, merchants; and the alarming crises of her fate put her into close competition with Clarissa Harlowe herself. America, France, and England are the far-separated scenes of Miss Stuart's trials and victories, the emphasis being on her life in America. There would be a chance for some interesting local color in this representation of mid-eighteenth-century life in New York if the young lady could have spared a moment from her adventures to observe her surroundings. An Indian encampment, a visit to a fort, an escapade to a "farm," a midnight row on the Hudson, are mentioned, but with no comment. Towns and houses, roads, rivers, and seas, are but localities for love scenes, means of transit from one episode to another. The story is told with a deft manipulation of details and an easy fluency that would seem to indicate something of a previous literary apprenticeship. At any rate, in this novel she had found her medium, and she was soon ready with a tale that gave her genuine distinction. The Female Quixote appeared in 1752 with a Dedication written by Johnson, and it was reviewed by him in The Gentleman's Magazine for March. He said of it: "Mr. Fielding, however emulous of Cervantes, and jealous of a rival, acknowledges in his paper of the 24th, that in many instances, this copy excels the original, and though he has no connection with the author, he concludes his encomium on the work, by earnestly recommending it as a most extraordinary, and most excellent performance. 'It is,' says he, 'a work of true humour, and cannot fail of giving a rational, as well as a very pleasing amusement, to a sensible reader, who will at once be instructed, and highly diverted.'"[361] Johnson's name is still more intimately connected with the book, for he wrote the chapter which has the heading, "Being in the author's opinion, the best chapter in this history."[362] Harriet Stuart reads like an echo of Richardson, but in The Female Quixote Mrs. Lennox strikes an original note. Comedy had already, a generation earlier, in Biddy Tipkin, made sport of the romance-reading girls of the day. But the satire was new in fiction. And it was carried out with a fullness and accuracy of details possible only to one who had herself been a traveler in enchanted realms. Mrs. Lennox must at some time have been as devoted to French fiction as even Dorothy Osborne and Mrs. Pepys in the preceding century. Her story is long-drawn-out and improbable, but the cleverness with which Arabella and Lucy parody Don Quixote and Sancho Panza gives the book a notable place among the English followers of Cervantes. The Spiritual Quixote (1773), a satire on the Methodists, and The Benevolent Quixote (1791), a satire on mawkish ideas of charity, are inferior in vivacity and interest to Mrs. Lennox's work.
In 1753-54 Mrs. Lennox brought out Shakespeare Illustrated; or, Novels and Histories on which the Plays are ... founded, collected and translated, an uncritical piece of work according to present standards, but historically significant as one of the earliest attempts to present Shakespeare's sources.[363] A two-volume novel, Henrietta, in 1758, was dramatized as a didactic comedy under the title The Sister,[364] and brought out at Covent Garden in 1769. Though Miss Mattocks played the chief part, and the Prologue and Epilogue were respectively by Colman and Goldsmith, the play met with but moderate success. In 1760-61 Mrs. Lennox edited The Ladies Museum, in which were illustrated articles on natural history written especially for ladies, philosophical discussions simplified for ladies, and continued stories of the love-adventure type evidently calculated for the same tastes. The most interesting character drawing is that of an incipient Mrs. Malaprop in the person of a Mrs. Gibbons.
If any annals were extant of Mrs. Lennox's life we should doubtless find records of continuous study. At least we constantly get new proofs of her learning. The Memoirs of M. de Bethune, Duke of Sully, in three volumes in 1756,[365] The Memoirs of the Countess Berci, in two volumes in the same year, and Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon, in 1757, show not only her mastery of French, but very steady application to intellectual tasks. In 1759 she had what might be considered her crowning honor as a learned lady. She was chosen to edit a translation of Brumoy's Greek Theatre. In collaboration with her were Dr. Johnson, Dr. Gregory Sharpe, Dr. Grainger, and John Bourrya, men of recognized standing as scholars.[366]
Mrs. Lennox lived forty-four years after the close of the period under discussion. But she belongs properly in the first half of the century because all her important work comes between 1750 and 1760. After a decade of exceptional literary activity she sinks into obscurity. In 1775 Dr. Johnson assisted in preparing proposals for the publication of her collected works, in three quarto volumes, by subscription. Had this plan been carried out there would doubtless have been preserved much interesting information concerning the social and literary life of an eminently successful mid-eighteenth-century bas bleu. From the facts at hand it is easy to see that she was countenanced by some of the best minds of her time. Her portrait was painted by Reynolds and engraved by Bartolozzi.
Miss Catharine Talbot (1721-1770)
In 1770 Miss Elizabeth Carter gathered together and published the Works of her friend Miss Catharine Talbot. There had been considerable urgency on the part of Miss Talbot's friends to secure such a publication during her lifetime, but she was too timid, and, though The Green Book in which she kept sketches and fragments, and "the considering drawer," constantly received accessions, her modest opinion of her own worth and an exaggerated dread of general criticism held her back from the ordeal of the printed page. But when the Works finally appeared they achieved immediate popularity. The Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week went through three editions the first year and there was a tenth edition in 1784. Of the Works the eighth edition appeared within forty years. The extravagant contemporary estimate of Miss Talbot as a moral and religious writer, as a supporter of Christian ethics, can awake only surprise in the modern reader. Even a reader whose mind has been subdued to second-class eighteenth-century didacticism finds Miss Talbot's moralizings pale and anæmic. But when we read her letters we come upon a much more attractive and vital personality. A letter descriptive of Mr. Browne Willis and his four daughters shows a gay spirit and a talent for minute observation and social satire of the Jane Austen type.[367]
From the age of five Miss Talbot lived in the family of Mr. Seeker, Bishop of Oxford and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Her spiritual and mental training were constantly under the supervision of the Archbishop, who loved her devotedly. And her education is particularly interesting as an illustration of the desultory and fragmentary character of the intellectual discipline provided for a girl of active mind, even in one of the best families. One advantage was hers from early life, and that was her association with the learned guests at the deanery where there was always an atmosphere of scholarly and serious discussion. And her position as a member of the Archbishop's family not only gave her entrance into the best social circles, but made it incumbent on her, as hostess or guest, to cultivate the amenities of life. But she did comparatively little in the way of exact studies. She was proficient in French and Italian, but she knew no Hebrew or Greek and but little Latin. She had tutors in geography and astronomy and found satisfaction in the conceptions opened up to her by these subjects. Of her drawing and painting for which she had considerable repute she wrote in 1745:
I learn of a good master but am much too impatient and too volatile to give half the time and application that are necessary to make anything tolerable, yet I undertake large pictures, like an inconsiderate goose as I am, and then have the mortification to leave them unfinished. This is actually the case with a fine holy family of Carlo Maratti's, which I began last winter (and two or three other pictures at the same time) in crayons, and which must now want the perfecting touches till February or March. At the same time I had undertaken to learn perspective of Mr. Wright. I hope from all these things I shall in time learn discretion at least, and not to be thus perpetually aiming de prendre la lune avec les dents.[368]
This letter was written when she was twenty-five. A Dialogue written at eighteen gives an earlier glimpse of her chaotic student life. This Dialogue is entitled "Enquiry how far Practice has kept pace with Intention."
What have you done, this Summer?
Rode, and laughed, and fretted.
What did you intend to do?
To learn geography, mathematics; decimal fractions and good humour: to work a screen, draw copies of two or three fine prints, and read abundance of history: to improve my memory and restrain my fancy: to lay out my time to the best advantage: to be happy myself, and make everybody else so. To read Voltaire's Newton, Whiston's Euclid, and Tillotson's Sermons.
Have you read nothing?
Yes: some of the Sermons; Mrs. Rowe's Works; The Tale of a Tub; a book of Dr. Watt's; L'Histoire du Ciel; Milton, and abundance of plays and idle books.
Archbishop Secker's household presents an agreeable picture of lettered leisure. During the evenings there are long sessions known as "the family readings." In 1751 they are reading Pope's Works, evidently in the recent nine-volume edition by Warburton. They are filled with mingled pride and shame as they reflect on his genius and his failings. They have read Mrs. Cockburn's defense of him and they love her for her zealous championship. But Pope is not their idol. All their hero worship, at least all of Miss Talbot's hero worship, goes to Richardson. She cannot subscribe to any criticism of him. In a discussion of one of his essays in The Rambler, Miss Carter's strictures bring a spirited protest from Miss Talbot:
He does not pretend to give a scheme (not an entire scheme) of female education, only to say how when well educated they should behave, in opposition to the racketing life of the Ranelagh-education misses of these our days. Do read it over again a little candidly. How can you ever imagine that the author of Clarissa has not an idea of what women may be, and ought to be.
Richardson and Miss Talbot were personal friends and he thought so highly of her judgment that when he contemplated creating the character of a perfect gentleman as the hero of Sir Charles Grandison, he consulted her concerning the traits of this superman. She in turn consulted Miss Carter, and when the book appeared she wrote to Miss Carter in great glee:
Oh! Miss Carter, did you ever call Pigmalion a fool, for making an image and falling in love with it ... and do you know that you and I are two Pigmalionesses? Did not Mr. Richardson ask us for some traits of his good man's character? And did we not give him some? And has not he gone and put these and his own charming ideas into a book and formed a Sir Charles Grandison?
Beside the evening readings there were leisurely literary picnics, where by some riverside they drank tea and read Madame de Sévigné's Letters and Miss Fielding. They read Mrs. Cockburn and Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Lennox, even the Memoirs of Mrs. Constantia Phillips, and the early verse of Miss Mulso. There is time for slow and meditative reading, and for interested comment and question, back and forth, by letter. It was a normal, unpretentious, and stimulating way to gain an acquaintance with contemporary literature. And the great classics were read, in translations, in the same manner. To read with a learned man like Archbishop Secker was in itself an education.
It is thus that Miss Talbot had all the environment of education with none of its disciplinary work. By twenty she was known as "the celebrated Miss Talbot" without any basis of actual achievement. She seems to have embodied an eighteenth-century ideal. Her religious beliefs were beyond cavil, her conduct irreproachable. She had an alert mind, wide interests, and considerable information on varied topics. She had a high social rank, and she recognized social obligations. She was affable, approachable, attentive. She had enough learning to give her distinction, but not enough even to threaten pedantry. And she exerted all her talents in home and church circles. She was not a Lætitia Pilkington writing scandal for daily bread, nor a Mary Astell protesting against the tyranny of man, nor an Elizabeth Elstob delving in unfashionable research. She awakened no antagonisms. She had the success and happiness that come from being entirely in accord with one's environment.[369]
Mary Leapor (1722-1746)
A few mediocre poetesses at the end of the period may be cursorily noticed because in their own day they attracted some attention. In Poems by Eminent Ladies Mary Leapor (1722-1746)[370] is given more space than any other author. And in these decorous pages she stands out as a distinct individuality. She is the daughter of a gardener, but no such elegant creature as Tennyson's Rose. She has work to do indoors and out, and her life is eminently prosaic. She has a plain face, an awkward figure, and non-descript clothes. But she has no quarrel with fate or her mirror. She seems to have been a shrewd, sensible young woman, vivacious, quick-witted, with no illusions, no sentimentality, no dreams. In her minor fashion she was a satirist of the Pope school. Of the seventeen books in the little library she had painfully gathered, the ones she valued most were by Pope and Dryden. She manages the heroic couplet with considerable correctness and ease and she follows Pope's method of illustrating a topic with verse portraits. Her closely studied country scenes suggest that Gay's Shepherd's Week must have been among her books. Considering her youth and contracted way of life, she had a remarkable insight into social foibles, but she had none of Swift's scorn of the human race nor of Pope's personal virulence. Her outlook on life was detached, tolerant, and amused.
Miss Mary Jones (fl. 1755)
In 1755, when Miss Mary Jones was included in Eminent Ladies, she was still living, and therefore the date of her birth was not given. But the editorial comment says that Oxford was her home, and "hence deservedly called the Seat of the Muses." Miss Jones corresponded with a maid of honor, had many intimacies among the nobility, and rejoiced in the friendship of Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Orange. Her poems had, therefore, especial opportunities to make their way. But the modest author long resisted the suggested publication of her works. She felt that these "accidental ramblings of her thoughts into rhyme" were of too slight value to be preserved in print. But she finally, in 1752, came forward with a volume which was greeted with high praise. The Monthly Review for 1752 began an Appreciation of her in the following flattering fashion: "To the applauded names of the ingenious Molly Leapor, and the truly admirable Mrs. Cockburn (see Review, the preceding volumes) we have now the pleasure to add that of Mrs. Jones; whose name will not be less an honour to her country, and to the republic of letters, than her amiable life and manner are to her own sex: to that sex whose natural charms alone are found sufficient to attract our tenderest regards; but which, when joined to those uncommon accomplishments and virtues this lady is mistress of, so justly command our highest admiration, and most ardent esteem." The Review considers her compositions in verse as "superior to those of any other of our female writers since Catherine Phillips" and her prose as "superior to any pieces of the kind that our own country has produced, from the pen of a woman." She was of a gay and vivacious temperament, and social by nature. Her interest in her friends' affairs brought forth many occasional poems. A spider frightens Charlot, Mrs. East's canary bird dies, a hare is sent to Mrs. Clayton, Lady Beauclerk desires an elegy in memory of her husband,—each incident receives poetical commemoration. Epistles on Patience, Desire, and Hope are addressed to her friends among the nobility.
Like Miss Leapor she is a satellite of Pope. She has studied him to such effect that phrases and whole lines from his poems occur in her verse, and to the best of her ability she copies his style. Her Epistle to Lady Bowyer is throughout curiously reminiscent of his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Her verse essays are loosely constructed amplifications of Pope's aphorism which she transforms into "Whatever is, is Best."
Mrs. Madan (fl. 1755)
Mrs. Madan ("formerly Miss Cowper") was living in 1755. She was reputed to have fine talents for poetry, an "extraordinary genius," in fact, but she could never be brought to publish any of her poems. She is therefore known now only by her translation of Abelard's Letter to Eloisa, a kind of companion piece to Pope's Eloisa to Abelard. It is smooth, well-expressed, and shows some sympathetic understanding of Abelard's emotions.
Miss Mary Masters (fl. 1755)
Miss Mary Masters, a native of Ottley near Leeds in Yorkshire, had an early taste for poetry, but she was "always brow-beat and discountenanced by her parents."[371] The chief poems by her in Eminent Ladies are trite paraphrases of the Psalms and need not detain us.
In 1755 she brought out by subscription Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions. The letters between her as Maria and various friends in 1755 are of considerable interest. The young ladies discuss, in the main, questions of love and marriage, but some letters at the end of the book concern themselves with the relative powers of men and women. "Miss ——" sustains the conventional view that they differ fundamentally, men having more strength of judgment, and women quicker apprehension. She says that no woman has been great as an orator, that the best women poets are inferior to Milton, and that men have always managed the government. Maria maintains that the difference is not in the faculties themselves, but in the training of the faculties and in opportunities for their use. She cites a young lady of twenty-two in France who had been admitted to the Academy of Science. And one entire letter is a eulogy of Italian learned ladies. She gives the name of Clelia Borromeo of Milan, counted by the Italians "the greatest mathematician their country has produced, except Galileo and Manfredi"; Gabriella Agnesi, also of Milan, skilled in algebraic computations; Countess Tullia Francesca Bizetti Imbonati, a "Lyrick Poetess," another Milanese lady; Laura Catterina Bassi, Professor of Experimental Philosophy in the University of Bologna, and many others. Maria is the earliest apologist for the advancement of women to make such definite and intelligent use of the learned Italian ladies as corroborative illustrations.[372]
Miss Mary Chandler (1687-1745)
Miss Mary Chandler (1687-1745), the daughter of a minister, was a popular poetess of Bath, where she had at eighteen set up a little shop. She was literary in her tastes and in spite of constant ill-health and the hard work entailed by her shop she found time for wide reading in poetry. She also wrote rhyming riddles and poems to her friends. She became a favorite among the gentry and the literary ladies in and about Bath, Lady Russell, the Duchess of Somerset, Mrs. Barber, and Elizabeth Rowe being among her friends. She often visited at great houses and her poems were handed about with much praise. She was finally advised to make a collection of these occasional verses and publish them. They appeared under the title A Description of Bath, and the book was so favorably received that it went through six editions by 1744, and a seventh and an eighth edition in 1755 and 1767. Our knowledge of Miss Chandler comes mainly from Cibber's Lives of the Poets. The account published by Cibber was written by Miss Chandler's brother Samuel.[373]
Mary Granville (Mrs. Delany) (1700-1788)
Mary Granville was sent at six to the private school of Mdlle. Puelle. From eight to seventeen she was educated at home according to the established programme for girls destined for marriage and social position. "Music, reading, writing, French, work, and whist" are the occupations she enumerates. At seventeen she was married to Alexander Pendarves, a match counted advantageous though the bridegroom was sixty and detested by the bride. After the wedding—"conducted with much pomp and misery"—there came seven years on an isolated estate where all the skill and patience of the young wife were called into action by the jealous fancies and the hypochondriac whims of her invalid husband. At twenty-four, a beautiful widow, she entered upon a gay period of London life. Socially a success she had many offers of marriage, but her affections were entirely centered upon Lord Baltimore. His impassioned love was not, however, equal to the strain put upon it by her small dowry, and he suddenly married a rich wife. After the long illness that followed this destruction of her hopes Mrs. Pendarves went to Ireland to recuperate. There she met Patrick Delany whom, years later, when she was forty-three, she married. The most satisfying years of her life came after this marriage. Dr. Delany belonged to the best literary set of Dublin, and he was in full accord with his wife's literary and artistic interests. For a quarter of a century her life was one of leisure, stimulating companionship, much reading and discussion, much social variety, and long hours of entertaining hand-work. After Dr. Delany's death in 1768 Mrs. Delany lived in an honored, dignified, but not inactive retirement. She was loved and visited by the King and Queen and by many devoted friends. There had gathered about her name a tradition of love and admiration. A sketch of her entitled "Maria," by Dr. Delany, does not exceed the general impression we get of her charm. He wrote:
Maria was early initiated into every art, with elegance and condition, that could form her into a fine lady, a good woman, and a good Christian. She read and wrote two languages correctly and judiciously. She soon became a mistress of her pen in every art to which a pen could be applied. She wrote a fine hand in the most masterly manner, she drew, and she designed with amazing correctness and skill....
With a person finely proportioned, she had a lovely face of great sweetness set off with a head of fair hair, shining and naturally curled, with a complexion which nothing could equal, in which the lilies and the roses contended for the mastery. Her eyes were bright ... indeed, I could never tell the colour they were of, but to the best of my belief they were what Solomon calls "Dove's eyes," and she is almost the only woman I ever saw whose lips were scarlet and her bloom beyond comparison.
Mr. Ballard dedicated the second part of the Memoirs of Learned Ladies to her as "the truest judge, and the brightest pattern of all the accomplishments which adorn her sex." Burke called her "the highest bred woman of the world and the woman of fashion of all ages."
These citations but faintly indicate the impression made by Mrs. Delany on her contemporaries. It is not, however, an impression sustained by any existing work of hers. The seventy-two pictures she painted were copies of old masters with occasional portraits of relatives and friends, and they were highly prized at the time, but no one of them was of sufficient excellence to secure permanent recognition. Her wide and diversified reading is evidenced by her letters which are full of references to the histories, novels, plays, criticism, and devotional works occupying her eager attention. She carried books on every journey. She read or was read to every spare moment. But none of this miscellaneous devotion to books resulted in anything like learning or even in a critically discriminating taste.
Her two real achievements were letter-writing and hand-work. Over a thousand of her letters have been published. They are lively and entertaining and are valuable for the study of mid-eighteenth-century social life. Especially vivid are her accounts of festivities. The rooms and their furnishings, the gowns and jewels of the ladies, the refreshments served, the guests and their idiosyncrasies, are effectively sketched in. There is humorous appreciation, but no touch of malice, and almost no gossip. The refinement and sweetness of tone in the letters never becomes vapid or mawkish. There is always a counter-balancing gayety and buoyancy of mood. Mrs. Delany must have made letter-writing nearly as much a matter of business as did Miss Seward, but the heavy "epistolary solicitudes" of the Swan of Lichfield are at the other end of the scale from Mrs. Delany's bright naturalness. Mrs. Delany's letters are but a clear medium revealing "the fine lady, the good woman, and the good Christian" of Dr. Delany's picture of "Maria."
The most surprising element of Mrs. Delany's life is her hand-work. In October, 1750, she wrote: "I am going to make a very comfortable closet, to have a dresser, and all manner of working tools, to keep all my stores for painting, carving, and gilding, etc., for my own room is now so clean and pretty that I cannot suffer it to be strewed with litter, only books and work, and the closet belonging to it to be given up to prints, drawings, and my collections of fossils and minerals."
With almost any tool she had instinctive dexterity, and she had taste and originality. She apparently enjoyed every kind of hand-work that came to her notice. She never wasted a minute. The knotting-shuttle and the embroidery needle were constant attendants on her tea-table hours, and she accomplished almost unbelievable amounts in designing and working fancy gowns, coverings for chairs and sofas, bed-curtains, etc. She made a carpet and other elaborate pieces in double cross-stitch; she did "shell lustres" and chenille work; she designed and executed a chapel ceiling in cards and shells. Most remarkable of all is her herbal begun when she was seventy-two and completed when she was eighty-five. The flowers were made of colored papers and were so accurate as hardly to be distinguished from the flowers themselves. This paper mosaic was left to the Duchess of Portland with a selection of twenty of the flowers to Queen Charlotte. The herbal is now in the British Museum.
A review of the achievements of Mrs. Delany—her painting, her hand-work, her letter-writing, her multifarious reading—shows that these are but incidental to her personal charm. Her beauty, and the loveliness of her nature, made a fine commendatory background for whatever she did. A friend's portrait, a design for a gown, a bit of turning in ivory, a letter—every trifle gained in value when illumined by the "dove's eyes" of so high-bred and elegant a lady. Her character was marked by uprightness, dignity, and good judgment. She was delicate in her feelings, gentle, courteous, and most sincerely kind. All of her qualities made her a desirable member of any family or social group. It is as a fine lady of the best type that she is remembered, not as a learned woman.
Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806)
Elizabeth Carter lived nearly half a century after the close of the period now under consideration, and her fame as a learned lady belongs chiefly in the second half of the century, but the work on which that fame was based belongs before 1760. Our knowledge of her life comes mainly from two sources, her Memoirs published in 1807 by her nephew and executor, Montagu Pennington, and a series of letters between Miss Carter and Miss Talbot written in the years 1741-1770 and published in 1809. There are also many allusions to Miss Carter in contemporary writings.[374]
Miss Carter's linguistic tastes were early in evidence, but she was discouragingly slow and dull in mastering language details. It was by sheer force of industry that she developed her remarkable aptitude for foreign tongues. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew she learned from her father. Italian, Spanish, and German she taught herself. French she had learned as a child from a Huguenot refugee minister in Canterbury. She also gained some knowledge of Portuguese, and she finally studied Arabic. She began her career as an author at seventeen with verses signed "Eliza" in The Gentleman's Magazine. At twenty-one her slender little volume of poems appeared. It is all occasional verse and nowhere rises to any particular excellence. But its moralizing and reflective tone proved acceptable to many readers and there were new editions in 1762, 1766, 1776, 1777, with a translation into French in 1706.
In 1739 Miss Carter's knowledge of French and Italian, her wide reading, and her interest in philosophical questions were shown by her translation from the French of an attack on Pope's Essay on Man, by M. Crousaz,[375] and a translation from the Italian of Algarotti's Newtonianismo per le dame.[376] At thirty-two she began her translation of Epictetus at the request of Miss Talbot and Archbishop Secker. She kept rather fitfully at this task for three years, from time to time forwarding completed sheets to the deanery. She had not made the translation with any thought of publication and it was with much difficulty that she could be brought to consider the thought of presenting her work to a general public. But consensus of authoritative opinion as to the ethical value of the original and the excellence of the translation led her finally to consent to a subscription publication at a guinea a volume in 1758. The success was unprecedented. Her share of the profits was one thousand guineas and her fame was established beyond cavil.
After Epictetus we hear of no more work by Miss Carter. Her intellectual life was not, however, at a standstill. She kept up her languages by daily assigned readings, she read much in ancient and modern history, she shows thorough familiarity with new books of science, poetry, and letters. She practiced on the spinet and German flute. She was an admirable housekeeper, being in especial repute for puddings, cakes, and pastries. All odd minutes were given to work with the needle and the shuttle. And she was guide and teacher to her young half-brothers and sisters. But we get no more poems, no more learned translations.
Her growing reputation as the most distinguished bas bleu in England, her social success during London winters, the awe with which her country neighbors regarded her as "the greatest schollard in the world," her travels in England and on the Continent, her literary and artistic friendships—all these given in vivid detail in her letters—belong in the picture of the brilliant life after the mid-century mark.
MISS ELIZABETH CARTER
From an engraving in The Works of Elizabeth Carter, 1806
But in whatever period, from whatever point of view, Miss Carter presents us with a career almost unexampled in the annals of learned ladies. She chose learning young and pursued it undeviatingly, with no hesitancies and no retrospective regrets. There were no disapproving friends or relatives to interpose obstacles in her path. Few girls, even to-day, could have greater freedom in the determination of their own hours, occupations, and pleasures. Her father, though disheartened by her slow progress, was her faithful teacher. Even her stepmother aided and abetted her extravagant devotion to study. She was allowed to determine the momentous question of marriage entirely according to her own inclinations. Her published work met with immediate praise. She was but twenty-two when Johnson published epigrams in Greek and Latin in her honor, and said she should be praised in as many languages as Lewis the Grand. And by middle life she had achieved independence, money, and fame.
Nor was her career merely an external success brilliantly masking unsatisfied inner desires. On the contrary, to the end her eighty-nine years seemed rich and gracious to her. She did not covet other women's lovers or husbands or children or homes. She set possible honors lightly aside. When her friends were urging upon her a place at court, she dreamed that she had cut off her head for the greater convenience of curling her hair, and she declared this dream symbolic of the fatal cost at which honors were often bought. Her joys were of an unambitious, quiet, perennial sort. She loved nature in all its moods of storm and shine. Her genius for friendship nearly equaled the "Matchless Orinda's." She loved reading and had many books. She enjoyed reflection and had many hours of happy solitude. She was domestic in her tastes and found herself loved and needed in her father's home. She had a sound, sweet, sensible, modest nature that not only disarmed criticism, but preserved her from any undue or arrogant emphasis on her position as the most distinguished literary woman of her time. And she had an unfailing sense of humor that sent an undercurrent of enjoyment through even the prosaic and dreary parts of life.