The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760

by Myra Reynolds

I. The Learned Lady as a Comic Type

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Fan. To all that, which the World calls Wit and Breeding, I have always had a natural Tendency, a penchen, deriv'd, as the Learned say, Ex traduce, from your Ladyship: Besides the great Prevalence of your Ladyship's most shining Example has perpetually Stimulated me, to the Sacrificing all my Endeavours towards the attaining of those inestimable Jewels; than which, nothing in the Universe can be so much a mon gre, as the French say. And for Beauty, Madam, the Stock I am enrich'd with, comes by emanation from your Ladyship; who has been long held a Paragon of Perfection; Most Charmant, most Tuant.

L. Fan. Ah, my dear Child: I! Alas, Alas! Time has been, and yet I am not quite gone; but thou hast those Attractions, which I bewail the want of: Poetry, Latin, and the French tongue.

Mrs. Fan. I must confess, I have ever had a Tendress for the Muses, and have a due Reverence for Helicon, and Parnassus, and the Graces: But Heroick Numbers upon Love and Honour are most Ravissant, most Suprenant; and a Tragedy is so Touchant! I dye at a Tragedy; I'll swear, I do.

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

Count. Me vil gage a hundred Pistol, dat dat fine Ladeè and her ver pretty Sister, are de French Ladeè.

L. Fan. We have often bewailed the not having had the honour to be born French.

Count. Pardon me, is impossible.

Mrs. Fan. Monfoy, je parle vray! we are meer English assurement.

Count. Mon foy, je parle vray! vat is dat Gibberish? Oh, lettè me see; de Fader is de Lawyere, an she learne of him at de Temple: is de Law French. I am amazè! French Lookè, French Ayre, French Mien, French Movement of de Bodee! Morbleu. Monsieur, I vil gage 4,500 Pistol, dat dese two Sister vere bred in France, yes. Teste bleau, I can no be deceive.

Mrs. Fan. Jee vous en prie, do not; we never had the blessing to be in France; you do us too much Honour. Alas, we are forc'd to be content with plain English Breeding: you will bring all my blood into a blush. I had indeed a penchen always to French.

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

Mrs. Fan. You know very well what the Poet says:

Res est Solliciti plena timoris amor.

Count. Ver well, Madam, you be de most profound Ladee, and de great Scholar.—[Aside.] Morbleu, she vill findé me out! Begar, I can no read.

Mrs. Fan. No, no assurement, pretty well read in the Classic Authors. Or so. Monsieur Scudery says very well:

L'amour est une grande chose.

Count. Hee bee ver pretty Poet too.—Begar she will puzzle me.

Mrs. Fan. Poet, Monsieur! he writ Romances.

Count. Ah, Madam, in France we callè de Romance, de Posie.

Mrs. Fan. And as Monsieur Balzac says, Songez un peu.

Count. Dat Balzac write de very good Romance.

Mrs. Fan. Indeed! I never heard that.

Count. Je vous assure.—A pox on her reading!

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

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

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

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

Oh what a Midnight Curse has he, whose Side

Is pester'd with a Mood and Figure Bride!

Let mine, ye Gods! if such must be my Fate,

No Logic learn, nor History translate,

But rather be a quiet, humble Fool:

I hate a Wife to whom I go to School.

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

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

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

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

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

Cynthia. How pray, Madam?

Lady Froth. O I writ, writ abundantly;—do you never write?

Cynthia. Write what?

Lady Froth. Songs, elegies, satires, encomiums, panegyrics, lampoons, plays, or heroic poems.

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

Lady Froth. My Lord Froth is as fine a gentleman and as much a man of quality! Ah, nothing at all of the common air!... I think I may say he wants nothing but a blue ribbon and a star to make him shine, the very phosphorus of our hemisphere. Do you understand those two hard words?... Being derived from the Greek I thought you might have escaped the etymology.

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

Lady Froth. Did my lord tell you? yes, I vow, and the subject is my lord's love to me. And what do you think I call it? I dare swear you won't guess—'The Syllabub'; ha! ha! ha!

Brisk. Because my lord's title's Froth, egad; ha! ha! ha! deuce take me, very à propos and surprising, ha! ha! ha!

Lady Froth. He! ay, is not it?—And then I call my lord Spumoso, and myself—what d' ye think I call myself?

Brisk. Lactilla, maybe;—'gad I can not tell.

Lady Froth. Biddy, that's all, just my own name.

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

Lady Froth. Then you think that episode between Susan, the dairy-maid, and our coachman, is not amiss; you know I may suppose the dairy in town as well as in the country.

Brisk. Incomparable, let me perish!—But then being an heroic poem, had not you better call him a charioteer? charioteer sounds great; besides, your ladyship's coachman having a red face, and you comparing him to the sun; and you know the sun is called Heaven's charioteer.

Lady Froth. Oh, infinitely better! I am extremely beholden to you for the hint; stay, we'll read over those half a score lines again. (Pulls out a paper.) Let me see here, you know what goes before,—the comparison, you know. (Reads.)

For as the sun shines every day.

So, of our coachman I may say—

Brisk. I'm afraid that simile won't do in wet weather; because you say the sun shines every day.

Lady Froth. No, for the sun it won't, but it will do for the coachman; for you know there's most occasion for a coach in wet weather.

Brisk. Right, right, that saves all.

Lady Froth. Then, I don't say the sun shines all the day, but that he peeps now and then; yet he does shine all the day too, you know, though we don't see him.

Brisk. Right, but the vulgar will never comprehend that.

Lady Froth. Well, you shall hear—Let me see. (Reads.)

For as the sun shines every day,

So, of our coachman I may say,

He shows his drunken fiery face,

Just as the sun does more or less.

Brisk. That's right, all's well, all's well—"More or less."

Lady Froth. (Reads.)

And when at night his labour's done,

Then too, like Heaven's charioteer the sun.

Ay, charioteer does better.

Into the dairy he descends,

And there his whipping and his driving ends;

There he's secure from danger of a bilk,

His fare is paid him, and he sets in milk.

For Susan, you know, is Thetis, and so—

Brisk. Incomparably well and proper, egad!—But I have one exception to make;—don't you think bilk (I know it's good rhyme), but don't you think "bilk" and "fare" too like a hackney-coachman?

Lady Froth. I swear and vow, I am afraid so—And yet our Jehu was a hackney-coachman when my lord took him.

Brisk. Was he? I'm answered, if Jehu was a hackney-coachman.—You may put that in the marginal notes though, to prevent criticism, and say, "Jehu was formerly a hackney-coachman."

Lady Froth. I will; you'd oblige me extremely to write notes on the whole poem.

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

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

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

Once on a time, a Nightingale

To Changes prone;

Unconstant, fickle, whimsical,

(A Female one)

Who sung like others of her kind,

Hearing a well-taught Linnet's Airs,

Had other matters in her mind,

To imitate him she prepares.

Her Fancy strait was on the Wing:

I fly, quoth she,

As well as he;

I don't know why

I should not try

As well as he to sing.

From that day forth she chang'd her Throat:

She did, as learned Women do,

Till every thing

That heard her sing

Wou'd run away from her—as I from you.

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

Rambler. Proceed to the next.

Sullen. "The Lost Lover, or, The Jealous Husband."

Rambler. I never heard of that.

Sullen. Oh this is a Lady's!

Crit. How's that?—Audetg; viris contendere virgo?

Rambler. See how Critick starts at the naming a lady.

Crit. What occasion had you to name a Lady in the confounded work you're about?

Sullen. Here's a Play of hers.

Crit. The Devil there is. I wonder in my heart we are so lost to all Sense and reason: What a Pox have the Women to do with the Muses? I grant you the Poets call the Nine Muses by the names of Women, but why so? not because the Sex had anything to do with Poetry, but because in that Sex they're fitter for Prostitution.

Rambler. Abusive, now you're abusive Mr. Critick.

Crit. Sir I tell you we are abus'd: I hate these Petticoat-Authors; 't is false Grammar, there's no Feminine for the Latin word, 't is entirely of the Masculine Gender, and the Language won't bear such a thing as a she-Author.

Sullen. Come, come, you forget your self; you know 't was a Lady carry'd the Prize of Poetry in France t'other day; and I assure you, if the Account were fairly stated, there have been in England some of that Sex who have done admirably.

Crit. I'le hear no more on 't: Come Sir, drink about.

Rambler. To the Fair Author of The Fatal Friendship.

Crit. Ay, come; away with it, anything that the Glass may go round....

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

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

Ensign. 'T is true, that little She Philosopher has made me do Penance more heartily than ever my Sins did; I deserve her by mere dint of Patience. I have stood whole Hours to hear her assert, that Fire cannot burn, nor Water drown, nor Pain afflict, and Forty ridiculous Systems....

Sir Jam. And all her Experiments on Frogs, Fish, and Flies, ha, ha, without the least contradiction.

Ensign. Contradiction, no, no, I allow'd all she said, with, undoubtedly, Madam,—I am of your Mind, Madam, it must be so—Natural Causes, &c.

Sir Jam. Ha, ha, ha, I think it is a supernatural Cause, which enables thee to go thro' this Fatigue; if it were not to raise thy Fortune, I should think thee mad to pursue her.

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

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

Lady. Will you ever be weary of these Whimsies?

Val. Whimsies! Natural Philosophy a Whimsy! Oh! the unlearned World.

Lady. Ridiculous Learning!

Alp. Ridiculous, indeed, for Women; Philosophy suits our Sex as Jack Boots would do.

Val. Custom would bring them as much in Fashion as Furbeloes, and Practice would make us as valiant as e'er a Hero of them all; the Resolution is in the Mind—Nothing can enslave that.

Lady. My Stars! this Girl will be mad, that's certain.

Val. Mad! so Nero banish'd Philosophers from Rome, and the first Discoverer of the Antipodes was condemn'd for a Heretic.

Lady. In my Conscience, Alphiew, this pretty Creature's spoil'd. Well, Cousin, might I advise, you should bestow your Fortune in founding a College for the Study of philosophy, where none but Women should be admitted; and to immortalize your Name, they should be called Valerians, ha, ha, ha.

Val. What you make a jest of, I'd execute were Fortune in my Power.

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

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

Maid. I had as good carry a raree-show about the street. Oh! how my back akes!

Clink. What are the labors of the back to those of the brain? Thou scandal to the muses, I have now lost a thought worth a folio, by thy impertinence.[490]

Maid. Have I not got a crick in my back already, that will make me good for nothing, with lifting your great books?

Clink. Folio's, call them, and not great books, thou monster of impropriety. But have patience, and I will remember the three gallery-tickets I promis'd thee at my new Tragedy.

Maid. I shall never get my head-cloathes clear-starch'd at this rate.

Clink. Thou destroyer of learning, thou worse than a book-worm! Thou hast put me beyond all patience. Remember how my lyric ode bound about a tallow-candle; thy wrapping up snuff in an epigram; nay, the unworthy usage of my Hymn to Apollo, filthy creature! read me the last lines I wrote upon the Deluge, and take care to pronounce them as I taught you.

Maid. (Reads with an affected tone.)

Swell'd with a dropsy, sickly Nature lies,

And melting in a diabetes, dies.

Clink. Still without Cadence!

Maid.

Swell'd with a dropsy—

Clink. Hold. I conceive ...

The roaring seas o'er the tall woods have broke,

And whales now perch upon the sturdy oak.

Roaring? Stay. Rumbling, roaring, rustling. No; raging seas. (Writing.)

The raging seas o'er the tall woods have broke,

Now perch, thou whale, upon the sturdy oak.

Sturdy oak? No; steady, strong, strapping, stiff. Stiff? No; stiff is too short.

What feast for fish! Oh too luxurious treat!

When hungry dolphins feed on butchers meat.

Foss. Niece, why, niece, niece! Oh, Melpomene, thou goddess of tragedy, suspend thy influence for a moment, and suffer my niece to give me a rational answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blurred! you driveller! Was ever any piece perfect, that had not corrections, erasures, interlineations, and improvements! Does not the very original show, that when the mind is warmest, it is never satisfied with its words:

Incipit et dubitat; scribit, damnatque tabellas,

Et notat, et delet; mutat, culpatque probatque.

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

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

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

In vain, against the force of nature's law,

Would rigid morals keep our hearts in awe;

All our lost labours of the brain but prove,

In life there's no philosophy like love.

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

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

Girls like squirrels oft appear,

In their cages, pleased with flav'ry,

But, in fact, 't is all but knav'ry;

Less thro' love than out of fear:

Only on their tricks relying,

Let them out, their hands untying,

And You'll see the matter plain.

Once there's naught their flight to hamper,

Presto—whisk-away they scamper;

Never to return again.

Wou'd you manage lasses rightly,

You must watch them daily, nightly,

Shut them close, and hold them tightly;

Never loose an inch of chain:

Freedom, run-aways will make 'em,

And the devil can't o'ertake 'em.

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