But if Apollo should design
A woman laureat to make,
Without dispute he would Orinda take,
Though Sappho and the famous Nine
Stood by and did repine.[161]
But this is elegy, not burlesque.
With Jeremy Taylor, ‘Palæmon,’ the case is different. In 1657 he put forth a duodecimo volume entitled A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship, which, the title-page announces, was ‘written in answer to a Letter from the most ingenious and vertuous M. K. P.’ Orinda had written to Taylor, with whom she must have been already on terms of intimacy, to inquire ‘how far a dear and perfect friendship is authorized by the principles of Christianity.’ The answer is a wholly delightful essay which was widely popular in the seventeenth century and deserves to be more generally known to-day. Taylor praises Mrs. Philips as ‘not only greatly instructed by the direct notices of things, but also by great experience in the matter of which you now inquire.’ He concludes that it is not ill that she should ‘entertain brave friendships and worthy societies’; but takes occasion to warn her against the fantastic Platonism of the salon:[162]
They that build castles in the aire, and look upon friendship, as upon a fine Romance, a thing that pleases the fancy, but is good for nothing else will doe well when they are asleep, or when they come to Elysium; and for ought I know in the mean time may be as much in love with Mandana in the Grand Cyrus, as with the Countess of Exeter; and by dreaming of perfect and abstracted friendships, make them so immaterial that they perish in the handling and become good for nothing.
In the postscript to Mrs. Philips, she is requested to forward the essay to Dr. Wedderburn, if she ‘shall think it fit that these pass further’ than her own ‘eye and closet.’ Such was Taylor’s trust in Orinda; such his tribute to her.
It must be admitted that Orinda’s relations with the authors of her time are little short of remarkable. Her name is written across some of the most characteristic poetry of the age. When she was but twenty, commendatory verses by her were prefixed to the Poems of Vaughan the Silurist. Before the end of her short life—she died in 1664, soon after her thirty-fourth birthday—she had even attracted the notice of Dryden. Her contemporaries appear to have been serious in their belief that she had made herself a permanent place in English literature, and for many years after her death kept her fame alive by publishing her plays, poems, and letters, in which she was invariably described as ‘celebrated,’ ‘matchless,’ and ‘incomparable.’ Her coterie made but little impression on the literature of its time; but that may well have been due to its short career. Mrs. Philips possessed a refinement of taste and of character by no means common among the literary ladies of the time, and a noble though highly sentimental affection for her friends. These are characteristics which, had she lived, she might have made of practical advantage to the world of letters.