Duelling, against which Steele, De Foe, and Fielding inveighed with courage and good sense, was a danger to which every gentleman was liable who wore a sword. Bullies were ready to provoke a quarrel, the slightest cause of offence was magnified into an affair of honour, and the lives of several of the most distinguished men of the century were imperilled in this way. 'A gentleman,' Lord Chesterfield writes, 'is every man who, with a tolerable suit of clothes, a sword by his side, and a watch and snuffbox in his pockets, asserts himself to be a gentleman, swears with energy that he will be treated as such, and that he will cut the throat of any man who presumes to say the contrary.'
The foolish and evil custom died out slowly in this kingdom. Even a great moralist like Dr. Johnson had something to say in its defence, and Sir Walter Scott, who might well have laughed to scorn any imputation of cowardice, was prepared to accept a challenge in his old age for a statement he had made in his Life of Napoleon.
Ladies had a different but equally doubtful mode of asserting their gentility. On one occasion the Duchess of Marlborough called on a lawyer without leaving her name. 'I could not make out who she was,' said the clerk afterwards, 'but she swore so dreadfully that she must be a lady of quality.'
There was a fashion which our wits followed at this time that was not of English growth, namely, the tone of gallantry in which they addressed ladies, no matter whether single or married. Their compliments seemed like downright love-making, and that frequently of a coarse kind, but such expressions meant nothing, and were understood to be a mere exercise of skill. Pope used them in writing to Judith Cowper, whom he professes to worship as much as any female saint in heaven; and in much ampler measure when addressing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but neither lady would have taken this amatory politeness seriously. Thus he writes after an evening spent in Lady Mary's society: 'Books have lost their effect upon me; and I was convinced since I saw you, that there is something more powerful than philosophy, and since I heard you, that there is one alive wiser than all the sages.' He tells her that he hates all other women for her sake; that none but her guardian angels can have her more constantly in mind; and that the sun has more reason to be proud of raising her spirits 'than of raising all the plants and ripening all the minerals in the earth.' He will fly to her in Italy at the least notice and 'from thence,' he adds, 'how far you might draw me and I might run after you, I no more know than the spouse in the song of Solomon.'
This was the foible of an age in which women were addressed as though they were totally devoid of understanding; and Pope, as might have been expected, carried the folly to excess.
Against another French custom Addison protests in the Spectator, namely, that of women of rank receiving gentlemen visitors in their bedrooms. He objects also to other foreign habits introduced by 'travelled ladies,' and fears that the peace, however much to be desired, may cause the importation of a number of French fopperies. But the proneness to follow the lead of France in matters of fashion is a folly not confined to the belles and beaux of the last century.
If a chivalric regard for women be an indication of high civilization, that sign is but faintly visible in the reigns of Anne and of the first Georges. Sir Richard Steele paid a noble tribute to Lady Elizabeth Hastings when he said that to know her was a liberal education, but his contemporaries usually treat women as pretty triflers, better fitted to amuse men than to elevate them. Young takes this view in his Satires:
'Ladies supreme among amusements reign;
By nature born to soothe and entertain.
Their prudence in a share of folly lies;
Why will they be so weak as to be wise?'
and Chesterfield, writing to his son, treats women with similar contempt.... 'A man of sense,' he says, 'only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does both, which is the thing in the world that they are proud of.... No flattery is either too high or too low for them. They will greedily swallow the highest and gratefully accept of the lowest.'
Nearly twenty years passed, and then Chesterfield wrote in the same contemptuous way of women in a letter to his godson, a 'dear little boy' of ten.