ALDA.
And why not?—Don't you know that I meditate, with the assistance of certain professorins, a complete Natural History of Coquettes, (in quarto,) which shall rival the famous Dutch treatise on Butterflies, in heaven knows how many folio volumes? In the first part of this stupendous work we intend to treat systematically of every known species, from the coquetterie instinctive, which may be termed the wild genus, indigenous in all females, up to the coquetterie calculée et philosophique, the most refined specimen reared in the hot-bed of artificial life. In the second part, we shall treat the whole history of Coquetterie, from that first pretty experiment of dear Mamma Eve, when she turned away from Adam,
"——As conscious of her worth,
That would be woo'd and not unsought be won,"
down to—to—how shall I avoid being personal?—down to the Lady Adeline Amundevilles of our own day. With some women coquetterie is an instinct; with others, an amusement; with others, a pursuit; with others, a science. With the German women it is a passion: they play the coquette as they do every thing else, with sentiment, with good faith, with enthusiasm.
MEDON.
Why then it is no longer coquetterie—it is love!
ALDA.
I beg your pardon; it is something very different. True, perhaps, "that thin partitions do the bounds divide;" but, to a nice observer, the division is not the less complete. In short, you can imagine nothing more distinct than an English coquette and a German coquette; in the first case, one is reminded of Dryden's fanciful simile—