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.