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."