Lady. My Stars! this Girl will be mad, that's certain.
Val. Mad! so Nero banish'd Philosophers from Rome, and the first Discoverer of the Antipodes was condemn'd for a Heretic.
Lady. In my Conscience, Alphiew, this pretty Creature's spoil'd. Well, Cousin, might I advise, you should bestow your Fortune in founding a College for the Study of philosophy, where none but Women should be admitted; and to immortalize your Name, they should be called Valerians, ha, ha, ha.
Val. What you make a jest of, I'd execute were Fortune in my Power.
The heroine of Charles Johnson's The Generous Husband (1711), Florida, is described as a "Pretender to Learning, a Philosophress." She is young, beautiful and with a tolerable dower. But she is invincibly opposed to marriage. She gives caustic analyses of the lawyer, the courtier, the soldier, the country squire, proposed by her father with matrimonial intent. "I'll not be married," she says, "I'll not submit myself to the uneven Temper of a Humourist; I'll neither be a Prop to a Fool's Fortune, nor a Bar to a Libertine's Pleasure." "I hate Men, I hate the Cumber of a Family, everything concurs to discourage me, to make me fear it, to make it my Aversion. Study has nothing in it but what is serene and calm." When her father urges the loss of her inheritance if she does not marry, her unmoved answer is, "I shall have still a good Book—which I am persuaded I shall love much better than a bad Husband—I'll tell you, Sir, for these three Years that I have been acquainted with Aristotle, we have not had the least difference together." Various lovers present themselves. One of them says he trembles whenever he visits her because she puts him so in mind of his schoolmaster, but he determines to stand "a little Ear-bating before Marriage"—encouraged thereto by the lady's money—with the hope of devising effective restraints after marriage. Another bold lover ventures upon her in her study where she sits surrounded by books and mathematical instruments. He is disguised as a traveling Japanese philosopher, and she enters upon the conversation with a learned salutation—Vir Colendissime si tu illorum Eruditorum, but he begs her in the name of Dr. Bentley not to repudiate her "vernacular Idiom," and the interview proceeds in the English tongue. All goes prosperously until the pseudo-philosopher speaks of love. She dismisses him with "What a terrible Solecism in good Manners has this Fellow committed—Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus; excellent Scipio—I admire that thought." She yields to love only when the learned Mr. Dypthong, who has "corrected every Nod in Homer," appears as a suitor. He has just escaped from the "Gothic Persecution of a sort of Animalcula call'd Punsters" and comes to her as an Oracle of Reason. This is the right approach and his victory is assured when he praises her noble easy Odes that Horace would not blush to own, her immortal Sonnet on Cato, her mastery of "both the Ethos and the Pathos." She pays him in kind with honeyed compliments from the Muses and the Graces. They discuss the Cartesian system, and the Epicurean, the Peripatetic and the Platonic Schools of Thought. The inhabitants of the moon come in for passing notice. The soul and the mind receive analysis. This sort of courtship suits her. 'T is thus a "Philosophress" should be wooed. She balks a little at the marriage articles, praying Mr. Grub to alter the savage style of them into something more genteel, at least in so far as to let the dates be "Calendar and Ides"; the pounds and pence, "Sesterces and Talents." But she yields the point on making the unhappy discovery that to be learned and polite in dower articles would be illegal, that the law demands tautology, verbiage, an impertinent jargon. It is only when Mr. Dypthong is unmasked a villain that Florida becomes "sick of Letters," lays aside the "Severity of Thought" along with her big folios, and accepts the paternal choice in the way of a husband. Her father, whose slightest remarks have received pitiless logical analysis from his daughter, who is urged to maintain silence or to speak "positively—laconically—naturally," whose arguments are met with classic quotations that are but as gibberish to his uninstructed ear, hands her over to a husband with a sigh of relief. His conclusion is, "Wit in a Woman is like Mettle in a blind Mare." The lover agrees that "a She-Understanding shou'd always be passive." Learning, he says, may give a woman more Sail, but she's sure to lack Ballast!
In January, 1717, there appeared a farce at Drury Lane entitled Three Hours after Marriage. It was the joint work of Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot, but the character of the learned lady, Phœbe Clinket,[489] was by Pope. Phœbe is not an important person in the plot. She was evidently drawn merely to caricature a learned lady, in this case an authoress. She comes upon the stage in an ink-stained dress with pens stuck in her hair. Her maid carries strapped to her back a desk on which Phœbe writes:
Maid. I had as good carry a raree-show about the street. Oh! how my back akes!
Clink. What are the labors of the back to those of the brain? Thou scandal to the muses, I have now lost a thought worth a folio, by thy impertinence.[490]
Maid. Have I not got a crick in my back already, that will make me good for nothing, with lifting your great books?
Clink. Folio's, call them, and not great books, thou monster of impropriety. But have patience, and I will remember the three gallery-tickets I promis'd thee at my new Tragedy.