[483] Ibid., p. 68.
[484] There are two other indications of the early influence of Les Précieuses. Flecknoe published in 1667 an unacted play entitled Damoiselles à la mode, a sort of mosaic made up from four plays of which Les Précieuses was one. September 15, 1668, Pepys wrote: "To the King's play-house, to see a new play, acted but yesterday, a translation out of French by Dryden, called 'The Lady's à la Mode': so mean a thing as when they came to say it would be acted again to-morrow, both he that said it, Beeson, and the pit fell a-laughing, there being this day not a quarter of the pit full." Pepys is the only authority for attributing the piece to Dryden.
[485] It is interesting to note that the dedication is to Charles, Earl of Winchilsea, whose aunt, Mrs. Finch, one of the literati, was at that time living with the young Earl, at Eastwell, and had even then a vast folio of verse and prose with which the family circle was occasionally regaled. She would hardly enjoy this choice of her nephew as public patron of Wright's caricature of female wits.
[489] See Winchilsea, Lady: Works (edited by Myra Reynolds), Introduction, pp. lxii-lxx, for full account of this character.
[490] This scene may refer both to Lady Winchilsea and the Duchess of Newcastle. Cibber, in his Lives of the Poets, vol. II, p. 164, says: "The Duchess kept a great many young ladies about her person, who occasionally wrote what she dictated. Some of them slept in a room contiguous to that in which her Grace lay, and ever ready, at the call of her bell to rise any hour of the night, to write down her conceptions, lest they should escape her memory."
[491] Curll: No Fool like Wits, Prologue.
[492] Seigneur de Gomberville brought out his Polexandre in four volumes, quarto, in 1632. More famous were La Calprenède's romances, Cléopâtre, Cassandre, and Pharamond, and the works of the Scudéry brother and sister (the sister being the chief writer) who wrote Ibrahim, Artemène, Clélie, and Almahide. All of these except Polexandre were published and some of them republished in France between 1641 and 1661. Their interminable length may be illustrated by Artemène which was in ten volumes, a total of 6679 pages.