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Vassar Semi-Centennial Series

ELIZABETHAN TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ITALIAN. By Mary Augusta Scott, Ph.D. (A.B. Vassar, 1876), Professor of English Literature in Smith College.

SOCIAL STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. By Laura J. Wylie, Ph.D. (A.B. Vassar, 1877), Professor of English in Vassar College.

THE LEARNED LADY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By Myra Reynolds, Ph.D. (A.B. Vassar, 1880), Professor of English Literature in Chicago University. [In preparation.]

THE CUSTOM OF DRAMATIC ENTERTAINMENT IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. By Orie J. Hatcher, Ph.D. (A.B. Vassar, 1888), Formerly Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in Bryn Mawr College. [In preparation.]

INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF VARIABLE STARS. By Caroline E. Furness, Ph.D. (A.B. Vassar, 1891), Professor of Astronomy in Vassar College.

MOVEMENT AND MENTAL IMAGERY. By Margaret Floy Washburn, Ph.D. (A.B. Vassar, 1891), Professor of Psychology in Vassar College.

BRISSOT DE WARVILLE: A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Eloise Ellery, Ph.D. (A.B. Vassar, 1897), Associate Professor of History in Vassar College.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York

THE LEARNED LADY IN ENGLAND

1650-1760

LADY JANE GREY

From an engraving in Edmund Lodge's Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain London, 1823, Vol. II

Vassar Semi-Centennial Series

THE LEARNED LADY IN ENGLAND
1650-1760

BY
MYRA REYNOLDS
Professor of English Literature in the University of Chicago

WITH PORTRAITS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY MYRA REYNOLDS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PUBLISHED IN HONOR OF THE

FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

OF THE

FOUNDING OF VASSAR COLLEGE

1865-1915

TO

E. E. L.

CONTENTS

I.

Learned Ladies in England before 1650

1

1. Prefatory Statement

1

2. Period of Henry VIII and Elizabeth

4

3. Period from 1603 to 1650

23

4. Schools for Girls before 1660

37

II.

Learned Ladies in England from 1650 to 1760

46

1. An Introductory Group in the Years 1650-1675

46

2. The Century following the Restoration

81

Actresses

81

Artists

84

Authors

88

Writers on Practical Subjects

89

Writers on Religion and Theology

92

Writers on Practical Beneficence

118

Dramatic Writers

127

General Learning and Literary Work

137

III.

Education

258

1. Boarding-Schools for Girls

258

2. Charity Schools

268

3. Higher Education

271

IV.

Miscellaneous Books on Women in Social and Intellectual Life

316

V.

Satiric Representations of the Learned Lady in Comedy

372

Summary

420

Bibliography

457

Index

477

ILLUSTRATIONS

Lady Jane Grey

Frontispiece

The Family of Sir Thomas More

10

Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

22

Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery

32

Mary Ward

38

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

From Horace Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors 46

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

From The Lives of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and of his Wife, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle 52

Mrs. Katherine Philips

56

Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson and her Son

70

Lady Fanshawe

74

Mrs. Anne Killigrew

86

Mrs. Aphra Behn

130

Elizabeth Elstob

170

The Supposed Editors of

The Female Spectator

, by Mrs. Eliza Haywood

216

Miss Elizabeth Carter

256

Mrs. Bathsua Makin

276

THE LEARNED LADY IN ENGLAND

CHAPTER I
LEARNED LADIES IN ENGLAND BEFORE 1650

1. Prefatory Statement

The theme to which this volume is specifically limited is the position and achievements of learned women in England in the period between 1650 and 1760. But before entering upon this detailed study it seems desirable to give a preliminary sketch of the work of learned women in England before 1650. In such a sketch it is, indeed, a temptation to go farther back along the path of history than a single volume would allow. It is difficult, for instance, to avoid some account of the women of genius notable in the great days of Greece and Rome.[1] More fascinating still would be a close study of the learned nuns of the Middle Ages.[2] St. Radegunde, Abbess of Poitiers, a poet of considerable distinction; St. Hilda, who governed her double monastery at Whitby so successfully as to put it "in the forefront of intellectual agencies in Great Britain"; the group of learned nuns who corresponded with St. Boniface, chief among them being St. Lioba, who made of her convent at Bischopsheim, Germany, "the most important educational center in that part of Europe"; Hroswitha of Gandersheim, whose seven dramas "caused the tragic muse to emerge once more from the midnight gloom of the Middle Ages";[3] St. Hildegard, "the most voluminous woman writer of the Middle Ages"; St. Herrad, author of an encyclopædic work entitled Hortus Deliciarum, or Garden of Delight—these are but a few of the women whose lives and works offer a field for profitable and interesting investigation.

Emily James Putnam, in her acute study, The Lady, says of this convent life:

No institution of Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom and development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern colleges for women only feebly reproduce it, since the college for women has arisen when colleges in general are under a cloud. The lady-abbess, on the other hand, was part of the two great social forces of her time, feudalism and the Church. Great spiritual rewards and great worldly prizes were alike within her grasp. She was treated as an equal by men of her time as is witnessed by letters we still have from popes and emperors to abbesses. She had the stimulus of competition with men in executive capacity, in scholarship, and in artistic production, since her work was freely set before the general public: but she was relieved by the circumstances of her environment from the ceaseless competition in common life of woman with woman for the favor of the individual man. In the cloister of the great days, as on a small scale in the college for women to-day, women were judged by each other as men are everywhere judged by each other, for sterling qualities of head and heart and character.[4]

From mediæval poems and romances also come glimpses, tantalizingly brief and casual, to be sure, yet glimpses indicative of a tendency to count learning as one of the possible charms of a heroine.[5] The delightful lady in Cursor Mundi, who was described as "learnyd, ware and wise," was also said to be "of much price lovéd." A later maid, likewise of "grete prys," could vie with a modern college girl in the variety and extent of her knowledge:

Wyse sche was and curtes of mowthe,

All the vii arse sche cowthe.

She had maystures at hur honde,

The wysest men of that londe,

And taght hur astronomye,

Arsmetryck and gemetrye.

That mayde was of grete prys

For sche was bothe warre and wyse.[6]

In Floris and Blanchefleur, Floris refused to study unless Blanchefleur was taught with him, and she prospered so at her books that her lore was a wonder to all. When she and Floris had been in school five years together, they knew Latin and could write well on parchment. When Floris went to visit his aunt she set him to learn many things, as other children did, "bot maydons and grome."[7] The wife of Sir Bevis of Hamtoun was taught "fysik and sirgerie" by great masters from Bologna.[8] Melior, the fair mistress of Partonope of Blois, since she was the only heir to the kingdom, was sent to school that she might get great wisdom. She says, "A hundred mastres I had and mo," and adds that God graciously inclined her to learning so that she came to know "the seven sciences" perfectly. She was also trained in herbs and "phisike," in "Divinite and Nygromancy."[9] Thaise, in Apollonius of Tyre, combined the "wisdom of a clerk" with

every lusti werk,

Which to a gentlewoman longeth.

She was wel kept, sche was wel loked

Sche was wel tawht, sche was wel boked

So wel sche spedde hir in hire yowthe

That sche of every wisdom cowthe.[10]

Medea, in Lydgate's Troy Book, had so passionate a desire for knowledge that she became in all the "artis called liberal" as expert and knowing as the best. She was powerful in logic, astronomy, and necromancy.[11]

But the highly prized ladies of romance, the abbesses with all their pomp and influence, the women poets, philosophers, and orators of Greece and Rome, all lose interest when compared with the story of the learned women in Italy during the Renascence. When we come to the actual flowering time of their genius the list is so long as to make selection difficult. "Never in history," says Mozans, "had they greater freedom of action in things of the mind; never were they, except probably in the case of the English and German abbesses of the Middle Ages, treated with more marked deference and consideration or fairness; never were their efforts more highly appreciated or more generously rewarded.... Everywhere the intellectual arena was open to them on the same terms as to men. Incapacity and not sex was the only bar to entrance."[12] When the great Cardinal Bembo said, "Little girls should learn Latin; it completes their charm," he was expressing the attitude of the best Italian scholars towards learning for women. Intellectual attainments were not only counted appropriate for women, but they were recognized as a distinct added attraction. Every city of importance had women whose renown was a source of civic pride. Women not only studied under tutors, but they apparently attended classes in the great universities, and even occupied important chairs in the most distinguished faculties.[13]

The outcome of a general investigation along the lines indicated would doubtless go to prove that in all civilized nations, in all ages of their progress, there have been individual women who by force of native endowment and through some favorable conjunction of circumstances, have risen into prominence in realms not ordinarily open to the women of their time, and that there have been various interesting epochs when women have responded in fairly large numbers to some exceptional intellectual stimulus.

2. Period of Henry VIII and Elizabeth

The first woman author in the English language is probably Juliana Barnes (or Berners), whose delight in hunting, hawking, and fishing, along with a surprising amount of technical knowledge on these subjects, led her to write, in 1481, a book for "the gentill men and honest persones" whose tastes coincided with hers. But this lady was prioress of Sopewell Nunnery and comes under the list of learned nuns.[14] Genuine interest in books on the part of women in secular life in England received one of its earliest manifestations in the will of the Duchess of Buckingham who left to her daughter-in-law, Margaret, the Countess of Richmond,[15] "a book of English, being a legend of Saints; a book of French, called Lucun; another book of French, of the Epistles and Gospels; and a Primmer with clasps of silver gilt, covered with purple velvet." This legacy was an important recognition of the literary tastes of the Countess of Richmond who had, says Ballard, "a fine library stored with Latin, French and English books, not collected for ornament, or to make a figure (as is frequently the case) but for use." The Countess knew French and had some knowledge of Latin. She also entered the field of authorship, publishing before 1509 The mirroure of golde for the sinfull soule, "translated at Parice out of Laten into Frenshe ... and now of late translated out of Frenshe into Englishe by the right excellent Princess Margaret." This right noble Margaret was likewise a patroness of literature and a guardian of learning. She established lectureships in divinity, maintained scholarships for poor students, founded two colleges, and in other ways manifested her interest in the progress of education.

The Countess of Richmond as a lover of books, as a translator of religious works, and particularly as an intelligent and ardent patron of learning, foreshadowed feminine activities of a later day. But the learned lady as a recognized factor in social life had no real place in England till the time of Henry VIII. Renascence ideas concerning the education of women came into England from Spain through Catherine, the first wife of Henry VIII. She was in England from 1501 to 1531. Under the influence of her mother, Queen Isabella,[16] she had been given remarkable educational advantages. Queen Isabella was interested in all that pertained to learning. She was a collector of books and contributed important accessions to Spanish libraries. She knew several modern languages and had a "critically accurate" knowledge of Latin. Learning for women was encouraged at her court. The queen had herself a lady teacher, Beatrix Galindo, who was professor of rhetoric at the University of Salamanca, and who was called, for her knowledge of the Latin language, La Latina. Other learned ladies of Spain were doubtless known at the court, as Francisca de Lebrixa who often took the place of her father, professor of history in the University of Alcala; or Doña Maria Pacheco de Mendoza and her sister, who are mentioned by Mr. Foster as the parallels of Sir Thomas More's daughters in England.[17] In this eager, ambitious, intellectual atmosphere the daughters of Isabella were brought up. She gave them personal instruction, and secured for them foreign teachers of eminence. Erasmus said that Catherine had been happily reared on letters from her infancy, that she loved literature, and that she was egregie docta. In the English court Queen Catherine's influence was all on the side of learning. Mr. Watson says that all the treatises on the education of women that appeared in England between 1523 and 1538 were under the spell of Catherine.[18] In the education of her own daughter, the Princess Mary, she kept to the traditions of the Spanish court and secured the most learned tutors for the young girl. Dr. Lynacre wrote for the child Princess a Rudiments of Grammar. His successor was Juan Luis Vives, who came to England in 1523 on the invitation of Henry VIII. Whether Vives actually taught the Princess or not, he wrote, in 1523, as director of her studies, two Latin treatises, both dedicated to Queen Catherine. The first of these, De Institutione Fæminæ Christiannæ, was translated into English by Richard Hyrde before 1528 (though not printed till 1540) under the title, The Instruction of a Christian Woman. Hyrde dedicated his translation to Catherine because of her gracious zeal "to the virtuous education of the womankind of this realm." Vives's second treatise, De Ratione Studii, an account of the studies appropriate for a young girl, appeared in 1524, and many editions are listed. Still another treatise is by subject-matter and chronology closely connected with the two essays by Vives. In 1524 there appeared a translation by Margaret Roper of Erasmus's Treatise on the Lord's Prayer. The Introduction was by Mr. Hyrde, and its importance is indicated by Mr. Watson when he calls it "the first reasoned claim of the Renascence period, written in English, for the higher education of women." These treatises by Vives and Hyrde have much in common and they express the most advanced contemporary ideas on woman's education. That the place of woman is in the home is emphatically stated. Housewifery is imperative. Vives has a charming passage on the handling of wool and flax, "two crafts yet left of that old innocent world," crafts of which no woman, be she princess or queen, may be rightly ignorant.[19] Almost equal in quaint interest is his defense of the kitchen: "Nor let nobody loathe the name of the kitchen: namely, being a thing very necessary, without the which neither sick folks can amend nor whole folks live." The lady should also be mistress of a closet of medicaments which she must be able to administer with skill. Occupations that involve any sort of publicity are counted inappropriate for women, hence Vives gives "no license to a woman to be a teacher."[20] The essential feminine virtues are piety and modesty. Obedience to parents and to husbands is enjoined. This obedience, if born of inner concord, might be a voluntary and ideal thing. The mother of Vives is given as an example of the true wifely attitude: "My mother Blanche when she had been fifteen years married unto my father, I could never see her strive with my father. There were two sayings that she had ever in her mouth as proverbs. When she would say she believed well anything, then she used to say, even as though Luis Vives had spoken it. When she would say that she would [wished] anything, she used to say, even as though Luis Vives would it."[21] In all these points Vives and Hyrde were quite in accord with their age. The new element in their creed was that learning could make women more attractive, companionable, and efficient in these home relationships.[22] Hyrde considers the man that "had leaver have his wife a fool than a wise woman" as "worse than twice frantic." Maids must be good, says Vives, but learning will fortify them and make them more truly good. In fact, according to Vives and Hyrde, there are no bounds to be set to the learning of women except those involved in the one general prescription that all their studies must tend to the development of character. Romances, for instance, are forbidden because they give false ideals, while ethical and religious books are strongly commended.[23]

The Princess Mary was too young to know the significance of the essays in her behalf, but she profited by the training accorded her. When she was but nine she was addressed by commissioners from Holland in the Latin tongue and responded in the same language "with as much assurance and facility as if she had been twelve years of age."[24] Her parents were proud of her achievements and planned to have her learn modern languages. Later in life, at the solicitation of Queen Catherine Parr, she translated Erasmus's Paraphrase on the Gospel of St. John, and her work was highly praised.

The example set at court was followed in many noble families. There is in the realm of education no single picture more entertaining and attractive than that of Sir Thomas More and his daughters. Our knowledge of this family comes from various sources, the chief of which are a description written by Erasmus in a letter to John Faber, and the letters written by Sir Thomas to the tutors and to his daughters, especially to his daughter Margaret.[25] Sir Thomas could not see why learning was not as suitable for girls as for boys. In a letter to Gunnel he wrote:

Neither is there anie difference in harvest time, whether it was man or woman, that sowed first the corne: for both of them beare name of a reasonable creature equally, whose nature reason only doth distinguish from bruite beastes, and therefore I do not see why learning in like manner may not equally agree with both sexes; for by it, reason is cultivated, and (as a fielde) sowed with wholesome precepts, it bringeth excellent fruit. But if the soyle of woman's braine be of its own nature bad, and apter to beare fearne then corne (by which saying manie doe terrifye women from learning) I am of opinion therefore that a woman's witt is the more diligently by good instructions and learning to be manured, to the ende, the defect of nature may be redressed by industrie.[26]

In describing the ideal wife he said: "May she be learned, if possible, or at least capable of being made so,"[27] and he gave the same training to Margaret and her sisters as to his son John. The fame of these daughters went far. Symon Grinæus, in dedicating his Plato to John, speaks of the young man's sisters as those "whom a divine heat of the spirit, to the admiration and a new example of this our age, hath driven into the sea of learning so far, and so happily, that they see no learning to be above their reach, no disputation of philosophy above their capacity."[28] Margaret, the daughter "most like her father both in favour and wit," and "a rare woman for learning, sanctity, and secrecy,"[29] was especially the source of his pride. His delight in her overflows in his charming response to a letter from her asking for money: "You aske monye, deare Megg, too shamefully and fearefully of your father, who is both desirous to giue it you, and your letter hath deserued it, which I could find in my heart to recompence, not as Alexander did by Cherilus, giuing him for every verse a Philipine of golde; but if my abilities were answerable to my will, I would bestowe two Crownes of pure golde for euery sillable thereof."[30] He found her Latin letters written in so pure a style that "Momus, his censure though never so teastie," could find no fault in them. Sir Thomas took occasion to show these letters and other compositions by Margaret to the Bishop of Exeter and to Reginald Pole, both good judges of any literary performance; and Margaret's attainments seemed to both "as a miracle." Of Mr. Pole's amazement Sir Thomas wrote:

I could scarce make him believe, but that you had some help from your maister, until I told him seriously that you had not only never a maister in your house, but also never another man, that needed not your help rather in writing anie thing, than you needed his. In the mean time I thought with myself how true I found that now, which once I remember I spoke unto you in jeaste, when I pittied your hard happe, that men that read your writings would suspect you to have had help from some other man therein; which would derrogate somewhat from the praises due to your workes; seeing that you of all others deserve least to have such a suspition had of you, for that you never could abide to be decked with the plumes of other birds.[31]

But sweet Meg is praised because she studies for love of learning, not for fame, and contents herself with her husband and father as a sufficient audience. When Margaret married the best wish her father could make was that her children should be most like to herself, "except only in sex," yet he adds that a daughter who could imitate her mother's learning and virtues would be of more worth than "three boys."[32]

THE FAMILY OF SIR THOMAS MORE

Hans Holbein pinxit. W. Parsons sculp. 1815 From an engraving in Effigies Poeticae, London, 1824, Vol. II

Margaret had three sons and two daughters and she took the same care of their education as had been taken of hers. Dr. John Morwen, a noted Greek scholar, was preceptor in Greek and Latin to her daughter Mary. Other tutors were Dr. Cole and Dr. Christopherson, also famous for Greek. Mary seems to have followed in her mother's footsteps so far as attention to learned pursuits is concerned, but without her mother's ability and charm. Her Latin orations were, however, so much admired that her tutor, Dr. Morwen, translated them into English. Sir Thomas More's other daughters, Elizabeth Dancy (b. 1509) and Cecilia Heron (b. 1510), and Margaret, a talented kinswoman who married her tutor, Dr. John Clement, in 1531, were given the same educational advantages as Margaret. A characteristic eulogy of the three sisters was by Mr. John Leland, its Latin being thus Englished in Ballard's Memoirs:

Forbear too much t' extoll, great Rome, from hence,

Thy fam'd Hortensius' Daughter's Eloquence;

These boasted names are now eclips'd by Three

More learned Nymphs, Great More's fair Progeny;

Who over-pas'd the Spinster's mean Employ;

The purest Latin Authors were their Joy;

They loved in Rome's political Style to write,

And with the choicest Eloquence indite,

Nor were they conversant alone in these,

They turn'd o'er Homer and Demosthenes;

From Aristotle's Store of Learning too

The mystic Art of Reasoning well they drew.

Then blush you Men if you neglect to trace

These Heights of Learning which the Female grace.[33]

Erasmus and Sir Thomas More were close friends and it was through this friendship that Erasmus was converted to the idea of advanced studies for women. In his The Abbot and the Learned Woman, Magdalia defends learning against the Abbot Antronius. The monk uses the well-worn argument that woman's place is in the home, that it is her business to conduct the affairs of the family and to instruct the children. Magdalia does not contest this position, but urges that so weighty a business needs all possible wisdom and that through books she gains wisdom. In a sharp attack on the ignorance of the monks she says: "In Spain and Italy there are not a few women belonging to the noblest families who are a match for any man. In England there are the Mores; in Germany the Pirckheimers and the Blaurers. And if you don't take care, it will soon come to this, that we shall preside in the schools of divinity, preach in the churches, and take possession of your mitres.... If you go on as you are doing it is more likely that the geese will begin to preach than that such dumb shepherds as you will be any longer endured."[34] Antronius is reduced to the weak argument that popular opinion does not favor Latin for women, and Magdalia closes the discussion with the classic defense of new ideas: "Why do you tell me of popular opinion, which is the worst example in the world to be followed? What have I to do with custom, that is the mistress of all evil practices? We ought to accustom ourselves to the best things, and by that means that which was uncustomary would become habitual, and that which was unpleasant would become pleasant, and that which seemed unbecoming would look graceful."[35]

The daughters of Sir Thomas More were not the only girls trained in the best learning of the day. Another important family where particular stress was laid on the education of the daughters was that of Sir Anthony Coke, one of the tutors of King Edward VI.[36] Mildred, the eldest daughter (1526-1589), who married Lord Burleigh, was celebrated for her knowledge of Latin and Greek. Two other daughters, Elizabeth, Lady Russel (b. cir. 1529), and Katharine, Mrs. Killigrew (b. cir. 1530), had fine natural abilities and a learned education, and were distinguished both socially and intellectually. But the most noted of the sisters was Anne (b. cir. 1527), who married Sir Nicholas Bacon, and became the mother of two remarkable sons, Anthony Bacon, and Francis Viscount St. Albans, the great Lord Bacon. She was said to be "exquisitely skilled in the Greek, Latin, and Italian tongues." In 1550 she translated twenty-five sermons from the Italian. In later life she did a much more important piece of translation. Bishop Jewel had written in Latin An Apology for the Church of England. The book had made so great a stir that an English translation seemed desirable and Lady Bacon undertook the task. She sent her translation to the Archbishop and to the author, with a letter written in Greek, that they might correct any errors, but they found it so accurate that they changed not the least word. In 1564 the Archbishop had the book published without consulting Lady Bacon because he said he knew her modesty would be abashed by any such publicity. He praised her clear translation saying that she "had done honour to her sex and to the degree of ladies." Lady Bacon was associated with her father in his duties as tutor to Edward VI. She also conducted the early education of her sons and they owed much to her wise care and great ability. Sir Anthony Coke believed that women should be educated on the same lines as men, and that they were quite as capable of acquiring knowledge, and his own daughters brilliantly sustained this theory.

A third distinguished family in which the daughters were liberally educated was that of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Three of them, Anne, Margaret, and Jane, were joint authors of A Century of Distichs upon the Death of Queen Margaret of Navarre, printed in 1550 and later translated into Greek, French, and Italian.[37] Henry Fitz Allan, Earl of Arundel, had both his daughters well trained in the classics and they had the advantage of the notable library he had collected. The eldest, Lady Joanna Lumley[38] (d. 1576), translated four of the Orations of Isocrates from Greek into Latin, and the Iphigenia of Euripides from Greek into English. Most of her writings were dedicated to her father. Her manuscripts were preserved in his library and so passed into royal possession in the time of James I. Another learned lady was Mary, Countess of Arundel.[39] She translated from Greek and Latin and collected a book of similes from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and other classic authors. She, too, dedicated her works to her father, Sir Thomas Arundel. Sir Thomas Parr, "following the example of Sir Thomas More and other great men," bestowed on his daughter Catherine[40] a learned education, as "the most valuable addition he could make to her other charms." She was interested in all matters pertaining to learning, and successfully used her influence with the King in behalf of the universities. She wrote a letter in Latin to the Princess Mary to induce her to translate Erasmus's Paraphrase of St. John, and wrote many psalms, prayers, and meditations, beside Queene Katherine Parre's lamentation of a sinner, published in 1548. Jane, Countess of Westmoreland, was placed by her father, the Earl of Surrey, under the tuition of Mr. Fox, the Martyrologist, who reported her skill in Latin and Greek as such "that she might well stand in competition with the greatest men of that age."[41]

Most interesting and most pathetic of all the young women known for learning in Tudor times was Lady Jane Grey.[42] Ascham, in a well-known passage in The Scholemaster (1570), describes an interview he had with her at Bradgate where she was pursuing her studies under John Aylmer, her tutor. This was in 1550 when Lady Jane was but thirteen.

Before I went into Germanie, I came to Brodegate in Le(i)cestershire, to take my leaue of that noble Ladie Iane Grey, to whom I was exeding moch beholdinge. Hir parentes, the Duke and Duches, with all the houshold, Gentlemen and Gentlewomen, were huntinge in the Parke; I founde her, in her Chamber, readinge Phædon Platonis in Greeke, and that with as moch delite, as som ientlemen wold read a merie tale in Bocase. After salutation, and dewtie done, with som other taulke, I asked her, whie she wold leese soch pastime in the Parke! smiling she answered me; I wisse, all their sporte in the Parke is but a shoadoe to that pleasure, that I find in Plato: Alas good folke, they neuer felt what trewe pleasure ment. And howe came you Madame, quoth I, to this deepe knowledge of pleasure, and what did chieflie allure you vnto it: seinge, not many women, but verie fewe men haue attained thereunto. I will tell you, quoth she, and to tell you a troth, which perchance ye will meruell at. One of the greatest benefites, that euer God gaue me, is, that he sent me so sharpe and seuere Parentes, and so ientle a scholemaster. For when I am in the presence of either father or mother, whether I speake, kepe silence, sit, stand, or go, eate, drinke, be merie, or sad, be sowyng, plaiyng, dauncing, or doing anie thing els, I most do it, as it were, in soch weight, mesure, and number, euen so perfitelie, as God made the world, or else I am so sharplie taunted, so cruellie threatened, yea presentlie some tymes with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies, which I will not name, for the honor I bear them, so without measure mis-ordered, that I think my selfe in hell, till tyme cum, that I must go to M. Elmer, who teacheth me so ientlie, so pleasantlie, with soch faire allurements to learning, that I thinke all the tyme nothing, whiles I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping because, what soeuer I do els, but learning, is ful of grief, trouble, feare, and whole misliking unto me: And thus my booke, hath bene so moch my pleasure, and bringeth dayly to me more pleasure and more, that in respect of it, all other pleasures, in vere deede be but trifles and troubles vnto me. I remember this talke gladly, bothe bicause it is so worthy of memorie, and bicause also, it was the last talke that euer I had, and the last tyme, that euer I saw that noble and worthie Ladie.

Mr. Elmer said she understood perfectly both kinds of philosophy, and could express herself very properly at least in the Latin and Greek tongues. Sir Thomas Chaloner said that she was "well versed in Hebrew, Chaldee, Arabic, French and Italian," that she "played well on instrumental music, writ a curious hand, and was excellent at her Needle." Ballard quotes a contemporaneous opinion that she was superior to King Edward VI in learning and in the languages. "If her fortunes [says he] had been as good as her bringing up, joyned with fineness of wit: undoubtedly she might have seemed comparable not only to the house of the Vespasians, Sempronians, and mother of the Gracchies; yea, to any other women besides that deserveth high praise for their singular learning; but also to the university men, which have taken many degrees of the Schools."

So far as accessible records go it was only in royal or noble families that a learned education was counted suitable for women. It is rare indeed to come upon an account like that of Elizabeth Lucar (1510-1537), the daughter of a Mr. Paul Withypoll, and the wife of a merchant-tailor, Mr. Lucar. In her accomplishments she seems to have vied with the best ladies in the land. She was excellent in music, being able to play on the viol, the lute, and the virginal, and she could sing in various tongues.

She wrought all Needle-works that Women exercise,

With Pen, Frame, or Stoole, all Pictures artificial,

Curious Knots, or Trailes, what fancy could devise,

Beasts, Birds, or Flowers, even as things natural.

She wrote "three manner hands," was especially cunning in accounts and "Algorism" (Arithmetic), and she could speak, write, and read Latin, Spanish, and Italian, and she "won the garland" in English.[43] Our knowledge of Elizabeth Withypoll's rare attainments comes by chance from the information on her monument. Probably there were other highly educated women in the wealthy middle classes but their learned tastes were not counted worthy of any definite record.

In addition to the many instances of girls trained in the best learning of their times during the first half of the sixteenth century, we have striking contemporary testimony as to the prevalence of the custom, and the high esteem in which such learning was held. Richard Mulcaster (1530-1611), first head-master of a school founded by the Merchant Taylors' Company in 1561, in discussing principles of education, expressed advanced ideas concerning the ability and training of girls.[44] He declared himself "for them toothe and naile." He says that their "natural towardnesse" is such that they should be well brought up, and he summarizes the elements of this training. A young gentlewoman is thoroughly educated, he says, if she can "reade plainly, and distinctly, write faire and swiftly, sing cleare and sweetly, play wel and finely, understand and speak the learned languages, and the tongues also which the time most embraseth with some logicall helpe to chop, and some rhetoricke to brave." And he asks whether it is likely that the children of a woman so trained will be "eare a whit the worse brought up" for this learning. The places wherein girls may study may be at home with tutors or they may go forth to the elementary school. And the teacher may be either a man or a woman. Mulcaster was himself in favor of sending girls to the public grammar schools, and even to the universities, but he said it was "a thing not used" in his country, there was no "president" therefor. But he is enthusiastic about the attainments of women. In languages, he says, "they compare favourably with our kinde in the best degree." Some of them are so excellently trained and so rarely qualified that they could be preferred to "the best Romaine or Greekish paragones be they never so much praised: to the Germaine or French gentlewymen by late writers so wel liked: to the Italian ladies who dare write themselves and deserve fame for so doing."

Nicholas Udall, in 1548, in a Preface to Princess Mary's translation of the Paraphrase of the Gospel of St. John by Erasmus, comments on the great number of noble women at that time in England given not only to human sciences and strange tongues, but

also so throughly expert in the Holy Scriptures that they were able to compare with the best writers as well in enditeing and penning of Godly and fruitful treatises to the instruction and edifying of realmes in the knowledge of God, as also in translating good books out of Latin or Greek into English.... It was now no news in England to see young damsels in noble houses and in the courts of princes, instead of cards and other instruments of idle trifling, to have continually in their hands either psalms, homilies, or other devout meditations ... and as familiarly both to read or reason thereof in Greek, Latin, French or Italian, as in English. It was now a common thing to see young virgins so trained in the study of good letters, that they willingly set all other vain pastimes at naught for learning sake. It was now no news at all, to see Queens and ladies of most high estate and progeny, instead of courtly dalliance, to embrace virtuous exercises of reading and writing, and with most earnest study both early and late, to apply themselves to the acquiring of knowledge.[45]

Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), indicates the prevalence of women poets in the sixteenth century when he says:

Darke word or doubtfull speach are not so narrowly to be looked vpon in a large poeme, nor specially in the pretie Poesies and deuises of Ladies and Gentlewomen-makers, whom we would not haue too precise Poets least with their shrewd wits, when they were maried they might become a little too fantasticall wiues.[46]

One of the influential foreign books of the first half of the sixteenth century was Baldasar Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, written in 1514, published in 1528, and translated into English in 1561 by Thomas Hoby. The book is a conversation supposed to take place in the drawing-room of the Duchess of Urbino, with the Duchess, her friend Emilia Pia, Pietro Bembo, Bernardo Bibbiena, Giuliano de Medici, and others, among the speakers. In the chapter on the attributes of the perfect Court Lady, Count Gaspar Pallavicino says, "Since you have given women letters and continence and magnanimity and temperance I only marvel that you would not have them govern cities, make laws, and lead armies, and let the men stay at home to cook or spin."[47] Giuliano de Medici replies, laughing, "Perhaps even that would not be amiss." There follows a discussion of woman as essentially imperfect, an accident or mistake of nature, and consequently of less dignity than men and not capable of those virtues to which men attain. But the Magnifico held the doctrine that physical weakness does not constitute inferiority, and that mentally women are equal to men: "All the things that men can understand the same can women understand too; and where the intellect of the one penetrates there also can that of the other penetrate."

It is but natural that the praise of learning for women should extend through the reign of Elizabeth. The Queen herself was an admirable linguist. She spoke and wrote Latin with ease; she was a student of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon; and she made translations into English from French and Italian, even translating from Latin into Greek. According to Ascham she read more Greek every day than some Prebendaries read Latin in a week, and bestowed more regular hours on learning than six of the best given gentlemen in the court. It was also in accordance with the ideals of the age that the Queen should wish to shine as a poetess. Dyce, in his Specimens of British Poetesses, says that except for the speech of the Chorus in the Hercules Acteus of Seneca (printed in Park's edition of Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors) he gives, and for the first time in collected form, all the poems by this "Flower of Troynovant." It is all occasional verse, such as a sonnet on that lovely "daughter of debate," Mary Queen of Scots, a Rebus, an Epitaph, and a few other stanzas. One little poem beginning

I grieve but dare not show my discontent,

with much that is conventional in expression, seems yet to have a genuine note of personal feeling. Taken as a whole the brief sum of the Queen's verse indicates no poetic aptitude. It merely goes to show that verse writing was counted an agreeable accomplishment, and one to be cultivated by a queen.

Probably the most highly gifted woman during Elizabeth's reign was Jane Weston (1582-1612).[48] And she was of high repute. When Evelyn went to dine with Lord Cornbury at Clarendon House (December 20, 1668) to see the new house "now bravely furnished, especially with the pictures of most of our ancient and modern wits, poets, philosophers, famous and learned Englishmen," he greatly commended his lordship's collection, but suggested additional names of the learned. Among these new names were Lady Jane Grey and Elizabeth Jane Weston. In Numismata Evelyn praised Jane Weston's Latin poem on typography. Farnaby "ranked her with Sir Thomas More and the best Latin poets of the day." She was reputed to speak and write English, Greek, German, Latin, Italian and Czech. John Philips praised her in his Theatrum Poetarum. "Weston's fair daughter," "the tenth muse," "the fourth grace," received, indeed, very high contemporary English recognition, and even more extravagant praise came from foreign critics. Her collected works were published in 1602 by Georg Martin von Baldhoven at his own cost. At the end of the book there was a list of learned women beginning with Deborah and ending with Elizabeth Weston.

The only woman before 1603 in Aubrey's Lives, besides the Countess of Pembroke, was Elizabeth Danvers. His notes on her are: "A great politician; great witt and spirit, but revengefull. Knew how to manage her estate as well as any man; understood jewells as well as any jeweller." He calls her "an Italian," probably because she understood that language, and he says "she had prodigious parts for a woman." Her learning was certainly unusual, for "she had Chaucer at her fingers' ends." The only date given for her is 1568, the year in which her son, Sir Charles Danvers, was born.[49]

To show that Scotland was not unrepresented, mention may be made of Elizabeth Melville, supposed to be identical with Elizabeth Colville, Lady Colville of Culross. In 1599 Alexander Hume dedicated to her his Hymns, or Sacred Songs, and he says of her: "I know ye delite in poesie yourselfe; and as I vnfainedly confes, excelles any of your sexe in that art, that ever I heard within this nation. I have seene your compositions so copious, so pregnant, so spirituall, that I doubt not but it is the gift of God in you."[50] The one poem by which she is known, Ane Godlie Dreame compylit in Scottish Meter by M. M. (Mistress Melville) Gentlewoman in Culross, at the request of her freindes, was published in 1603. It appeared again in a volume of Various Poetry in 1644, and in David Laing's Early Metrical Tales in 1826. Dyce gives a few stanzas in his Specimens. The poem is a Bunyan-like narrative in which the horrors of hell are painted with a vigorous brush. In fact hell is made so distinct that even the mitigating and finally saving presence of Christ as guide can hardly soften the pictures of "puir damnit saullis ... frying wonder fast in flaming fire."[51]

The one lady of Elizabethan days whose fame justly exceeds that of any of her predecessors is Mary Sidney (1561-1621),[52] sister of Sir Philip Sidney. At sixteen she married Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and the twenty-four years of her married life were passed at his estate, Wilton House, in Wiltshire. Her brother Philip was often at Wilton and her more important literary accomplishments are closely bound up with his work. It was at Wilton that he wrote The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia which he dedicated to his "dear ladie and sister." The brother and sister translated together the whole book of Psalms into English verse. Psalms 44-150 are attributed to Lady Pembroke. In 1592 she published two translations from the French, Du Plessis Mournay's Le Excellent Discours de la Vie et de la Mort; and Robert Garnier's Marc Antonie, a tragedy. Before 1600 she had also translated The Triumph of Death from the Italian. In 1593 she brought out her brother's Arcadia on which she had done most careful editorial work. She had also a taste for science. Aubrey, in his Brief Lives, says of her: "She was a great chymist, and spent yearly a great deale in that study.[53] She kept for her laborator in the house Adrian Gilbert (vulgarly called Dr. Gilbert), half brother to Sir Walter Ralegh, who was a great chymist in those dayes.... She also gave an honourable pension to Dr. Thomas Mouffett, who hath writ a booke De insectis. Also one ... Boston, a good chymist ... who did undoe himself by studying the philosopher's stone."

But while Lady Pembroke takes undoubtedly a high rank as translator and editor, her fame does not rest chiefly on this work. When Nicholas Breton compared her to the Duchess of Urbino he brought forward her essential claim to distinction, which is that she understood, valued, and befriended the literati of her day. Aubrey says: "In her time Wilton House was like a College, there were so many learned and ingeniose persons. She was the greatest patronesse of witt and learning of any lady in her time." The most extravagant eulogies were addressed to her from girlhood to old age. No such chorus of praise had been accorded any other woman except the queen. But it must be noted that this adulation is mainly for Lady Pembroke as the patroness of letters. Only incidentally are her own scholastic attainments commended. It was as a lover of wit and learning, as a dispenser of favors, that Lady Pembroke, the typical great lady of Elizabethan days, expressed her interest in learning, rather than as herself a scholar; and it was as an intelligent and open-handed patroness that she received highest recognition.

Wotton, about a century later, gives the following summary of the learning of this period: "It was so very modish, that the fair Sex seemed to believe that Greek and Latin added to their Charms: and Plato and Aristotle untranslated, were frequent ornaments of their Closets. One would think by the Effects, that it was a proper Way of Educating of them, since there are no Accounts in History of so many truly great Women in any one age, as are to be found between the years 15 and 1600."[54]

MARY SIDNEY, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

From an engraving in Horace Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors, London, 1806

Though Wotton counts the century as one period, a closer study of dates shows that most of the learned women of the century belong in the first half of it, or at least obtained their education in the first half of it. The woman most noted for classical attainments during Elizabeth's reign was Lady Bacon. Her sisters also were of considerable importance intellectually, and they lived well into the reign of Elizabeth. But their education and their establishment as women of exceptional learning belong before the coming of Elizabeth to the throne.

Miss Weston's learning is unquestioned, but it can hardly be credited to England. She lived much abroad, her works were published in Holland, and the praise accorded her in England was but an echo of the eulogies uttered by foreign critics. In spite of Queen Elizabeth and Lady Mary Sidney, and Lady Bacon and Jane Weston, it becomes apparent by a study of dates and names that there were in Elizabeth's reign fewer eulogies of liberal education for girls and fewer records of women distinguished by learning than in the preceding period. In point of fact, when we speak of the sixteenth century as a century of learned women, the emphasis should be on the first sixty years of the century.

3. Period from 1603 to 1650

With the death of Elizabeth we come practically to the end of the favor accorded learned women. The changed tone of public opinion may be fairly indicated by a few scattered utterances from contemporary poems and essays.

Sir Thomas Overbury, in his Characters (1614), describes "A Good Woman" as one "whose husband's welfare is the business of her actions." Her chief virtue is that "Shee is Hee." In A Wife he says that "Books are a part of Man's Prerogative." He praises a "passive understanding" in women and deprecates learning since

What it finds malleable it maketh frail

And doth not add more ballast, but more sail.

Powell, in Tom of All Trades (1631), is emphatic in his plea for the domestic as against the learned lady: "Let them learne plaine workes of all kinds, so they take heed of too open seaming. Instead of Song and Musicke, let them learn Cookerie and Laundrie. And instead of reading in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, let them reade the grounds of good huswifery. I like not a female Poetresse at any hand."[55] William Habington, in Castara (1634), a series of poems in honor of Lucy Herbert, his wife, gave a comprehensive description of the ideal wife's attitude towards her husband: "Shee is inquisitive onely of new wayes to please him, and her wit sayles by no other compass then that of his direction. Shee lookes upon him as Conjurers upon the Circle, beyond which there is nothing but Death and Hell; and in him shee beleeves Paradice circumscrib'd. His vertues are her wonder and imitation; and his errors, her credulitie thinkes no more frailtie, then makes him descend to the title of Man."[56] Richard Brathwait, in The English Gentleman, comments with apparent approval on the ancient seclusion of women. He says, "The Ægyptians, by an especiall decree (as Plutarch reports) injoined their Women to weare no shooes, because they should abide at home. The Grecians accustomed to burne, before the doore of the new married, the axletree of that coach, wherein she was brought to her husbands house, letting her understand that she was ever after to dwell there."[57]

Sir Ralph Verney said of his own daughter: "Pegg is very backward.... I doubt not but she will be schollar enough for a Woeman." With regard to little Nancy Denton he wrote: "Let not your girl learn Latin nor short hand: The difficulty of the first may keep her from that vice, for soe I must esteem it in a woeman; but the easinesse of the other may be a prejudice to her; for the pride of taking sermon noates hath made multitudes of women unfortunate." Miss Nancy was quite in advance of her godfather in her conception of the studies appropriate for her. She wrote to him: "I know you and my coussenes wil out rech me in french, but i am a goeng whaar i hop i shal out rech you in ebri grek and laten." Sir Ralph answered: "I did not think you had been guilty of soe much learning as I see you are; and yet it seems you rest unsatisfied or else you would not threaten Lattin, Greeke, and Hebrew too. Good sweet harte bee not soe covitous; beleeve me a Bible (with y^e Common prayer) and a good plaine cattichisme in your mother tongue being well read and practised, is well worth all the rest and much more sutable to your sex; I know your Father thinks thise false doctrine, but be confident your husband will bee of my oppinion. In French you can not be too cunning for that language affords many admirable books fit for you as Romances, Plays, Poetry, Stories of illustrious (not learned) Woemen, receipts for preserving, makinge creames and all sorts of cookeryes, ordring your gardens and in Breif, all manner of good housewifery."[58]

The general opinion was quite in accord with Luther when he said: "Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children";[59] or, at the best, with Milton's "He for God only, she for God in him."[60]

Mr. Baldwyn, it is true, in 1619, in his New Help to Discourse, praises England as the place where women had the greatest prerogatives. In England, he says, women "are not kept so severely submiss" as in France, nor so jealously guarded as in Italy. "England is termed by foreigners the Paradise of Women as it is by some accounted the Hell of horses and the Purgatory of Servants. And it is a common byword among the Italians that if there were a bridge built over the narrow seas all women in Europe would run into England."[61] But this favorable opinion must be discounted as being a retrospective estimate based mainly on the attitude towards women in the sixteenth century; and further, as being an Englishman's attempt to exalt English as against continental customs.

Of more curious interest is the ingenious attempt of the Bishop of London to interpret the account of the creation of Eve from Adam's rib as an intention on the part of the Creator to teach the equality of woman with man. The Bishop says: "The species of this bone is exprest to be costa, a rib, a bone of the side, not of the head: a woman is not domina, the ruler; nor of any anterior part; she is not prælata, preferred before the man; nor a bone of the foote; she is not serva, a handmaid; nor of any hinder part; she is not post-posita, set behind the man; but a bone of the side, of a middle and indifferent part, to show that she is socia, a companion to her husband. For qui jungunter lateribus, socii sunt, they that walke side to side, cheeke to cheeke, walke as companions."[62]

One book definitely in honor of the ladies came out rather late in the period. This was Charles Gerbier's Elogium Heroinum. The Ladies' Vindication: or, The Praise of Worthy Women. The threefold dedication to the Princess of Bohemia, "whose marvellous wisdom and profound knowledge in Arts, Sciences, and Languages, is admired by all men," to the Countess Dowager of Claire, "a Patroness of the Muses, a general Lover of the Languages, and Knowledge"; and to the "Vertuous Accomplisht Lady Anne Hudson," is justified by the three principles in natural philosophy, the three theological virtues, and the three graces. "Woman," says Mr. Gerbier, "is capable of as high improvement as man," an assertion which he proceeds to establish by the following arguments: "Does not Sophia signify wisdom? Are not Faith, Hope and Charity represented as Women? Are not the Seven Liberal Arts exprest in Women's Shapes? Are not the Nine Muses Daughters of Jupiter? Is not Wisdom called the Daughter of the Highest?" His list of worthy women begins with the Queen of Sheba who disputed with Solomon, goes enthusiastically through the famous dames of Greece and Rome, including the Muses and the Sibyls, and touches upon later learned women such as "Christine de Pisan, Margaret of Vallois, Lady Jane Grey, the Countess of Pembroke, the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke," and a few other outstanding personages of Tudor times. Praise so heterogeneous and uncritical was perhaps of little value, but such as it is, it stands alone in England in the period between Elizabeth and Charles II as a defense of learned women. And no defense or protest comes from the pen of a woman.

It should, however, be noted that in European countries women were more vitally concerned in their own destinies. Between 1600 and 1641 there appeared at least three significant books by women dealing with the intellectual emancipation of their sex. The earliest of these came from Italy in 1608 with a second edition in 1621. It was written by a young Venetian widow, Lucrecia Marinelli (1571-1653), and was entitled Della notabilità e della eccellenza delle donne e dei difetti degli uomini. A second and better known book was by Marie de Jars, the fille d'alliance of Montaigne, usually known as Mlle. de Gournay.[63] Her book, entitled L'Egalité des Hommes et des Femmes, appeared in 1604 when "the Pride of Gournay," "the French Siren," as she was called, had become well known in the cultivated circles of Paris through her definitive edition of Montaigne's works in 1595. Mlle. de Gournay's thesis as to the dignity and capacity of women is established by divine authority and by citations from the church fathers and ancient philosophers. She follows up these expressions of opinion by a thorough résumé from sacred and profane history of the women who have worthily held high places. M. Feugère[64] voices what must be the opinion of any modern reader when he says that L'Egalité would be plus piquant without the pedantic form in which it is cast, without les citations fréquentes et les raisonnements scholastiques qui le surchargent. But however cumbersome we may find her method, it apparently suited her public, for the book was enthusiastically received.

The third and by far the most important book on the position and desirable training of women was by Anna van Schurman of Utrecht. The extremes to which Mlle. de Gournay carried her doctrines were distasteful to Anna van Schurman, yet many of her ideas were doubtless based on the work of her French predecessor, la mère du féminisme moderne. Anna van Schurman's book was translated into English and had a direct influence on the progress of English educational ideals for women. It is taken up in detail later in this discussion.

The low estimate of learning, in the first half of the seventeenth century, as an appropriate pursuit for women, had as its natural outcome a great decrease in the number of women who devoted themselves to any form of scholarship. The names that remain to us from this period as in any way connected with literature or learning form a singularly inchoate list, interesting, for the most part, because of the oddities it represents rather than because of any solid achievements. Of considerable importance are several ladies in the early years of the Stuarts who followed in the footsteps of Lady Pembroke as patronesses of learning. The first of these was Lady Bedford, who held her "graceful and brilliant little court" at Twickenham Park between 1608 and 1618. Daniel, Drayton, Donne, and Jonson were among those who celebrated her munificence. Though Lady Bedford wrote verses she had no pronounced literary pursuits of her own. Her "considerable and varied learning" went preferably along antiquarian and horticultural lines. She collected medals and pictures, and she designed a garden highly praised by Sir William Temple. She is of importance chiefly because, in an age when learning lived only as it found patrons, she was magnificent in her hospitality to the poets.[65] Lady Mary Wroth was a niece of Lady Pembroke and carried on the traditional family attitude towards poets. Jonson's Alchemist (1610) was dedicated to her, and Chapman's Iliad (1614) had a prefatory sonnet addressed to her. She wrote The Countess of Montgomerie's Urania (1621), in four books, a work modeled on her uncle's Arcadia. A third patroness was Elizabeth Spencer, wife of Sir George Carey. She was a kinswoman of Edmund Spenser and he commemorated her for "the excellent favors" she had granted him.

One of the most notable young women of the time of James I was Elizabeth Jocelyn (1596-1622). She was brought up by her grandfather, William Chaderton, Bishop of Lincoln. He was a friend of Sir Anthony Coke and Lord Burleigh and naturally shared their ideas as to education. The quick wit and remarkable memory of this little granddaughter greatly pleased him and he took the utmost pains with her education, training her carefully in "languages, history, and some arts," but principally in "studies of piety." She died nine days after the birth of her first child to whom she left The Mother's Legacie to her Unborne Childe. The third edition came out in 1625, an incorrect impression in 1684, and a reprint of the 1625 edition in 1852.[66] The little book contains a letter to her husband in which she indicates her wishes in case the child should be a girl:

I desire her bringing up to bee learning the Bible, as my sisters doe, good housewifery, writing and good workes: other learning a woman needs not; though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion, yet I desired not so much in my owne, having seene that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdome, which is of no better use to them than a main saile to a flye-boat, which runs under water. But where learning and wisdom meet in a vertuous disposed woman, she is the fittest closet of all goodnesse. She is, indeed, I should but shame myself, if I should goe about to praise her more. But, my dear, though she have all this in her, she will hardly make a poore man's wife: Yet I leave it to thy will. If thou desirest a learned daughter, I pray God give her a wise and religious heart, that she may use it to his glory, thy comfort, and her owne salvation.

Nearly all of the book is given up to cautions and plans for a boy's education. And for boy or girl there is great emphasis on religion, on attending services, reading the Bible, and keeping up habits of daily devotion. Of the prayers definitely recommended, one for morning is one hundred and eighty lines, and one suitable for all times is three hundred and fifty-nine lines. In the brief portion addressed directly to the girl, "Devout Anna, Just Elizabeth, Religious Ester, and Chaste Susanna" are held up as exemplars. Self-effacement seems the chief duty enjoined on the girl: "If thou beest a Daughter, remember thou art a Maid, and such ought thy modesty to bee, that thou shouldst scarce speak, but when thou answerest." The book was deservedly popular because it was so genuine in its forecast of sorrow, so pathetically eager in plans and hopes for her husband and child. No other work so personal and human in its appeal comes to light in this period.

There are during the first half of the century a few books by women on practical subjects. They could hardly take rank as learned productions, but they are significant as early attempts on the part of women to put into some sort of readable form, and to print for the instruction of other women, the wisdom garnered through years of experience. One of these books appeared in 1628 and was entitled The Countess of Lincoln's Nurserie.[67] The Countess was the mother of seven sons and nine daughters and wrote this little treatise particularly for the guidance of her daughter-in-law Bridget. It is described as "a well-wrote piece full of fine arguments, and capable of convincing anyone that is capable of conviction, of the necessity and advantages of mothers nursing their children." A second book transmitted information of another sort. Before 1651 Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent (1581-1651), the granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick, wrote or compiled A Choice Manuall, or Rare and Select Receipts in Physick and Chyrurgery. A second part, entitled A True Gentlewoman's Delight Wherein is contained all manner of Cookery, reached its nineteenth edition in 1687. The Legacie, the Nurserie, the Choice Manuall, were the direct outcome of interests considered appropriate for women, and such publicity as they involved would not be challenged.

Letter-writing is also a realm ascribed without question to women, and when chance has rescued from oblivion any group of their letters, social history has been thereby enriched. The earliest Englishwoman, any large number of whose letters have been preserved and published, is Lady Brilliana Harley (1600-43) who wrote to her son Edward while he was at Oxford in the years 1638-40. She was a woman of pronounced religious and political opinions, observant, domestic, and with a ready pen for picturesque detail, and her letters are of more interest than most of the contemporary published work.[68]

A few women have more directly to do with learning than those already mentioned. Occasionally in some great family Tudor traditions were maintained. Margaret, Countess of Cumberland (1560-1616), for instance, held to the idea that maidens of noble houses must be nobly educated, and she induced the poet Daniel to live at Skipton Castle as tutor to Anne, her nine-year-old daughter. Bishop Rainbow, who knew the family well, gives the following account of Anne:

She could discourse with virtuoso's, travellers, scholars, merchants, divines, statesmen, and with good housewives in any kind: insomuch that a prime and elegant wit, Dr. Donne, well seen in all human learning ... is reported to have said of this lady, in her younger years to this effect; that she knew well how to discourse of all things from predestination to slea-silk. Meaning that although she was skilful in her housewifery, and such things in which women are conversant, yet her penetrating wit soared up to pry into the highest mysteries, looking at the highest example of female wisdom. Although she knew Wool and Flax, fine Linen and Silk, things appertaining to the spindle and the distaff: yet she could open her mouth with wisdom.... If she had sought fame rather than wisdom, possibly she might have been ranked among those wise and learned of her sex, of whom Pythagoras or Plutarch, or any of the ancients have made such honourable mention.[69]

A portrait of Anne at thirteen represents the books supposedly read by her under her tutor, Mr. Daniel, and her governess, Mrs. Ann Taylor, whose heads appear in the picture. The books are "Eusebius, St. Augustine, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Godfrey of Boulogne, The French Academy, Cambden, Ortelius, and Agrippa on the Vanity of Occult Sciences."[70]

ANNE CLIFFORD, COUNTESS OF DORSET, PEMBROKE AND MONTGOMERY

From an engraving in Pennant's Tour in Scotland, 1790, Part II

At nineteen Anne married the Earl of Dorset. Her second marriage, in middle life, was to Philip Herbert, Fourth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. In alliance with these noble houses she was extremely unhappy. In her Journal she says: "The marble pillars of Knowle in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire, were to me often times but the gay arbor of anguish. A wise man, that knew the insides of my fortune, would often say, that I lived in both these my lords' great families as the river Roan runs through the lake of Geneva, without mingling its streams with the lake; for I gave myself up to retiredness as much as I could and made good books and virtuous thoughts my companions."[71] A portrait, belonging to this period of middle life, indicates as the books then most favored, "the Bible, Charron on Wisdom and pious treatises." Lady Pembroke's pursuit of abstract and theological learning was, however, largely the outcome of her repressed and unhappy life. On her second widowhood, in 1650, she forsook learning and gave free reign to her "master-passion for bricks and mortar." But most of this energetic work, during which she rebuilt or restored her six castles and several churches, belongs after the Restoration. As a woman of affairs Lady Pembroke made a remarkable impression on her age. Bishop Rainbow, who says she had "a clear soul shining through a vivid body," emphasizes also "her great understanding and judgment." Pennant, in his Tour, said that she was regarded as "the most eminent character of her times, for intellectual accomplishments, for spirit, magnificence, and benevolence."

Another lady who carried over into this period the liberal training of Tudor days was Elizabeth Tanfield (1585-1639), who, at the age of fifteen, married Henry Carey, later Viscount Falkland. Our knowledge of her very interesting life and character is derived mainly from a Life written by one of her daughters. She was a lover of books from her childhood and learned languages—French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Transylvanian—practically without a teacher. Her daughter said of her:

When she was but four or five years old they put her to learn French, which she did about five weeks, and not profiting at all gave it over; after, of herself, without a teacher, whilst she was a child she learned French, Spanish and Italian; ... she learned Latin in the same manner.... Hebrew she likewise, about the same time, learned with very little teaching.... She then learned also of a Transylvanian his language, but never finding any use of it forgot it entirely. She read so incessantly at night that her mother forbade the servants to give her candles. But she bought candles at half a crown apiece of the servants and at twelve was £100 in their debt, a debt which she paid on her wedding day.

Her work as an author began early, for her first play was written about the time of her marriage. It was dedicated to her husband. A second play, The Tragedy of Mariam the Faire Queene of Jewry, was written when she was eighteen or nineteen, though not printed till 1613.[72] She was early recognized as one of the most intellectual women of her time. In 1612 she was one of the three "Glories of Women" to whom John Davies dedicated his Muses Sacrifice. Later, in 1633, the publisher of Marston's Works dedicated them "To the Right Honourable the Lady Elizabeth Carey, Viscountess Falkland," because she was so "well acquainted with the Muses." That Lady Falkland's appetite for learning never abated is apparent from her daughter's testimony:

She had read very exceedingly much: poetry of all kinds ancient and modern in several languages, all that ever she could meet; history very universally, especially all ancient Greek and Roman histories; all chronicles whatsoever of her own country, and the French histories very thoroughly: of most other countries something, though not so universally, of the ecclesiastical very much, most especially concerning its chief pastors. Of books treating of moral virtue or wisdom (such as Seneca, Plutarch's Morals, and natural knowledge, as Pliny, and of late ones, such as French, Mountaine, and English, Bacon) she had read very many when she was young. Of the fathers and controversial writers on both sides a great deal even of Luther and Calvin.[73]

Lady Falkland was converted to Catholicism in 1605 and she devoted all her learning to the service of the Church. She translated Cardinal Perron's Works and wrote lives of the saints in verse.

Lady Falkland's son Lucius married Letice Morrison, another "undue lover of books," who abridged herself of sleep that the hours of reading might be prolonged. This daughter-in-law of Lady Falkland was not only eager for learning, but she had independent views along social lines. One of her schemes was the foundation of houses "for the education of young gentlewomen and the retirement of widows with the belief that through such houses learning and religion might flourish more than heretofore in her own sex." Her early death in the time of the Civil War frustrated her plans, but they have an especial interest as forecasting the ideas set forth by Mary Astell later in the century.[74]

Anna Hume, the daughter of David Hume, was carefully educated by her father at Godscroft, a property to which he retired that he might be unmolested in his devotion to literature. Anna joined in his pursuits with eagerness and intelligence, and after his death she did much to complete his work. In 1644 she superintended the publication of his History of the House and Race of Douglas and Angus. She translated Latin poems, and in 1644 she also published The Triumph of Love, Chastity and Death, translated from Petrarch. Drummond of Hawthornden speaks highly of her learning and of her "rare and pregnant wit."

Esther Kello (1571-1624) is often spoken of as one of the notable women of the Stuart period. Her works were counted worthy gifts for kings, and are preserved in royal libraries. Calligraphy was one of the fine arts in the seventeenth century. To write many different hands, to make flourishes, to decorate margins, to illuminate titles and capital letters, to make elaborate head or tail pieces to chapters, and to write the alphabets of many languages, were the elements of this art. No other accomplishment was so often advertised.[75] It was in this art that Esther Kello excelled. Les Proverbes de Salomon (1599), written in forty hands, and with all possible ornamental detail, was one of her most famous books. It was preserved in "Bodley's Library." In exactness, fineness, and beauty her books are said to rival the old illuminated manuscripts.[76]

There was published in 1630 a twelve-page tract entitled A Chain of Pearl, or a Memorial of the Peerless Graces and heroic Virtues of Queen Elizabeth, of glorious memory, composed by the noble lady, Diana Primrose. The Pearls of the Chain are Religion, Chastity, Prudence, Temperance, Clemency, Justice, Fortitude, Science, Patience, and Bounty. A preliminary address to the author by one Dorothy Berry greets Diana as "the Prime-rose of the Muses nine." The Pearls are in the style of exaggerated compliment always associated with the name of Queen Elizabeth, but they could not have been inspired by any interested motives, for Elizabeth had been dead nearly a generation when they came from the press. Save the date of publication I have no facts about either Diana Primrose or Dorothy Berry. Perhaps their youth was spent during the "blest and happy years" when the Heroine they praised was on the throne.

She, she it was that gave us golden days,

And did the English name to heaven raise.

If so, and if they wrote when trouble was brewing between the King and the people, we can well understand the ardor of Diana Primrose's eulogy of the days when the Prince and People agreed "in sacred concord and sweet sympathy."

A very curious book is by Mary Fage. It is entitled Fame's Roule and appeared in 1637.[77] It is a collection of the most ingenious anagrams and acrostics on the names of four hundred and twenty persons of the "hopeful posterity" of Charles I. John Weymes, for instance, is anagrammed into "Show men joy" and John Hollis into "Oh! on my hills." The amplification of the anagram is mainly compliment with now and then a trace of exhortation. This was an age when playing with words gave undoubted pleasure, but four hundred and twenty anagrams on royal names would seem an undue tax on even the most agile manipulator of the alphabet.

Katherine Chidley wrote and spoke on questions of Church and State. In 1641 she published a quarto volume entitled The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ, in which she maintained that the congregations of the Saints should receive "no direction in worship from any other than Christ their head and lawgiver." She is described as "a most violent independent who talked with so much bitterness and with so clamorous a tongue as to vanquish opposing divines, and who wrote as furiously in behalf of her cause as if she were the Amazonian Queen in defence of the Trojans."

A literary oddity of the Cromwell period, a fertile writer whose half-mad and often unintelligible prophetic writings yet came true often enough to secure her a troublesome reputation as a "Cunning Woman," was Lady Eleanor Davies, the wife of Sir John Davies of Hereford. She was twice married and both husbands had burned her manuscripts, but finally, in 1651, there was printed a pamphlet, The Restitution of Prophecy; that Buried Talent to be revived. By the Lady Eleanor.[78] The Lady Eleanor was as devoted to anagrams as was Mary Fage. The change of Eleanor Davies into "Reveal O Daniel" was her mystic authorization as a prophet, until some wit shattered her anagram by producing "Never so mad a lady."

4. Schools for Girls before 1660

Of schools for girls during the period before 1660 we get but vague hints. John Whitgift, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1583, protested against having schools for "maiden children" within the precincts of the church. And he added in a note, "Especially seeing they may have instruction by women in the town."[79] In the statutes of Harrow School, made in 1590, there is a statement to the effect that "no girls shall be received or taught," hence the subject had at least been under discussion.[80] Love's Labour's Lost seems to indicate that Holofernes taught girls as well as boys,[81] and Helena comments on the "school-days' friendship" between her and Hermia.[82] But these references belong to late Elizabethan times and are too indefinite to serve as evidence.

The best-known schools for girls in the first half of the seventeenth century were apparently religious in origin. One of these is the "Institute" founded by Mary Ward (1585-1645).[83] She was a brilliant and beautiful young Catholic who made it the aim of her life to influence young women to an acceptance of the Catholic faith. This she endeavored to accomplish through educational agencies. It was her plan to have an organization of uncloistered nuns who should not wear habits, who should be free to come and go, and who should adapt themselves in manner and dress to their surroundings in such ways as might be most advisable in the pursuance of their spiritual aims. Conditions in England made it useless to attempt such a school or community there. So the first establishment of the Institute was at St. Omer. This was in 1609. Five gentlewomen crossed the sea at that time with Mary Ward. The one she loved and trusted most was Winifred Wigmore, a descendant of the Throgmortons of Warwickshire, and so well educated that she spoke five languages fluently. She had a keen intellect, was wise, sympathetic, courageous, and very devout. Mary Poyntz, "gifted with all that can be most highly esteemed in person, birth or fortune," the youngest of the group, was scarcely sixteen when she cast her lot in permanently with Mary Ward. Of Jane Browne, Catharine Smith, and Susanna Rookwood fewer details are given. Later on Miss Ward was joined by Barbara Babthorpe, "highly educated and very well read ... with a striking gift of eloquence," and by her own sister Barbara Ward. Each of these ladies had a companion, so it was quite a household that assembled at St. Omer, and they entered at once upon the life they had planned. They practiced rigid self-denial, living on one meal a day and sleeping on straw beds, and submitting themselves to other austerities. Their time was given over to good works, especially to education. They established a school for French and English girls, receiving the English girls as boarders. In 1612 Miss Ward said that they had already received two nieces of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and another young lady from the family of the Earl of Southampton, and that many Catholic nobles were planning to send their daughters to be brought up in the Faith and good manners, by the ladies of St. Omer.

MARY WARD

From an engraving in The Life of Mary Ward, by Mary Elizabeth Chambers of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin

The Institute finally received the sanction of the pope and was successful in various countries. But Miss Ward's efforts to establish it in England in 1638 met with so much hostility that she was obliged to carry on her work secretly and by subterfuge, changing the location of her little band of followers from time to time as suspicion centered upon them. The Institute was finally broken up by the Puritans in 1642. Little is known of the actual work of the school. The members of the Institute were always so anxious and harried that there could have been no really systematic instruction except in the articles of faith. There are in the Convent of the Institute at Augsburg fifty large oil paintings dating from the seventeenth century, and representing events in its history. In these pictures Mary Ward's life is seen to be one of dramatic interest from her childhood to her death. And her personality is one of compelling charm. She was a heroine and a pioneer, an executive of first-rate ability, an extremely acute woman of business, and yet without loss of the graces and amenities of human intercourse. The St. Omer school shows genius. Within the limits of her church she was promulgating ideas the full fruition of which would not come for many years. She believed that sound mental training would establish women in their faith, and that women, if given opportunity and education, would prove to have powers not generally ascribed to them. To establish a school on this basis was an enterprise bolder, more original, and more hazardous than was the opening of the first colleges for women in America.

Another religious school was that known as Little Gidding,[84] founded by Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637). The life of Ferrar is one of great interest. He was a man of wide experience. He had known academic life at Cambridge, he had traveled in Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain, he had conducted extensive business enterprises in connection with the Virginia Company, and had taken an important place in political life as a member of Parliament. But while still under forty he turned definitely to a life of religious sequestration. He and his mother bought the Manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire in 1624 and there they set up the new establishment. He was joined by his brother John with his wife and three children, and by Mrs. Collet, his favorite sister, with her husband and sixteen children. To the children of these two families were added such children of the neighboring gentry as cared to come. In this household the girls were carefully educated. They had one master in Music, one in Arithmetic and Writing, one in English and Latin. They formed themselves into a little society called "The Academy" which had regular meetings for discussion of topics set for them. They took fanciful names, and had many quaint and elaborate little formalities. The topics discussed by "Patient" and "Cheerful" and "Moderator" and "Visitor," and even by little four-year-old "Humble," were nearly always religious or ethical, and the purpose of the discussions was always moral improvement. So strong was the religious element, so rigid were the forms of fasting, feasting, and worshiping, that the school came under suspicion as a Protestant nunnery. In 1641 it was attacked in a pamphlet entitled The Armenian Nunnery, or a Brief Description and Relation of the newly erected Monasticall Place called the Armenian Nunnery at Little Gidding.

The school at Little Gidding has had its fame as a religious organization perpetuated in Mr. Shorthouse's John Inglesant, but it is even more famous in the annals of fine book-binding. It was the belief of Nicholas Ferrar that every one should be taught some hand-work, and he determined upon book-binding as a part of the regular school work at Little Gidding. Dr. Jebb says that "a Cambridge book-binder's daughter that bound rarely" was procured as an instructor. She came, he says, either from the University printers themselves or from some Cambridge bindery which they patronized where she herself had been trained. She brought some of her own stamps with her, and some of her own ideas as to how they should be arranged.

Even this activity was the handmaid of religion, and was, indeed, probably undertaken primarily in order to preserve the concordances of the four gospels so carefully worked out by Nicholas Ferrar. The girls learned to do all the mechanical parts with extreme nicety, joining the many tiny slips and putting in the illustrative engravings with great deftness. The name of the binder is not usually given in the book, but there is one exception. A book bound by the youngest of the workers bears the inscription:

Thanks be to God.
Done at Little Gidding. Anno Domino 1640
by Virginia Ferrar, an. 12.[85]

The curious little "histories" composed by "The Academy" were written out in three manuscript volumes and bound. They have been lately acquired by the British Museum. "The volumes measure 13½ x 9 inches and are bound in black morocco, with a small double gold line running along the edge, finished with a little ornamental spray at each corner." The Concordances were more sumptuous. The Bibliographica gives full-page colored illustrations of these fine bindings and says of them:

The beautiful effect which Mary Collet, who seems to have done much of the binding herself, was able to produce by different arrangements of the stamps I have described shows that she was undoubtedly a lady of much taste and originality ... and it may fairly be considered that the velvet-bound volumes, of great size, gorgeous in color and rich in decoration, which were eventually produced under her supervision, must take the highest rank among amateur decorative book-bindings.

Unequalled in size, original in design, and rich in execution, these volumes must be seen to be appreciated; then indeed the expressions which Charles I used concerning them, which sound extravagant, can be well understood. Although much faded, and sometimes re-backed and the sides relaid, with the silken ties all gone, enough of their old magnificence still remains to make us feel that we should indeed be proud that English binders could have produced such works.[86]

Aside from these religious schools, which were very small, there were undoubtedly some fashionable boarding-schools, such as Mrs. Salmon's school in Hackney where Katherine Fowler went.[87] Another fully organized private school at Hackney was that kept by Mrs. Perwick in 1643, where as many as eight hundred girls had been educated.[88] The existence of a school for girls in Richmond is shown by a curious document found among a large number of miscellaneous papers in Warwickshire. It is entitled "Account for Peggy's Disbursements since her going to schoole at Richmond, being in Sept. 1646":

s. d.

Payd for a louehood

2.

6

For carriing the truncke to Queenhive

0.

8

For carriing it to Hammersmith

1.

0

Payd for two pair of shoes

4.

0

Payd for a singing booke

1.

0

Given to M

^rsis

Jervoises mayd

1.

0

Payed for a hairlace and a pair of showstrings

1.

0

For an inckhorne

0.

4

For faggots. 2

s.

8

d.

; and cleaving of wood,

12d.

3.

8

For 9

^li

of soape 2

s.

4

d.

; and starch 4

d.

2.

8

For hooks and a bolte for the doore

0.

9

For sugar and licorich

1.

4

For silke and thread

0.

6

For 3

^li

of soape, 11

d.

; and starch 4

d.

; and carrying letters 6

d.

1.

9

For 3

^li

of soape, 12

d.

; and starch 4

d.

1.

4

For sugar, licorich and coultsfoot

1.

6

For a necklace, 12

d.

; for a m. of pins, 12

d.

2.

0

For a pair of cands (candles?) 6

d.

; for muckadine 4

d.

; for wormsend (worsted), 2

d.

1.

0

For shostrings, 6

d.

; for going on errands, 6

d.

1.

0

For 3

^li

of soape, 12

d.

; for starch 4

d.

; thread and silk 4

d.

1.

8

For a bason, 4

d.

; for carrying letters, 6

d.

; for tape 4

d.

1.

2

For soape, 12

d.

; for starch, 4

d.

; for going on errands, 6

d.

1.

10

For a pair of pattins, 16

d.

; for three pair of shoes, 6

s.

7.

4

For callico to line her stockins, 2

d.

; for showstrings 4

d.

0.

6

For 3

^li

of soape, 12d.; for a pint of white wine 4d.

1.

4

For ale, 3

d.

; for 1/2

^li

of sugar, 8

d.

0.

11

For a m. of pins, 12

d.

; for a corle and one pair of half-handed gloves, 8

d.

1.

8

Given to the writing mr.

2.

6

For silke, 12

d.

; for silver for the tooth-pick case, 4

d.

1.

4

For a sampler, 12

d.

; for thread, needles, paper, pins, and parchment, 30

d.

3.

6

For a pair of shoes, 2

s.

2

d.

; for ribbon, 3

d.

2.

5

For soape, 12

d.

; for starch, 4

d.

; for carriing a letter, 4

d.

1.

8

To the waterman bringing the (box?) to Richmond

1.

0

For shoestrings, 6

d.

; for purge, 18

d.

2.

0

For bringing the box from Richmond

1.

0

For a coach from Fleetestreete

1.

0

For wood to this time

15.

10

———

Totall of disbursements to this 15th day of Aprill, 1647 is

£3. 18.  5 

[89]

Peggy's clothing and her board and tuition must have been paid for by her father. The accurate little list represents only her personal and incidental expenses. The writing-master's fee, the purchase of an inkhorn, a singing-book, and materials for a sampler are the only suggestions that Peggy was being educated. But several of the items are indicative of general school conditions. For instance, if a girl had a fire she evidently had to pay extra for it, Peggy's largest single item being for wood, "cleaving of wood," and "faggotts." The next largest sum goes for "soape" and starch. Peggy apparently did her own laundry, or at least bought the materials used; and she bought them in amounts suggestive of disproportionate emphasis on clean linen. In clothing the most surprising purchase is of six pairs of shoes and one pair of "pattins" in six months. It is a pity we have not the letters for the carrying of which Peggy paid ten pence. They might serve to throw light on her expense account.

In May, 1649, Evelyn records in his Diary, "Went to Putney by water, in the barge with divers ladies, to see the schools, or Colleges, of the young gentlewomen." These Putney schools may have been under the charge of Mrs. Makin. In that case they were the forerunners of the more advanced school she established at Tottenham High Cross in 1673.

One interesting point occurs in the foundation of a school for boys by Balthasar Gerbier in 1648. This school was an academy wherein the sons of noble families could be taught classics, mathematics, drawing, painting, carving, music, behavior, etc. The novel element in the school is Gerbier's advertisement December 21, 1649, in which he says that ladies are to be admitted to his lectures.[90]

If girls were educated at all during the period from 1603 to 1660 it must have been, in the main, at home under parents and tutors. But even of such education the records are meager. Little Gidding was practically a home school, but it stands as an isolated attempt. The few little pictures of more secular home education that have been by chance preserved to us indicate no very valuable training. Mrs. Alice Thornton (1626-1707), Lady Anne, daughter of the Earl of Strafford, and Lady Arabella Wentworth, were brought up in Ireland and were given "the best education that Kingdome could afford." They were taught to write and speak French; singing, dancing, playing on the lute and theorboe, and such other accomplishments as "working silkes, gummework, sweetmeats, and other sutable huswifery" such as was necessary for girls of their social position.[91]

We get some further light from autobiographical sketches by the Duchess of Newcastle,[92] Lady Fanshawe,[93] and Mrs. Hutchinson,[94] women whose mature work belongs in the Restoration period or not many years before it, but whose childhood and early youth belong in the period under consideration, and serve in a measure to illustrate its methods. The educational advantages afforded these young daughters of the best families were like those of an eighteenth-century finishing-school, and were far removed from the stern mental discipline in the school of Sir Thomas More.

CHAPTER II
LEARNED LADIES IN ENGLAND FROM 1650 TO 1760

1. An Introductory Group in the Years 1650-1675

The brief running summaries in the preceding chapter have perhaps served to bring into prominence two sharply contrasted periods. The first half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth seem even more than a hundred years apart in tone and temper. We turn from the eager intellectual life of many women in the Tudor period, from their full and rich opportunities, and we find that in the time of the earlier Stuarts there were very few women who took any pride in learning, that there was little or no provision at home or in schools for any but the most desultory sort of education for girls, and that there were practically no formulated ideals or theories of intellectual advancement for women. But at the close of this barren half-century we come upon what may be considered the real beginnings of the modern work of women. This era of development may be appropriately introduced by the presentation of several women who, while in no sense cohering into a group, are yet alike in that their home education belongs in the reign of Charles I, that later they had the stern training incident on Civil War conditions, and that their published work belongs before 1675.

Margaret Lucas, the Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1674)

The most talked-of learned lady of the Restoration period was the Duchess of Newcastle.[95] She was brought up by her mother, who was left a widow with a great fortune and a family of eight children when Margaret was an infant. The Duchess in her Autobiography describes a family life conducted with splendor and luxury. She comments on the elaborate attendance, the rich and costly garments, the many pleasures, secured for the children by the industrious care and tender love of their mother. It was a bright, gay, free, affectionate home life. But we get only slight indications of any educational advantages. "As for tutors, although we had for all sorts of vertues, as singing, dancing, playing on musick, reading, writing, working, and the like, yet we were not kept strictly thereto, they were rather for formality than benefit, for my Mother cared not so much for our dancing and fidling, singing and prating of severall languages, as that we should be bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably and on honest principles." None of these opportunities met Margaret's needs. She says she had a natural stupidity in learning foreign tongues, cared little for music, disliked needlework, found cards and games tiresome, and dancing frivolous. Apparently the freedom of the family life left her at liberty to follow her real interests which were in the main intellectual. Here she had the sympathetic aid of her brother, Lord Lucas. The precocious development of her mind is shown by the fact that at twelve she had written a book on a philosophical subject.

MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

From an engraving in Horace Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors, London, 1806

At eighteen she was appointed maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria and accompanied her to France. There, at twenty, she became the second wife of the Duke of Newcastle, a nobleman thirty-two years older than herself, but who was, she says, "the onely Person I ever was in love with." She was with him during the trying years of his absence from England and it was during this difficult and tedious period that literature became her resource. Her publications began with Philosophical Fancies in 1653 and closed with Grounds of Natural Philosophy in 1668, during which period she wrote nearly twelve folio volumes. The portions of her work concerning which she felt the greatest measure of self-congratulation were her studies in natural philosophy. Her Philosophical Fancies of 1653 was expanded in 1655, and in 1663 received its final form as Philosophical and Physical Opinions. Of all her books this was "her best beloved and favourite." But the quality on which she chiefly prides herself is the very one that nullifies her work. Originality is her great boast, an originality so pronounced as to refuse to base its deductions on the writings of previous thinkers. Her husband substantiates her claim. He says that all her philosophical fancies are spun out of her own brain, and that, if she does not use the technical terms of philosophers, it is because her language is her own too. She has scorned to talk with any "profest scholar" to learn his phraseology. "She did never impe her high-flying Phancies, with any old broken Fethers out of any university."[96] She says herself that she could never "afford board-room to other people's ideas lest the legitimate offspring of her own brain should be crowded out."[97] In Part IV, "On the Motion of the Bodie," we find that the Duchess has never studied anatomy, but this apparent disqualification does not prove inhibitory. In An Epistle to the Reader she explains the situation:

I am to be pardoned, if I have not the names and tearms that the Anatomists have or use; or if I have mistaken some parts in the body, or misplaced any: for truly I never read of Anatomie, nor never saw any man opened, much less dissected, which for my better understanding I would have done; but I found that neither the caurage of nature, nor the modesty of my sex would permit me. Werefore it would be a great chance, even to a wonder I should not erre in some; but I have seen the intrals of beasts, but never as they are placed in their bodies, but as they are cut out to be drest ... which intrals I have heard are much like mans, especially a hogs, so that I know man hath a brain, a heart, a stomach, liver, lights, spleen, and the like; yet these I never viewed with a curious and searching eye, but as they have laien in some vessels; and as for bones, nerves, muscels, veines and the like, I know not how they are placed in the body, but as I have gathered several times from several relations, or discourses: here a bit and there a crum of knowledge, which my natural reason hath put together.[98]

From any modern standpoint of scientific excellence the inaccuracy and amazing self-confidence of these studies render them worse than futile. But it was not ignorance that was charged against the Duchess by her critics. The experimental method was having its triumphs, but doubtless a good deal of the scientific writing of the first half of the century was marked by a dogmatic tone and an uncertainty as to facts, so the Duchess was not attacked on that score. The common report that irritated the Duke of Newcastle to a spirited defense of his wife was that she could not have written these books, for "no lady could understand so many hard words." The Duke takes up various kinds of hard words such as terms of divinity, philosophy, astronomy, and geometry, and shows that natural wit, common sense, and some observation could compass most of them. He gives the following account of the way he and the Duchess acquired a medical vocabulary: "But would you know the great Mystery of these Physical terms, I am almost ashamed to tell you; not that we have been ever sickly, but by melancholy often supposed ourselves to have such diseases as we had not, and learned Physitians were too wise to put us out of that humour, and so these terms cost us much more than they are worth, and I hope there is nobody so malicious as to envie us our bargain."[99] At the end of his Preface the Duke comes to what he considers the real cause of the aspersions on his Lady's books: "But here's the crime, a Lady writes them, and to intrench so much on the male prerogative, is not to be forgiven." The Duchess, in her Address to the Two Universities, recurs to this idea. She hopes her book may be received

for the good incouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots, by the dejectednesse of our spirits, through the carelesse neglects, and despisements of the masculine sex to the effeminate, thinking it impossible we should have either learning or understanding, wit or judgement, as if we had not rational souls as well as men, and we out of a custom of dejectedness think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge ... so as we are become like worms that only live in the dull earth of ignorance, winding ourselves sometimes out, by the help of some refreshing rain of good educations which seldom is given us; for we are kept like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses ... we are shut out of all power, and Authority by reason we are never imployed either in civil nor marshall affaires, our counsels are despised, and laught at, the best of our actions are troden down with scorn, by the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves and through a despisement of us.[100]

But she presents her book with some confidence to the universities as places where are to be found right judgment and respectful civility. And at any rate she would rather "lie intombed under the dust of an University" than be "worshipped by the Vulgar as a Deity."

One of the Duchess's most curious books is Orations of Divers Sorts accommodated to Divers Places. Among the "orations" is a "collection of speeches for a convivial meeting of country gentlemen in a market town, ending with 'a speech of a quarter-drunk gentleman,' and 'a speech of a half-drunk gentleman.' Another little collection headed 'Female Orations' reports the speeches delivered at a meeting of women on the great question of combining together to make themselves 'as free, happy, and famous as men.'"[101]

When the Duke and Duchess returned to England after the Restoration they lived for the most part at one of their country estates, but they made occasional visits to London. It was then that the Duchess's beauty, wealth, eccentric dress and manners, and literary and scientific pretensions made her a conspicuous and, to some, a ridiculous figure. Sir Walter Scott, in Peveril of the Peak,[102] makes Charles II say of the Duchess, "Her Grace is an entire raree-show in her own person—a universal masquerade—indeed a sort of private Bedlam hospital"; and this sums up the attitude that found expression in the phrase, "Mad Madge of Newcastle." In 1653 Dorothy Osborne wrote to Sir William Temple: "Let me ask you if you have seen a book of poems newly come out, made by my Lady Newcastle? For God's sake if you meet with it send it to me; they say 't is ten times more extravagant than her dress. Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous as to venture at writing books, and in verse too." A little later she wrote: "You need not send me Lady Newcastle's book at all, for I have seen it, and am satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam."[103] Mrs. Evelyn called on the Duchess in 1667 and wrote to Mr. Bohun:

I was surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls. Her habit particular, fantastical, not unbecoming a good shape, which truly she may boast of. Her face discovers the facility of her sex, in being yet persuaded it deserves the esteem years forbid, by the infinite care she takes to place her curls and patches. Her mein surpasses the imagination of poets, or the descriptions of a romance heroine's greatness: her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out of her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is as airy, empty, whimsical and rambling as her books, aiming at science difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity.[104]

On May 30, 1667, the Duchess made a formal visit to the Royal Society, and Pepys says she was all admiration at the fine experiments they showed her, but he did not hear her say anything that was worth hearing. There had been much objection to admitting her to the rooms of the Society, some of the members fearing that the town would be "full of ballads of it," but the visit seems to have passed off mildly and with the respectful observance to which she was accustomed.

MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

From an engraving in The Lives of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and of his wife Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, edited by Mark Antony Lower, London, 1872

In spite of the stream of private criticism already indicated, the almost unmixed adulation of which the Duchess was the subject is indicated by the Letters and Poems, in Honour of the incomparable Princess Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle, published in 1676, two years after her death. In her lifetime, too, the praise was equally extravagant. Resounding Latin titles, such as Illustrissima Heroina, Excellentissima Dux, Eminentissima Princeps, came to her from high sources. The Rector Magnificus of the University of Leyden called her not only Princeps fæminini sexus, but Princeps terrarum. And the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in a complimentary address said that the great women of old could not contend with her for the palm of learning, but rather would they, with bent knee, adore this solam Margaretam Consumatissimam Principem. Even so sane a man as Evelyn wrote her a most flattering letter when she sent him her works in 1674. Beginning with Zenobia he assembled the great women of ancient times, the learned ladies of more modern days in France, Spain, Italy, and Holland, and concluded with

Mary de Gournay, & the famous Anna M. Schurman: and of our owne country, Queene Elizabeth, Queene Jane, the Lady Weston, Mrs. Philips our late Orinda, the daughters of S^r Tho: More; the Queene Christina of Sweden, & Elizabeth, daughter of a queen also to whom the renowned Des Cartes dedicated his learned worke, & the profound researches of his extraordinary talent. But all these, I say, sum'd together, possesse but that divided, which yr Grace retaines in one; so as Lucretia Marinella, who writ a book (in 1601) dell' Excellenzia

delle Donne

, con difetti è mancamenti de gli huomini, had no neede to have assembled so many instances and arguments to adorne the work, had she lived to be witnesse of Margarite, Dutchess of Newcastle, to have read her writings, & to have heard her discourse of the science she comprehended.[105]

Praise could hardly go further.

The best modern judgment discards the encomiums, but yet gives the Duchess a fairly high place. Sir Egerton Brydges, the editor of her Autobiography, says:

That the Duchess was deficient in a cultivated judgment; that her knowledge was more multifarious than exact; and that her powers of fancy and sentiment were more active than her powers of reasoning, I will admit; but that her productions, mingled as they are with great absurdities, are wanting either in talent or in virtue, or even genius, I cannot concede.[106]

The Duchess was buried in Westminster Abbey with this inscription on her monument:

Here lies the loyal Duke of Newcastle and his Duchess, his second wife, by whom he had no issue. Her name was Margaret Lucas, youngest sister to Lord Lucas of Colchester, a noble family, for all the brothers were valliant, and all the sisters virtuous. This Duchess was a wise, witty, and learned Lady, which her many books do well testify; She was a most virtuous, and loving, and careful wife, and was with her Lord all the time of his banishment and miseries; and when they came home never parted with him in his solitary retirements.

The two books by the Duchess that one would not willingly let die are her Life of her husband and her Autobiography. These are of permanent value as pictures of the life of a great, rich family like that of her girlhood home, and the straitened life in exile, with the later affluent and splendid life of a noble high in royal favor such as was the Duke of Newcastle. All the personal portions of both books are told with an air of genuineness, a naïveté, that make delightful reading. The Duchess summed up her life as that of a woman "honourably born, carefully bred, and nobly married to a wise man," and it was out of these happy domestic relations that her best work came.

Mrs. Katherine Philips (1631-1664)

Contemporary with the Duchess of Newcastle was Katherine Fowler, better known as Mrs. Katherine Philips, and better still as the "Matchless Orinda." She was the daughter of John Fowler, "an eminent merchant in Bucklersbury," and Katherine Oxenbridge. Aubrey gives a quaint account of her precocious childhood as it was described to him by "her cosen Blacket who lived with her from her swadling cloutes till eight, and taught her to read." Aubrey says: "When a child she was mighty apt to learn, and ... she had read the Bible through before she was full four yeares old; she could have sayed I know not how many places of Scripture and Chapters. She was a frequent hearer of sermons; had an excellent memory and could have brought away a sermon in her memory."[107]

Her further education was carried on at Hackney at the school of "Mris Salmon, a famous schoolmistress, Presbyterian.... Loved poetrey at schoole, and made verses there. She takes after her grandmother Oxenbridge ... who was an acquaintance of Mr. Francis Quarles, being much inclined to poetrie herself." As a child Katherine evidently was as ardent a Presbyterian as her school-mistress and her Oxenbridge ancestors. "She was very religiously devoted when she was young; prayed by herself an hower together, and tooke sermons verbatim when she was but ten yeares old.... She was when a child much against the bishops, prayd to God to take them to him, but afterwards was reconciled to them. Prayed aloud, as the hypocritical fashion then was, and was overheared."

At sixteen she married Mr. James Philips, Esquire, of Cardigan Priory, Wales. Her published work includes numerous brief poems, most of them of a personal nature, two plays translated from the French, and several letters to Sir Charles Cotterell. This is rather scanty productivity to serve as a basis for the great vogue Mrs. Philips certainly had, nor to the modern reader does the quality of the work sufficiently account for the enthusiasm it excited. Yet we have abundant testimony that the last ten years of her life were made brilliant by praise from the most authoritative sources. Sir Charles Cotterell, her intimate friend and the editor of her Works, said of her: "We might well have call'd her the English Sappho, she of all the Poets of former Ages, being for her Verses and her Virtues both, the most highly valued; but she has call'd herself Orinda, a name that deserves to be added to the Muses, and to live with honour as long as they. Were our language as generally known to the world, as the Greek and Latin were anciently, or as the French is now, her Verses could not be confined within the limits of our Islands, but would spread themselves as far as the Continent has Inhabitants, or as the Seas have any Shore." Something must be allowed here for the enthusiasm of a friend and an editor, but other estimates were almost as extreme. The Earl of Orrery had thought that the high praise of her poems at court must be exaggerated, but when he came to know her and her writings the court eulogies were to him but "Imperfect Trophies," and he exclaimed, "If there be Helicon, in Wales it is." Henry Lawes and Dr. Coleman, the best composers of the day, set some of her poems to music. Cowley in two poems to her praised her for her spirit "so rich, so noble, and so high," her "inward Virtue," her "well-knit Sence," and for her poems in which were united all the excellences of both sexes. When her translation of Pompey appeared in the Smock-Alley Theater, Dublin, the Earl of Roscommon wrote the Prologue and Sir Edward Dering the Epilogue, and the success of the play was assured by the enthusiastic support of the aristocracy of Dublin. In 1659 Jeremy Taylor dedicated to her his Discourse of the nature, offices and measures of friendship. Though she does not exactly fulfill the prophecy of Mr. Thomas Rowe, that "Orinda should be an ever-glorious name to ages yet to come," yet her fame was by no means confined to her own brief day. We hear echoes of it far down in the eighteenth century. The highest praise that could be given to any woman poet was to bracket her with Orinda.

By the nineteenth century her vogue was almost extinct, but chance appreciation came from an unexpected quarter. Keats wrote to Reynolds in September, 1817:[108]

The world, and especially our England, has, within the last thirty years, been vexed and teased by a set of Devils, whom I Detest so much that I almost hunger after an Acherontic promotion to a Torturer, purposely for their accomodation. These devils are a set of women, who having taken a snack or Luncheon of Literary scraps, set themselves up for towers of Babel in languages, Sapphos in Poetry, Euclids in Geometry, and everything in nothing. Among such the name of Montague has been preëminent. The thing has made a very uncomfortable impression on me. I had longed for some real feminine Modesty in these things, and was therefore gladdened in the extreme on opening the other day, one of Bailey's Books—a book of poetry written by one beautiful Mrs. Philips, a friend of Jeremy Taylor's and called "The Matchless Orinda"—you must have heard of her, and most likely read her Poetry—I wish you have not, that I may have the pleasure of treating you with a few stanzas.

Whereupon he quotes the ten stanzas written by Orinda on parting with her friend "Rosania," a poem of genuine feeling and quaintly charming in expression. "In other of her poems," says Keats, "there is a most delicate fancy of the Fletcher kind—which we will con over together."

MRS. KATHERINE PHILIPS

"From an original Picture in the Collection of her Grace the Dutchess of Dorset." Drawn by J. Thurston. Engraved by W. Finden. From an engraving in Effigies Poeticae. London, 1824

Thus the magic of Orinda's name reasserts itself, and she is again praised as a lady of "delicate fancy," "feminine modesty," and unmatched in friendship. A reintroduction to a general public was given by Mr. Gosse's delightful essay in Seventeenth Century Studies (1885). And in 1904 a selection from her poems was published with an acute "Appreciation."

In her own day Orinda was not only prized as a poet, but she was considered the highest example, the prophet and expounder, of true friendship. Much of her verse was called forth by her Society of Friendship. The chief members of this circle were "Antenor" (Mr. Philips), "Lucasia" (Miss Anne Owen), "Rosania" (Miss Mary Aubrey), "Regina" (Mrs. John Collier), "Palæmon" (Jeremy Taylor), "Silvander" (Sir Edward Dering), "Policrite" (Lady Margaret Cavendish), "Celimena" (Miss E. Boyl), "Cassandra" (Mrs. C. P., her dear sister), and "Critander" (Mr. J. B.). "Ardelia," "Phillis," and "Pastora" remain unidentified. There were doubtless others in the circle, but these we know because they all received poetical tributes from Orinda. There were over thirty-five private individuals intimately addressed in her poems.

It is undoubtedly the personal character of her poems that secured her so wide and favorable an audience while her writings were still in manuscript and known only as they passed from hand to hand. Each person addressed was the center of a new circle of readers. But the intimacy of the poems is one reason for the actual agony Orinda suffered when an unauthorized edition of her poems appeared in 1662. "Their Names expos'd in this Impression without their leave" was the burden of her grief. And she was likewise injured in her modesty. The publication seemed to put her in the position of a woman bold and masculine enough to send her writings into the world. A thousand pounds, she says, would not have bought her consent. To Sir Charles Cotterell she wrote:

To me (Sir) who never writ any line in my life with any intention to have it printed.... This is a most cruel accident, and hath made so proportionate an impression upon me, that really it hath cost me a sharp fit of sickness since I heard it.

If the garbled version makes a true version a necessary reparation of the misfortune she will yield, "but with the same reluctancy as I would cut off a Limb to save my Life."

I am so far from expecting applause for anything I scribble, that I can hardly expect pardon; and sometimes I think that employment so far above my reach, and unfit for my Sex, that I am going to resolve against it for ever; and could I have recovered those fugitive Papers that have escaped my hands, I had long since made a sacrifice of them all. The truth is, I have an incorrigible inclination to that folly of riming, and intending the effects of that humour, only for my own amusement in a retir'd life; I did not so much resist it as a wiser woman would have done.[109]

She had been planning a visit to London, but she wrote in despair to Dorothy Osborne (then Mrs. Temple):

I must never show my face there or among any reasonable people again, for some dishonest person hath got some collection of my Poems as I heare, and hath deliver'd them to a Printer who I heare is just upon putting them out and this hath soe extreamly disturbed me, both to have my private folly so unhandsomely exposed and ye belief that I believe the most part of ye world are apt enough to believe yt I connived at this ugly accident that I have been on ye rack ever since I heard it, though I have written to Col. Jeffries who first sent me word of it to get ye Printer punished, the book called in, and me someway publicly vindicated yet I shall need all my friends to be my champions to ye criticall and mallicious that I am soe innocent of this pittiful design of a knave to get a groat that I never was more vexed at anything and yt I utterly disclaim whatever he hath so unhandsomely expos'd. I know you have goodness and generosity enough to doe me right in your company and to give me your opinion too how I may best get this impression supressed and myself vindicated and therefore I will not beg your pardon for troubling you with this impertinent story.[110]

Her pride of authorship would, however, almost certainly have triumphed over her modesty if she could have lived to see the sumptuous volume with its bravery of eulogistic verse in which Sir Charles Cotterell enshrined her work. Her letters to him, under the title Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, were published in 1705 and add distinctly to her fame.

On the whole, Orinda becomes a personage to us and an agreeable one. There is a note of sincerity through even her most unrestrained poems; the ardor of her affections is unmistakable; her loyalty to the King, to her friends, to her ideas, is genuine. She does not labor compliments. Her praise pours forth from the abundance of her feeling. Perhaps one reason for her ready popularity was that she aroused no antagonisms. Though a literary woman there was nothing about her that was masculine, strident, or assertive. Her outlook on life was gracious and tolerant. She loved simplicity and retirement and was never dazzled by wealth or titles.

At any rate, there is one interesting and significant fact about her and that is her success. It was a kind of success new in English literary history. A woman without any commanding advantages of birth or fortune, only moderately good-looking, without any compelling fascination, unstimulated by parental or tutorial ambitions, with but the scantiest schooling, married to an ordinary, rather dull man; a virtuous, sane, orderly, thrifty woman, excellent in business, housewifely, with no eccentricities, simply follows her feelings in friendship and the bent of her mind towards authorship, and attains in a few years a position notably high.

Mary North (d. 1662)

Two interesting young women who belong chronologically to this group are not exactly learned ladies, but they had intellectual piquancy and alertness. One of them, Mary North, was the eldest of the fourteen children of Dudley, the fourth Lord North. The mother of this large family was evidently a remarkable woman. Her son Roger says of her: "The Government of us was In generall severe, but tender; our mother maintained her authority, and yet condiscended to Entertain us. She was learned (for a lady) and Eloquent. Had much Knoledg of History and readyness of witt to express herself, in the part of Reproof, wherein she was fluent and pungent.... But without occasion given to the Contrary, she was debonair, familiar, and very liberall of hir discourse to entertain all." This combination of the pungent and the debonair made an effective family discipline, for it was said that there was not a son or daughter whose abilities were not of a very high order, and that the daughters were hardly less cultured than their brothers. And of this group Mary was, says Roger, "by far the most brilliant—a woman of real genius." A charming picture is given of the ladies of the North family, gathered together according to the custom of the time for endless tasks of tapestry and embroidery, listening entranced to Mary who recited romances for hours together, giving not only the story, but the conversations, the substance of letters, and the general reflections. She had "a superiour wit, a prodigious memory, and was most agreeable." "She instituted a sort of order of the wits of her time and acquaintance, whereof the symbol was a sun with a circle touching the rays, and upon that in blue ground were wrote αὐτάρκης in proper Greek characters, which her father suggested. Divers of these were made in silver and enamel, but in embroidery plenty, which were dispersed to those wittified ladies who were willing to come into their order; and for a while they were formally worn, until the foundress fell under the government of another, and then it was left off."[111] Mary North was married to Sir William Spring of Pakenham and died in 1662 in her twenty-fourth year. Her feminine "Order of Intellect," her quaint badge, "the symbol of a community of taste and interest in literature, science, and art,"[112] offer an attractive and hopeful prospect. It was an inconspicuous little organization, springing up gayly and spontaneously, and its scope of learning may not have gone beyond the French romances the gifted young leader knew by heart, but it was at any rate an association of young women with some pronounced literary aspirations and tastes, and as such it stands out alone, a charming picture set in the framework of the anxious years before the Restoration.

Dorothy Osborne, Lady Temple (1627-1694)

When Dorothy Osborne had been Lady Temple some years her husband wrote from London a "sweet scrip full of reproaches" at the businesslike tone and brevity of her letters. She answered with a touch of her old sauciness: "Pray what did you expect I should have writ, tell me that I may know how to please you next time. But now I remember me you would have such letters as I used to write before we were marryed, there are a great many such in your cabinet yt I can send you if you please, but none in my head I can assure you."[113]

The love letters thus preserved in Sir William Temple's cabinet have had a narrow escape from oblivion. They were found among the Temple papers when Mr. Courtenay was preparing his elaborate Life of Sir William Temple, and forty-two extracts from the letters were put by Mr. Courtenay apologetically in an appendix. He could not be sure that they would not seem trivial in comparison to matters of state. This book was published in 1836. Macaulay reviewed it in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1838, and took occasion to give a vivid sketch of Dorothy and her lover. Macaulay's article led Mr. Edward Abbot Parry to read Courtenay's extracts from the letters and to weave them together into a kind of story, which was published in April, 1886, in The English Illustrated Magazine. This magazine fell into the hands of Mrs. S. R. Longe who had had access to the original letters and had copied them with minute accuracy. These letters were offered to Mr. Parry for publication and were accordingly brought out, though with omissions, in 1888.[114] In 1903 the letters were published in full. Thus, after escaping the vicissitudes of nearly two and a half centuries, these letters became a delight accessible to all.[115]

When Dorothy was twenty-one she went with her brother to France. At the Isle of Wight they were joined by young Mr. William Temple who promptly fell in love with Dorothy because of the spirited way she met a difficult situation. Her brother had written on the window pane at the inn some phrases objectionable to the Puritans, and the whole party was arrested. Then Dorothy, relying upon the general chivalrous attitude towards women, took the blame upon herself, and they were set free. The courtship thus begun was destined to last seven years. There were few meetings and the correspondence was carried on with all possible secrecy, for both the Osbornes and the Temples had other plans for the young people. It was a difficult seven years for Dorothy. The Osbornes lived at Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, a lonely and not very interesting region. Dorothy's mother died in 1650. After a long illness, during which she was his constant attendant, her father died in 1654. During these years her brother was the only one of the family with her in the strange old house. And from him came her chief trial, for it was the effort of his life to see her well married. Young men, middle-aged men, old men, aspired to be Mistress Dorothy's "servants." The ancient Priory saw a train of lovers sent away unsatisfied. Dorothy gave all sorts of reasons for her fastidious and critical attitude towards her suitors—all reasons but the real one. Mr. Temple had no assured income, Dorothy but a small dowry, and no families in their rank of life could be expected to sanction so imprudent a choice. In the meantime silence and faithfulness was the only resource of the impecunious lovers. It was a hard fate, but not without compensations for later generations, for if they had married happily on coming out of France there would have been no bundle of letters in the old cabinet at Sheen.

There are various indications that Dorothy had numerous correspondents. That they did not save her letters is our great loss, for we can imagine few more delightful ways of being inducted into the life of the times than through the letters of Mistress Dorothy. The "Matchless Orinda" was one of her correspondents, but only one letter arising out of this friendship has been preserved. It may justly be quoted entire because it serves to unite the two most interesting women of the time, and because it shows how Mrs. Philips, in the plentitude of her fame, with Dublin dramatic triumphs fresh upon her, with the aristocracy of London adding leaves to her laurel crown, courted the quiet Mrs. Temple living the most retired and domestic of lives at Sheen. This letter has the further pathetic interest of being one of the last Orinda wrote, for when she reached London on this visit she had so longed for she fell a victim to that most dreaded scourge, the small-pox:

Deare Madam,—You treat me in your letters so much to my advantage and above my merit that I am almost affray'd to tell you how exceedingly I am pleased with them lesst you should attribute yt contentment to ye delight I take in being praised whereas I am extreamely deceived if that be ye ground of it, though I confess it is not free from vanity. I can not choose but be proud of being owned by soe valuable a person as you are, and one whom all my inclinations carry me to honour and love at a very great rate, and you will find by the trouble I last gave you of this kind how impossible it will be for you to be rid of an importunity which you have much encourag'd and how much your late silence alarm'd one yt is soe much concern'd for ye honour you doe her in allowing her to hope you will frequently let her know she hath some room in ye particular favour, I hope you have pardon'd me that complaint and allow'd a little jealousy to that great passion I have for you and that I shall with some more assurance come to thank you for this last favour of 12th instant, and must beg you to believe that if my convent were in Cataya and I a recluse by vow to it, yet I should never attain mortification enough to be able willingly to deny myself the great entertainment of your correspondance, which seems to remove me out of a solitary religious house on ye mountains and place me in the most advantageous prospect upon both court and town and give me right to a better place than of either, and that madam is your friendship, which is so great a present, that there is but one way to make it more valuable and yt is by making it less ceremonious and by using me with a freedom that may give me more access into your heart and this beg from you with a great earnestness, and will promise you that whatsoever liberties of that kind you allow me, yt I will never so much abase that goodness as to press mine own advantages further than you shall permit or lessen any of the respect I ow you, by the less formal approaches I desire to make to you who though I esteem above most of the world yet I love yet more.[116]

Orinda was a letter-writer of no mean ability herself, but she wrote with something of a professional tone, and possibly with an eye to numerous readers. It was only Dorothy that could make town and court live again. Macaulay's philippics against "the dignity of history" and his eulogy of the social value of such letters as Dorothy's must find approval from every one who tries to revivify a forgotten era. Dorothy was an acute observer. If the novel of domestic life had been in existence in her day she would have found the natural place for her clever and slightly caustic pen. The successive suitors and various dull visitors at Chicksands could have had little suspicion of the merry and facile wit that was serving up their oddities for the amusement of her lover. Furthermore, Dorothy was an inveterate reader, and a reader with mental reactions, an independent judgment, and a skill in witty comment. The general tone of the letters is a delightful mixture of humor, tenderness, and coquetry. No writing of the time was more unaffectedly human. And there were counsels of prudence and of good sense, bits of worldly wisdom and penetrating knowledge of human foibles. And with it all was the charm of style. When Mr. Temple wishes to know how she spends her day she outlines the slow-moving hours and closes with this delicate picture of evening:

The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o'clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there: but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly when we are in the midst of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings to their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay behind; and when I see them driving home their cattle, I think 't is time for me to return too. When I have supped, I go into the garden, and so to the side of a small river that runs by it, when I sit down and wish you were with me (you had best say this is not kind neither). In earnest, 't is a pleasant place, and would be much more so to me if I had your company. I sit there sometimes till I am lost with thinking; and were it not for some cruel thoughts of the crossness of our fortunes that will not let me sleep there, I should forget that there were such a thing to be done as going to bed.[117]

Dorothy's easy, natural tone was quite in accord with her theory of letter-writing. She writes to Mr. Temple:

All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one's discourse, not studied like an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm. 'T is an admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find terms that will obscure a plain sense, like a gentleman I knew who would never say "the weather grew cold," but that "winter begins to salute us." I have no patience for such coxcombs, and cannot blame an old uncle of mine who threw the standish at his man's head because he writ a letter for him, where instead of saying (as his master bid him) that "he had the gout in his hand" he said "that the gout would not permit him to put pen to paper." The fellow thought he had mended it mightily, and that putting pen to paper was much better than plain writing!

How in 1652-54 did Dorothy escape the grand style? She was steeped in romances and she read Jeremy Taylor with delight. But there are no preciosities, no attempted elaborateness or ornamentation or splendor in her style. She might have written after the moderns had won their victory so direct and straightforward is her speech. But the infinite charm of her letters belongs to no age. It is the expression of a personality.

We cannot leave Dorothy Osborne's letters without feeling defrauded that there are so few of them. After their marriage in 1655 the Temples lived five years in Ireland. Sir William's importance in state affairs led to a later residence in Brussels and at The Hague. After 1681 they lived in retirement at Moor Park and Swift and Stella were of their household. What opportunities for letters if Dorothy had only been as indefatigable as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu! But except for a few personal notes from Sheen in 1665-67, Dorothy fades from our sight. Did accumulated sorrows sap her energy and dim her joyous courage? She had nine children. Seven of them died in infancy. Her daughter died of small-pox. Her son committed suicide because of fancied inability to perform a diplomatic mission. It is said that at some time during the years 1689-94 Queen Mary and Dorothy kept up a continuous correspondence. If such letters were written there is now no trace of them. The latest published letter from Dorothy is in 1689 in response to some expression of condolence for the death of her son. It is difficult to recognize in this subdued and dignified, almost cold and stately lady, the sparkling and mischievous Dorothy of the earlier letters.

Lady Pakington (d. 1679)

Just about contemporary with Mrs. Philips and the Duchess of Newcastle was a remarkable woman of quite another type. This was Lady Pakington, the daughter of Lord Coventry. If, as was long supposed, she wrote the series of books of which The Whole Duty of Man was one, that fact would place her very high in the ranks of seventeenth-century authors. With the consensus of expert opinion now against the ascription of these books to her, she yet holds an important place among learned women.[118] Dr. George Hickes, whose deanery was near Westwood, the home of Sir John Pakington, and who was intimate with the family, in the Preface to his Thesaurus which was inscribed to Sir John, gives a "character" of Lady Pakington in which he says she was trained in her youth by "the excellently learned Sir Norton Knatchbull," and that later in life she was mistress of all the learning, good judgment, sound thinking, and piety necessary to have been the author of the famous Whole Duty of Man. He says that noted divines declared her as learned in the history of pagan and Christian systems of thought as were they themselves; and that she knew concerning the antiquities of her own county "almost as much as the greatest proficients in that kind of knowledge." Especially did Dr. Hickes comment on her "talent for speaking correctly, pertinently, clearly, and gracefully," and on "her evenness of style and consistent manner of writing." No woman of the period came nearer being the tutelary deity of a coterie than did Lady Pakington. Her loyalty to the Church of England and to the Stuart cause made of her beautiful home at Westwood during the Protectorate a natural resort for royalist divines. Dr. Hammond, Bishop Fell, Bishop Morley, Bishop Pearson, Bishop Henchman, Bishop Gunning, were among those whose friendship and esteem she had acquired by her "great virtues and eminent attainments in knowledge." Before the Restoration she held a kind of Church of England salon, and though most of the men who frequented it were given benefices by Charles II and so scattered through England, Lady Pakington, by letter and occasional personal intercourse, kept up the friendships of the earlier days, through the nineteen years that she lived after the Restoration. And even if she did not write The Whole Duty of Man (1657) and the series that followed it, these books arose from the discussions held at Westwood.

Mary Boyle, the Countess of Warwick (1624-1678)

The Countess of Warwick is best known from her Diary, her Autobiography, and the sermon preached at her funeral by Dr. Anthony Walker, rector of Fyfield in Essex. The Diary was kept from July, 1666, till 1678. The part from 1666 to 1672 was published in 1847 by the Religious Tract Society with a memoir. The remainder is among the manuscripts in the British Museum.[119] Her Autobiography, under the title, Some Specialties in the Life of M. Warwicke, was published by the Percy Society in 1848.[120] Dr. Walker's sermon, entitled The Virtuous Woman found, her loss bewailed, and character exemplified, etc., was published in 1678 and 1687.[121]

Mary Boyle was married to Mr. Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick, when she was but fifteen. Her life before that time she thus describes: "I was married into my husband's family, as vain, as idle, and as inconsiderate a person as possible, minding nothing but curious dressing and fond and rich clothes, and spending my precious time in nothing else but reading romances, and in reading and seeing plays, and in going to court, and Hide Park and Spring Garden; and I was so fond of the court, that I had taken a secret resolution that if my father died, and I was mistress of myself, I would become a courtier."[122] But by the time she was twenty-one a complete change was manifest. She became exceedingly devout. There is no more romance reading. The books on her chosen list are "St. Bernard, George Herbert, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Samuel Rutherford Clarke, the Confessions of St. Augustine, John Janeway's Dying, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Cayley's Glimpses of Eternity."[123] Her writing was all religious in tone. Rules for a Holy Life, Occasional Meditations, and Pious Reflections were among the topics she found most congenial. The Specialties in the Life of M. Warwicke shows the intensity of her struggle after spiritual perfection and her genuine aloofness from the gay and splendid scenes in which her rank compelled her to bear a part. The most ordinary occurrences, such as "lighting many candles at once," or "drawing the window-curtains to prevent the sun's putting out the fire," suggested pious reflections. At a glorious banquet at Whitehall "the trumpets sounding in the midst of all that great show" put mortifying thoughts into her mind and made her consider "what if the trump of God should now sound?" In a meditation entitled "Upon looking out of my window at Chelsea, upon the Thames," her delight in the sweet river when it is calm and serene, and her dislike of it—so that she shut her window and ceased to look—when it was rough, is moralized into the charm of calm and patient people as against those of turbulent passions.[124]

Lady Warwick's writings exhibit none of the joyous or fervent aspects of religion. In the midst of domestic trials, surrounded by an alien life, she was steadily tutoring her own heart, subduing her sins, following a high ideal. Dr. Walker in his sermon gives an example of seventeenth-century pulpit oratory in his effort adequately to praise this great lady, as conspicuous for goodness as for her rank and wealth: "An hundred mouths, and a thousand tongues though they all flowed with nectar, would be too few to praise her." "Oh," he exclaims, "for a Chrysostom's mouth, for an angel's tongue, to describe this terrestrial seraphine; or a ray of light condensed into a pencil, and made tactile, to give you this glorious child of light in viva effigie."

Lucy Apsley, Mrs. Hutchinson (1620-?)

That Lucy Hutchinson had written a life of her husband was known by many people and there were frequent requests in the eighteenth century that so valuable a historical document should be made accessible to the public. Mrs. Catherine Macaulay was one of those urgent in this matter, but without avail.[125] It was not till the manuscript came into the possession of the Reverend Julius Hutchinson that it was published. After the first edition in 1806 three editions appeared in four years. Some other writings besides the Memoirs were found among the papers of Mrs. Hutchinson. Of these the precious Autobiography was but a fragment. It not only closed abruptly, but leaves had been torn out. But from what remains we get one of the few accounts of the home education of girls in the first half of the seventeenth century. Her father and mother, extremely glad to welcome a girl after three sons, "applied all their cares and spared no cost" in her education. She describes this education as follows:

By the time I was four years old I read English perfectly, and having a great memory, I was carried to sermons; and while I was very young could remember and repeat them exactly, and being caressed, the love of praise tickled me, and made me attend more heedfully. When I was about seven years of age, I remember I had at one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing, writing and needle-work; but my genius was quite averse from all but my book, and that I was so eager of, that my mother, thinking it prejudiced my health, would moderate me in it; yet this rather animated me than kept me back, and every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find, when my own were locked up from me. After dinner and supper I still had an hour allowed me to play, and then I would steal into some hole or other to read. My father would have me learn Latin, and I was so apt that I outstripped my brothers who were at school, although my father's chaplain, that was my tutor was a pitiful dull fellow. My brothers, who had a great deal of wit, had some emulation at the progress I made in my learning, which very well pleased my father; though my mother would have been contented if I had not so wholly addicted myself to that as to neglect my other qualities. As for music and dancing, I profited very little in them, and would never practise my lute or harpsichords but when my masters were with me; and for my needle I absolutely hated it. Play among other children I despised, and when I was forced to entertain such as came to visit me, I tired them with more grave instructions than their mothers, and plucked all their babies to pieces, and kept the children in such awe, that they were glad when I entertained myself with elder company; to whom I was very acceptable, and living in the house with many persons that had a great deal of wit, and very profitable serious discourses being frequent at my father's table and in my mother's drawing-room, I was very attentive to all, and gathered up things that I would utter again, to great admiration of many that took my memory and imitation for wit. It pleased God that, through the good instructions of my mother, and the sermons she carried me to, I was convinced that the knowledge of God was the most excellent study, and accordingly applied myself to it, and to practise as I was taught. I used to exhort my mother's maids much, and to turn their idle discourses to good subjects: but I thought, when I had done this on the Lord's day, and every day performed my due tasks of reading and praying, that then I was free to anything that was not sin.[126]

MRS. LUCY HUTCHINSON AND HER SON

From an engraving in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, 1808

Elsewhere she notes other elements of her education. She says that as soon as she was weaned, a Frenchwoman was taken to be her dry-nurse and she was taught to speak French and English together. At the siege of Nottingham Castle Mrs. Hutchinson is represented as acting the part of a surgeon. This knowledge may doubtless be referred to instructions by her mother. Sir Allen Apsley, Lucy's father, was lieutenant of the Tower of London during her youth, and Mrs. Apsley was very generous and humane to the prisoners. Her daughter says of her:

What my father allowed her she spent not in vanities, although she had what was rich and requisite upon occasions, but she laid most of it out in pious and charitable uses. Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin being prisoners in the Tower, and addicting themselves to chemistry, she suffered them to make rare experiments at her cost, partly to comfort and divert the poor prisoners, and partly to gain the knowledge of their experiments, and the medicines to help such poor people as were not able to seek physicians. By these means she acquired a great deal of skill, which was very profitable to many all her life.[127]

The love story of Lucy Apsley and Colonel Hutchinson is curiously interwoven with her learning. When Lucy was sixteen her mother took her into Wiltshire in pursuance of a contemplated marriage contract and left a younger sister at a house where she was "tabled for the practice of her lute." Mr. Hutchinson, "tabled" at the same house, was attracted by the vivacious child, and frequently accompanied her when she went over to her mother's house. On one of these occasions he saw some Latin books and was much interested to find that they belonged to Lucy. Then he heard that this Lucy was "reserved and studious," then that she composed songs above "the ordinary reach of a she-wit," then that she had "sense above the rest," but that she "shunned the converse of men as a plague." Strangely enough, these accounts, or some magic, or the hand of Providence, plunged Mr. Hutchinson into the despairs and ardors of love even before he had seen the lady. On her return, the proposed marriage contract not having been completed, he daily frequented her mother's house, and for six weeks "in the sweet season of the spring" they had opportunity for converse with each other. During this period some envious ladies endeavored to break the friendship by telling him that Lucy neglected her dress and all womanish ornaments, giving herself up wholly to study and writing. But since his love had owed its inception to a sight of her Latin books, and had been stimulated by hearing her poetry, these insinuations did not interfere with what his wife calls "a more handsome management of love than the best romances describe."[128]

Somewhat later Lucy Hutchinson's love of learning led her to at least a slight knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. That she kept up her Latin is shown by the fact that she translated part of the Æneid. In her early married life she found scholastic means to mitigate the monotony of the needlework she loathed. Out of a "youthful curiosity to understand things she had heard so much of at second-hand" she translated six books of Lucretius into verse, accomplishing this task, she says, "in a room where my children practised the several qualities they were taught with their tutors, and I numbered the syllables of my translation by the threads of the canvas I wrought in, and set them down with a pen and ink that stood by me."

There was not, however, in Mrs. Hutchinson's life much opportunity for scenes so domestic as this. She was married to Mr. Hutchinson in 1638. By 1642 her husband was definitely committed to the side of the Puritans, and the rest of their life till his death in 1664 was one of anxiety, conflict, and baffled high endeavor. But it was also a life of achievement and excitement, and constantly sweetened and stimulated by extraordinary affection between husband and wife. When at his death she retired to the family home at Owthorpe the days must have looked very blank and empty to the heroine of Nottingham Castle. Not even the care of her eight children could keep her mind from dwelling on the past. The message her husband sent her from his death-bed in the prison, "Let her, as she is above other women, show herself, on this occasion, a good Christian, and above other women,"[129] helped her to restrain extreme signs of grief, but her heart and mind were with him. And the mechanic exercise that dulled her grief was the writing of his Life. She had kept a rough sort of diary and this was the basis for the longer work. The writing was done between 1664 and 1671 when Mrs. Hutchinson herself died. The work was addressed "To my Children" and its purpose was to make them know the character and deeds of their father. But the narrative goes much farther than that. It is a minute account of the persons and events of that portion of the Civil War especially connected with Nottingham. She writes as an eye-witness and a participant. She wields a pen vigorous, racy, and unafraid. She had a genius for picturesque characterization, and her scornful descriptions of cowards and traitors are veiled by no feminine softness of phrase. When describing such treacherous members of the Parliament Party as Charles White and Chadwick and his wife her vocabulary of abuse is unstinted. But she is equally fluent in her account of heroes such as Colonel Thornhagh. The intrigues, the factions, the cross-currents, within the Puritan Party are as minutely analyzed and laid open as is the general contest between King and Parliament. Furthermore, the book is readable from beginning to end. It moves with the rapidity of a novel of adventure. Mr. A. H. Upham[130] has analyzed Mrs. Hutchinson's work to show that it was probably suggested by the Duchess of Newcastle's Life of her husband, and that, further, the general plan and even the choice of detail were guided by the Duchess's Memoir. The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, though not published till 1667, was written in 1665, and since the two families were neighbors, and knew each other well, it might easily be that Mrs. Hutchinson was acquainted with the work of the Duchess in manuscript. This ingenious theory is maintained by citations of passages showing numerous similarities. But the fact remains that Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoir moves forward as from the force of an original impulse, nobly religious, shrewd, caustic, affectionate, and naïve. It was, in subject-matter and style, a notable achievement, and while succeeding in the amplest measure in its purpose of exalting Colonel Hutchinson's memory, quite as deservedly gives to Mrs. Hutchinson her own unsought and higher pinnacle of fame.

Ann Harrison, Lady Fanshawe (1625-1680)

A few years before her death Lady Fanshawe wrote for her son a narrative of her life. Of her own education she says: "Now it is necessary to say something of my mother's education of me, which was with all the advantages that time afforded, both for working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, (the) lute, the virginals, and dancing; and, notwithstanding I learned as well as most did, yet I was wild to that degree that the hours of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time; for I loved riding in the first place, and running, and all active pastimes; and in fine I was what we graver people call a hoyting girl. But to be just to myself I never did mischief to myself or other people, nor one immodest action or word in my life; but skipping and activity was my delight. But upon my mother's death and as an offering to her memory I flung away those little childishnesses that formerly possessed me and by my father's command took upon me the charge of his house and family, which I so ordered by my excellent mother's example as found acceptance in his sight."[131] At her mother's death Ann was "fifteen years and three months" old, and the household she took charge of was one "of plenty and hospitality," her father having a very great estate. In 1644 she married Sir Richard Fanshawe to whom she was passionately devoted during the twenty-six troubled years of their life together. She says: "Glory be to God, we never had but one mind throughout our lives, our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aims and designs one, and our resentments one. We so studied one the other that we knew each other's mind by our looks; whatever was real happiness God gave it me in him."[132]

LADY FANSHAWE

From an engraving in Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, London, 1830

When Lady Fanshawe wrote her Memoirs, her son Richard, her youngest child, was about ten or twelve years old. Her purpose apparently was to recount all the facts of the eventful family career. The narrative, except for an occasional outburst, was uncolored by emotion. One series of events recorded is the births and deaths of children. In a period of twenty years Lady Fanshawe had fourteen children and she records the deaths of nine of them. This would seem to be suffering and sorrow enough for one life. But we get an added conception of the family vicissitudes when we discover that no two of the fourteen children were born in the same house, and no two of the nine who died were buried in the same churchyard. Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Yorkshire, Kent, Hertfordshire, Oxford, were places of sad memory to the bereaved mother. Yet, except in the cases of "little Nan" and the first Richard, there is simply a recital of facts and dates. Lady Fanshawe was but fifty-five when she died, but she had gone through so much that a re-living of past emotions as well as a recalling of facts would have made the writing of the Memoirs an impossibility. As a narrative of the externals of life the story has singular interest. It abounds in striking contrasts. Money stringency, mishaps by land and sea, sicknesses, imprisonments, deaths, mingle strangely with official splendors, royal gifts, rich furnishings, gorgeous apparel. It is personal in tone, with as little historical detail as was consistent with carrying the narrative forward. And for that reason it is of importance to-day as a closer record of life than historians of the Civil War or of the reign of Charles II are likely to give.

Margaret Blagge, Mrs. Godolphin (1652-1678)

The most interesting personality in this early group is the beautiful Mrs.[133] Margaret Blagge. She is the supreme example of a developed religious sense in the court of Charles II. She was not driven to a life of devotion through a grief-enshrouded heart. Religion was to her joy and ecstasy. John Evelyn recorded in his Diary a determination to consecrate the worthy life of Margaret Blagge to posterity, and when he died in 1706 he left a list of "things I would write out fair and reform if I had leisure," among them being the Life of Mrs. Godolphin. This manuscript was first published in 1847. It records a life of singular charm and interest. Yet the facts of Margaret Blagge's life are meager enough. She was born in 1652; was early in France with the Countess of Guildford; when scarcely twelve became maid of honor to the Duchess of York; and then on the death of the Duchess in 1671 entered into the same service with Queen Catherine; in 1674, after a nine-year courtship, married Sidney Godolphin; and in 1678 died in child-birth. It is her inner life that counts, and that life would have left small record had not the beautiful young maid of honor chosen the wise and religious John Evelyn as her friendly counselor in her difficult attempt to maintain a life of purity and piety in the most dissolute court of Europe. Evelyn recounts the success of her devout life in these words: "Arethusa pass'd through all those turbulent waters without soe much as the least staine or tincture in her Chrystall; with her Piety grew up her Witt, which was soe sparkling, accompanyed with a Judgment and Eloquence so exterordinary, a Beauty and Ayre soe charmeing and lovely, in a word, an Address soe universally takeing, that, after a few years, the Court never saw or had seen such a Constellation of perfections amongst all their splendid Circles."[134] But though she was regarded as "a little miracle" at court, her heart was never there. To no young woman of the time were the pomp and glory of the world more alluringly open, but she turned instinctively from all such joys. She counted her beauty a snare and would never "trick and dress herself vpp ... to be fine and ador'd." Lovers crowded about her, but she avoided the vain converse of gallants. Evelyn records her particular gift for mimicry, recitation, acting, but such talents she held in abeyance. At sixteen she acted in a court play, probably Dryden's Indian Emperor, with great success, but her growingly devout spirit came to abhor such recreations, so that when she was summoned by royal request to act in Crowne's Calisto, in 1674, even though the play was to be given all by ladies, and those the most illustrious in the land, it was a matter of almost tragic grief to her that her duty forbade a refusal. "To be herselfe an Actoresse ... cost her not only great reluctancy but many teares."[135] Though she was decked with jewels worth £20,000, though she "trode the Stage with a surprizeing and admirable Aire," and though the whole theater was extolling her, she felt no transport, but, when an interval came, "retired into a Corner, reading a book of devotion." Not even the fact that she played the part of "Diana, the Goddess of Chastity," consoled her.

She had one real calling and that was to a religious life. As a child of seven, in France with the Countess of Guildford, though often "tempted by that By-Gott proselitesse to goe to Masse and be a papist,"[136] she yet could maintain her own faith. Because of her spiritual precocity she was "admitted to the holy Sacrament when she was hardly Eleaven years of age." Though she disliked Catholicism, she praised nunneries, and would have chosen a retired life of devotion and good works, had not her love for Mr. Godolphin and the urgent advice of Mr. Evelyn restrained her. Nearly all her writing and reading were along religious lines. Mr. Evelyn says on this point:

She has houres alsoe for reading historye and diversions of that nature; butt allwayes such as were choice, profitable and instructive, and she had devoured an incredible deale of that solid knowledge, and could accompt of it to admiration; soe as I have even beene astonished to find such an heape of excellent things and material observations collected and written with her owne hand, many of which (since her being with God) came to myne; for, besides a world of admirable prayers and pieces of flagrant devotion, meditations, and discourses on various subjects (which she compos'd), there was hardly a booke she read that she had not common placed, as it were, or taken some remarkable note of; add this to the Diary of her owne life, actions, resolutions, and other circumstances, of which I shall give some specimen. She had contracted the intire historye of the Scriptures, and the most illustrious examples, sentences, and precepts, digested under opposite and proper heads; and collected togeather the result of every Article of the Apostles' Creed, out of Bishop Pearson's excellent Treatise. I have allready spoken of her Sermon Notes: butt to give a just Account of her Letters, they are so many and in so excellent naturall and easy a style, that, as for their number, one would believe she did nothing else butt write, soe, for their weight and ingenuity, that she ought to doe nothing else; and soe easyly did her Invention flow, that I have seen her write a very long letter without once takeing off her pen (butt to dip it), and that with exterordinary Judgment.[137]

Her Diary is a delightfully spontaneous document. Here is one Resolution:

June the 2d.

  I will nere play this halfe year butt att 3 penny omber, and then with one att halves. I will not I doe not vow, but I will not doe it;—what, loose mony att Cards, yet not give (to) the poore! 'T is robbing God, misspending tyme, and missimploying my Talent: three great Sinns. Three pounds would have kept three people from starveing a month: well, I will not play.[138]

Equally genuine and charming, but in more decorous and solemn fashion, is the letter in which she consecrated John Evelyn her friend. Indeed, the whole quaint and formal episode of the establishment of this remarkable friendship, seems incredibly pure and lovely when thought of as occurring in the court of which Grammont's Memoirs is a fair record. Evelyn wrote "a little master-piece of biography," partly because of his intimate knowledge of Mrs. Godolphin's spiritual experience and his personal affection for her, but also, in part, because his imagination was inevitably stimulated by the vision of a life so crystal clear in an environment so murky.

The versatility and intellectual energy of the Duchess of Newcastle, the quick wit and instinct for style in Dorothy Osborne's letters, the grave and sincere religious feeling coupled with considerable theological learning on the part of women in influential positions like Margaret Blagge, Lady Pakington, and Lady Warwick, the vivid social and political pictures in the biographies by Mrs. Hutchinson and Lady Fanshawe, the gay playing with belles lettres in Mary North's little society, and especially the extraordinary vogue of Mrs. Philips, are sufficient indications, as we look back over the period, that a new spirit was awake. It reads now almost as if there were a general and brilliant opening of literary pursuits to women. But it is also significant to recall that Mrs. Philips and the Duchess of Newcastle were the only two women whose ability or learned tastes were known at the time beyond their own small private circle. In reality the work was sporadic, secluded, uninfluential. And the fame even of the Duchess of Newcastle and Mrs. Philips is hardly established before 1660. It is with the Restoration that the more varied and public activities begin.

2. The Century following the Restoration

The period to be here presented in detail is the century following the Restoration. During this period the work of women spreads out in new directions. Not only is there a greater variety in the kinds of writing, but other forms of self-expression are entered upon. In this more complicated era the strictly chronological method becomes confusing. It seems more desirable to take up the work under different species, keeping to chronological development within each species.

Two kinds of new work by women, acting and painting, demand brief preliminary notice. Though possibly not within the category of learned occupations they must yet be recognized as of great importance in the new life opening before women.

Actresses

Charles II had in France been familiar with the custom of having women on the stage, and when he issued his two patents to Davenant and Killigrew he inserted the famous clause, "We do permit and give leave from this time to come that all women's parts be acted by women." Mrs. Coleman had taken the part of Ianthe in Davenant's Siege of Rhodes in 1656, but this was not a regular play. It was more of the nature of an opera or spectacle. The first woman to act on the public stage in England was probably the actress who played Desdemona, December 8, 1660. "J. Jordan" wrote a prologue to introduce her as "the first woman that came to act on the stage," but he did not give her name.[139]

The theatrical novelty initiated by this unknown actress was far-reaching in its effects. Through the ensuing years a constantly increasing number of women followed the lure of the stage. No other opportunity open to the ambition of women met with so eager a response, or could number so many aspirants, or could register success so unqualified. Yet as we read of these early English actresses we hardly think of acting as a profession or of them as artists. They were in no sense students of the parts they played. Beauty, youth, high spirits, a certain native endowment of wit or boldness, ability to sing a song or dance a jig, seemed to meet all the demands of audiences too much delighted with the mere fact of seeing women on the stage to be over-critical of their technique or interpretation. Moreover, the runs of plays were short, three days being about the average, so there was hardly time to work up finished productions. The stage tenure of most of the actresses was also brief, hardly more than a prelude to the social and domestic irregularities of their later lives. Cunningham names Mrs. Betterton as the only actress of Charles II's day who was not mistress to some man at court. "Frailties," as they were euphemistically called, became so normally associated with actresses that Anne Bracegirdle excited incredulous surprise by her reputed purity of life, and she was presented by the noblemen of her day with a purse of eight hundred guineas in recognition of her virtue.[140] The immorality of these early actresses, girls of no rigorous professional training and no professional standards, is quite intelligible. In appearing before the public at all they broke so many conventions, defied the feminine ideal so completely, that a few steps further in pursuit of flattery and luxurious living hardly seemed to count. As actresses they were at once under a moral stigma anyhow, so far as the soberer part of the community was concerned, and they naturally followed the path of least resistance and accepted the morality of the court of the merry monarch, a court where virtue with her "lean and scare-crow face" seldom intruded. The unfortunate outcome of the turpitude of the Restoration actresses is that they built up in the public mind a prejudice against actresses as a class, a prejudice which affected later even such women as Mrs. Betterton, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Cibber, or Mrs. Siddons. But it must not be forgotten that they served the cause of women by opening the way to a new and important profession, a profession in which women have no handicaps. The stage has been represented by more women of genius, and has given to women more unstinted recognition in fame and money, than have any of the other forms of public activity into which women have so far been admitted, except, possibly, in late years, administrative work in social service.

It is unnecessary, in this study, to carry the account of the actresses into further detail, or further down the century. The history of the part women took on the seventeenth and eighteenth century stage would make a volume of itself. And since it was many years before acting was connected with any critical or intellectual conception of the plays represented, it may suffice here to leave this portion of the new work of women with the mere announcement of its inception.

Artists

To acting we may add another new realm, that of painting. The earliest woman portrait-painter on record in England is Anne Carlisle, who died about 1680. In 1658 Sir William Sanderson, in his Graphice, commenting on the artists then in England, said, "And in Oyl Colours we have a vertuous example in that worthy Artist, Mrs. Carlisle." In the notes left by Vertue to Walpole was a statement that he had seen in about 1730 the portrait Mrs. Carlisle had painted of herself. Her chief work was in copying the paintings of Italian masters, or, according to a fashion of the times, reproducing them in miniature. It is said that Charles I admired her work so warmly that he presented to her and Van Dyck ultramarine to the value of five hundred pounds.[141]

Of more distinguished ability was Mary Beale (1637-1697),[142] who is said to have studied either with Sir Peter Lely or Robert Walker. At least she watched Lely paint and thereby gained some of his technique. She worked in oils, water-colors, and crayons. Through Sir Peter Lely she was given access to some of the best works of Van Dyck and in copying these gained a training somewhat similar to that given most artists by sojourns in Italy or Holland. There are in the English National Portrait Gallery portraits by her of Charles II and Abraham Cowley. At Knole is her portrait of John Milton; at Woburn Abbey, one of the Duke of Monmouth; Archbishop Tillotson, Henry, Duke of Norfolk, Dr. Sydenham, Dr. Croone, Bishop Wilkins, are among those who sat to her. No other English portrait-painter of the period had so distinguished a clientèle or is represented by so many canvases in English galleries. Her success may be measured, in part, by her financial returns. In a pocket-book kept by her husband in 1672 is this entry: "Received this year, for pictures done by my dearest heart, 202l. 5s." The receipts for 1674 were 216l. 5s.; and for 1677, 429l. She was still painting important portraits in 1691, for we find in the Term Catalogue for Michaelmas of that year the announcement of "The true Effigies of his Grace, John, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Engraven by Rob. White on a large sheet of Paper, from the Original lately painted by Mrs. Mary Beale."

According to the manuscript of Mr. Oldys, Mrs. Beale was also celebrated for her poetry. He styles her, "that masculine poet, as well as Painter, the incomparable Mrs. Beale." Dr. Woodford included in his translations of the Psalms several versions by Mrs. Beale whom he eulogizes as "an absolutely compleat Gentlewoman," and to whom he wrote several poems under the name "Beliza."[143]

Anne Killigrew (1660-1685), a maid of honor to Mary of Modena, died at twenty-five, but she had already attained considerable repute as a portrait painter. There is a tradition that she studied with Sir Peter Lely. If so she must have taken these lessons before she was twenty, for Lely left England in 1680. Dryden says that her portrait of James II expressed "not only his outward part, but drew forth the very image of his heart," and that she was equally successful in depicting the bright beauty and peerless majesty of Mary of Modena. Her portrait of herself was engraved by Becket and prefaces the volume of her poems issued the year after her death. Other paintings were religious in subject, as in her portrayal of incidents in the life of John the Baptist; or mythological, as in her representation of Diana's nymphs. Of far more possible significance is her landscape work. During 1660-1685 Robert Streater is the only English landscape-painter of whom we have record. Charles II brought over a number of Italian and Flemish artists who painted English landscapes in the style of Ruysdael, Poussin, or Salvator Rosa, and their work would be the pictures chiefly known at court. It is not improbable that Miss Killigrew's landscapes were copies or imitations of these foreign artists. Dryden says she painted ruins of Greece and Rome, and forest glades in which were nymphs and shaggy satyrs. Such pictures must have been copies. But Dryden also enumerates sylvan scenes of herds and flocks; clear, shallow little brooks; deep rivers reflecting as in a mirror the trees on their banks. Such pictures are truly English in tone and whatever their intrinsic value such a choice of subjects would put her with Robert Streater at the very inception of English landscape art. And though the scanty records concerning her painting do not substantiate Dryden's description of her landscapes, it could hardly be supposed that he would have been so explicit in a poem written for the family and immediately after her death had there not been some pictures at least moderately correspondent to his lines.[144]

Other seventeenth-century names of less importance show an aspiration in art somewhat above that countenanced by the boarding-schools. Mrs. Pepys and Miss Margaret Pen may serve to indicate the sort of work being done in amateurish fashion in various homes. Both ladies were "learning to limn" with one Mr. Browne. Pepys was tremendously interested in his wife's progress. In the midst of terrifying accounts of the plague and the fire there come in 1665 and 1666 frequent notes on her pictures. Once after a week's absence on exhausting work he records, "To my wife, and having viewed her last piece of drawing since I saw her which is seven or eight days, which pleases me beyond anything in the world, to bed with great content, but weary." The next day, on being importuned to buy her a pearl necklace, he promises it, but only "if she pleases me in her painting." On one occasion he called on Lady Pen and says of the visit, "Talking with Mrs. Pegg Pen, and looking at her pictures, and commended them; but, Lord! so far short of my wife's as no comparison." A month later is the note, "I took my Lady Pen home, and her daughter Pegg and, after dinner I made my wife show them her pictures, which did mad Pegg Pen, who learnes of the same man." In September, 1665, Pepys had just seen his wife's picture of our Saviour and thought it so pretty that he boasted of it to Evelyn, at which Evelyn paid him in kind by telling him that "the beautiful Mrs. Middleton is rare (in painting) and his own wife do brave things."[145]

MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW

From a painting by herself engraved by T. Chambars

The Evelyn family seems to have been instinctively artistic. In Mr. Thoresby's account of a visit to Evelyn, he said he was shown "many drawings and paintings of his own and his lady's doing; one especially of enamel was surprisingly fine, and this ingenious lady told me how she wrought it." Both Mr. Evelyn and his son Draper were proud of Mary's work in painting. Sixteen years after her death Mr. Thoresby wrote: "He afterwards carried me in his coach to his son Draper's at the Temple, and showed me many curious pieces of his ingenious daughter's performances, both very small in miniature, and as large as the life in oil colours, equal it is thought to the greatest masters of the age. He gave me a specimen of some prospects he took in Italy, and etched upon the copper by his own hand."

At the end of the century is Sarah Curtis (d. 1743) who was married in 1701 to Bishop Hoadly. Before her marriage she had been a pupil of Mary Beale, and she is now represented in the National Portrait Gallery by three canvases, portraits of Burnet, Winston, and Hoadly. Mrs. Rowe's paintings were likewise highly prized by discriminating friends. Of greater interest is Mrs. Delany (1700-1788). She copied at least seventy-two pictures by old masters and painted many portraits. Her work is not represented in public galleries, but many of her pictures are still preserved in private collections. Susan Penelope Gibson was a successful miniature painter. Elizabeth Creed was also an artist of at least local repute. She did sacred subjects as altar-pieces for neighboring churches and she painted numerous portraits. She also gave free lessons to the girls living near her. Her daughter Elizabeth, who inherited her artistic tastes, is said to have ornamented a hall in a Tudor mansion near Oundle.

Short and insignificant as this list appears, it yet assumes real importance when we realize not only that these were the earliest English women to enter this field, but that the list shows up surprisingly well when compared with a similar list of the native English painters among the men of the period. Charles I was a great lover of art and he summoned many artists, some of the first rank, to England, and he bought pictures with a far-sighted munificence, and Charles II was ambitious of following along the same distinguished path. But a list of the pictures painted in England before 1700 shows hardly an English name. Hence the presence of any successful women artists is doubly significant.

The amateurish quality of the painting may be in part explained by the fact that in but one case, that of Mary Beale, was there any impetus or training such as are necessarily associated with work adopted as a profession. The painting was an accomplishment, a pleasant occupation for leisure hours, a resource, rather than a life purpose ardently pursued. The only external reward for the many hours at the easel was the praise of a small circle of friends. The real incentive was an inner demand for some form of self-expression, and the mere number of pictures painted, quite apart from the question of their excellence, is indicative of the eagerness with which women welcomed any sort of opportunity for the free play of their own individuality.

Authors

It was not, however, acting or painting that occupied most of the women whose natures craved something out of the ordinary routine. Writing was a much more natural and feasible resource. Acting implied a public, and even painting, especially portrait-painting, was likely to be semi-public. But writing could be carried on in retirement and the results submitted only to the partial criticism of a home or social circle. It did not bring women before a carping public or necessarily into competition with men, for even if plays were produced and books published, the name of the writer could be veiled, as it usually was, under a decent anonymity. Hence women who respected the obvious conventions could yet indulge themselves in authorship.

WRITERS ON PRACTICAL SUBJECTS

When women entered upon writing as a career, it might be thought that they would at first take up subjects familiar to them, but such was not the case. For instance, most of the books for children, before the venture of the Newberys about the middle of the eighteenth century, were by men.[146] It was James Janeway whose maxim, "A child is never too little to go to Hell," resulted in works so popular as A Looking Glass for Children and A Token for Children (1676); John Bunyan's A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rimes for Children; being Divine Poems on the Creed, Commonwealth and Several other Subjects (1690); Mr. Mason's A Little Catechism with little Verses and little sayings, for little children (1693). The Divine and Moral Songs for Children, by Isaac Watts in 1720, carried on the religious instruction. There were also various accounts of the "Life and Saintly Death" of children of tender years, which were published with the avowed purpose of influencing other children of like tender years, but none of these are by women. The first women I have come upon who wrote professedly for children are Sarah Fielding and Mrs. Collyer in 1749.[147]

In a somewhat less degree the same condition exists in relation to medicine, especially in the realms most definitely in the hands of women. Mrs. Pilkington tells us that her father was the first man midwife in England, but nearly all the books on midwifery were written by men. Two women, however, appear in print, in a discussion of their professional work. Mrs. Jane Sharp's book is entitled The Midwives' Book, or the whole Art of midwifery discovered, directing Child-bearing Women how to behave themselves in their Conception, Breeding, Bearing, and Nursing, of Children. In Six Books. By Mrs. Jane Sharp, Practitioner in the Art of Midwifery above thirty years.[148]

Mrs. Elizabeth Cellier, a second writer on midwifery, is known perhaps chiefly because she was supposed to have some connection with the Meal Tub Plot. After her acquittal from treason charges she wrote a pamphlet called Malice Defeated, in which she courageously expressed her adherence to an unpopular cause in the words, "I do not yet so much fear the smell of Newgate as to be frighted for telling the truth; nor is death so great a terror to me, but that I am still ready to seal the same with my blood."[149] She must have been a woman of substance as well as courage, for she was fined a thousand pounds because of certain passages in this pamphlet. She was also condemned to stand in the pillory three times, a punishment which, according to Lady Russell, she bore with intrepidity and nonchalance, protecting her head from missiles by means of a battledore which she held up with one hand, while with the other she gathered up and put into her pocket all the stones that fell within her reach.

In her profession of midwifery Mrs. Cellier was of high repute, but her interests were not circumscribed by her own practice. One of her schemes was the establishment of a "Colledg of Midwives" where the best possible training should be given. Though her pamphlet, entitled A Scheme for the Foundation of a Royal Hospital and raising a revenue of 5000 l or 6000 l a year by and for the Maintenance of a Corporation of Skilful Midwives, did not result in the establishment of her proposed college, the idea and the formulation of the plan do credit to her foresight and intelligence, and sound quite in line with modern forms of woman's civic enterprise.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could show a long list of interesting and elaborately worked-out books on housewifery in general and cooking in particular, but it seldom happens that one of these books is by a woman. It is, to be sure, not impossible that more of the material was furnished by women than is apparent on the surface. Very many of the books on housekeeping matters were anonymous and

were probably

mere publishers' compilations from unacknowledged sources, and in such cases the actual material may have come from various housewives. But during the century I have come upon but three women who published under their own names the results of their experiences as cooks. The earliest of these was Mrs. Hannah Woolley. She was born about 1623. Her mother and elder sisters are said to have been "very well skilled in physick and chirurgery" and they taught her in her youth. She was twice married, the first time to a schoolmaster named Woolley, and then to a Mr. Francis Challinor. She is known usually as Mrs. Woolley. One of her books, The Queen-like Closet, or A rich Cabinet stored with all manner of rare Receipts for preserving, Candying, and Cookery. Very pleasant and beneficial to all ingenuous persons of the Female Sex, reached its eleventh edition by 1696. Mrs. Woolley had been governess in two noble families and had acquired definite ideas as to polite behavior. This knowledge also she committed to the printed page. On manners, but especially on household management, she wrote as an authority and received due recognition.

Another book, by a woman whose initials I have not been able to expand into a name, is the following: The Cook's New Years Gift, Cookery refined, or The Lady, Gentlewoman and Servant-maid's Companion: containing the Art of dressing all sorts of Flesh, Fish, and Fowl, various ways, after the newest Mode; with their proper seasonings, sauces, Garnishes, serving up and carving, etc. By Mrs. A. M. a long practiser of this curious Art. (Term Catalogues, Mich. 1697. Mich. 1700.)

The work of Mrs. Woolley in the seventeenth century found its most worthy counterpart in the eighteenth century in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which far exceeds any Thing of the kind ever yet Published.... By a Lady. London. Printed for the Author; and sold at Mrs. Ashburn's, a China-Shop, the Corner of Fleet Ditch, 1747. The book was issued with about two hundred subscribers. A fourth edition in octavo came out in 1751, a ninth edition in 1759, and many later editions. In her Preface Mrs. Glasse said, "If I have not wrote in the high polite Stile I hope I shall be forgiven, for my Intention is to instruct the lower Sort, therefore treat them in their own Way. For Example: when I bid them lard a Fowl, if I should bid them lard with large Lardoons, they would not know what I want: But when I say they must lard with small Pieces of Bacon, they know what I mean." The new element in her book was this attempt to write out receipts that were simple enough to come into general use.

WRITERS ON RELIGION AND THEOLOGY

The Term Catalogues for 1670-1713 show how great was the preponderance during those years of books on "Divinity." That women should share in this prevailing interest is but natural, for religion came within the accepted canon of the truly feminine. And there are evidences of an even greater amount of devotional writing by women than might be expected. The period 1650 to 1750, and especially the first half of that period, could show a long list of women noted for lives of piety and good works.[150] The loose living characteristic of the court apparently had its reaction towards exceptional spiritual rigor on the part of many ladies of rank. And of these devout ladies no small number found in the composition of religious verse or prose the intellectual and emotional outlet denied them in other ways. Almost none of this writing was meant for a public. The reams of meditations, prayers, and reflections left in manuscript were merely a private resource, and often kept secret even from the author's family. Such writings were in their nature fugitive, and it would only now and then happen that some relative or friend would collect and order the papers and see them through the press. We accordingly get scattered hints through funeral sermons and casual notices of an amount of devotional writing greatly in excess of that published. But to tabulate even all the published material would be wearisome and to no good end. A few illustrative examples showing the chief characteristics may suffice.

Lady Elizabeth Brooke (1601-1683)

One of the best examples of the persistent and prodigious industry shown by some of these ladies is the work of Lady Elizabeth Brooke. She began at thirty to make notes on sermons, to copy extracts from commentaries, and occasionally to write out some personal opinions, and she kept at this sedative occupation till her death fifty-two years later. It is painful to reflect on such a mass of undigested material, but the significant fact remains that she preferred such reading and writing to the ordinary interests of her sex. Some of her "Observations and Rules for Practice" were published as an appendix to the sermon preached at her funeral. Selections from her writings were published as late as 1828 in The Lady's Monitor.

Anne Murray, Lady Halkett (1622-1699)

Anne Murray, Lady Halkett, was even more industrious. Her father, who was tutor of Charles I and Provost of Eton, died when she was a child, but her mother, who was governess to the Princess Elizabeth, gave her "a complete education." Of her early life she says: "My mother spared no expense in educating all her children in the most suitable way to improve them ... and paid masters for teaching my sister and mee to write, speak French, play on the lute and virginalls, and dance, and kept a gentlewoman to teach us all kinds of needlework, which shows I was not brought up in an idle life." After several complicated and long drawn-out love affairs—fully described in her Autobiography—Anne married Sir James Halkett in 1656. As the years passed her interests finally centered on two subjects, divinity and medicine. In "physick and surgery" she gained great repute. She was consulted in difficult cases from the remotest parts of the kingdom and her fame spread even to Holland. It was quaintly said of her: "She was ever employed either in doing or reaping good: in the summer season she vyed with the bee or ant, in gathering herbs, flowers, worms, snails, etc., for the still or limbeck, for the mortar or boyling pan, etc., and was ordinarily then in a dress fitted for her still-house; making preparations of extracted waters, spirits, ointments, conserves, salves, powders, etc., which she ministered every Wednesday to a multitude of poor infirm persons, besides what she dayly sent abroad to persons of all ranks who consulted her in their maladies."[151] But it was religious themes only that employed her pen. The catalogue of her writings includes twenty-one volumes, or a total of about eight thousand pages of manuscript, some in quarto, some in folio size, and all bound. Some of these books were printed at Edinburgh in 1701. The title of one book of three hundred and fifteen pages will indicate the general character of her writing: Select Meditations and Prayers upon the First Week, with Observations on each Days Creation, and Considerations on the Seven Capital Vices to be opposed, and their opposite Virtues to be studied and practised.

Vices to be subdued Virtues to be learned Pride

Sunday

Humility Covetousness

Monday

Contentation Lust

Tuesday

Chastity Envy

Wednesday

Charity Gluttony

Thursday

Temperance Anger

Friday

Patience Sloth

Saturday

Diligence

All but nine of these books were written during Lady Halkett's twenty-eight years of widowhood when she had much leisure, but under any circumstances the task was a great one, and becomes the more amazing when we reflect upon it as really only a private recreation. To write so much with no urgency of fame or money shows some very strong inner demand for expression and a very facile pen.

"Legacies"

Another type of religious book goes back for its inspiration to Elizabeth Jocelyn's famous Legacie. One of Lady Halkett's books was The Mother's Will to an Unborn Child, written in 1656 before the birth of her daughter Elizabeth. Books of advice from parents to children to be read after the death of the parents were not uncommon. Elizabeth Sadler (1623-1690), the wife of the Reverend Anthony Walker, was an exceedingly devout woman whose literary instinct and a prevision of death led her to write a large book in octavo for the instruction of her two daughters. Two other books will sufficiently illustrate the type: The Experiences of God's gracious dealing with Mrs. Elizabeth White, late wife of Mr. Tho. White of Caldecot in the County of Bucks; as they were written under her own hand, and found in her Closet after her decease: she dying in child-bed, December 5th, 1669;[152] The Legacie of a Dying Mother to her mourning children; being the Experiences of Mistress Susanna Bell, who died March 13, 1672. With an Epistle Dedicatory by Thomas Brookes, Minister of the Gospel.

Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell (1636-1723)

Lady Russell is an example of a woman who definitely set out to be religious, and whose writings contain an analysis of her methods. The circumstances of her life give everything pertaining to her a particular interest. The execution of Lord Russell for treason in 1683 left her broken by the shock. She had, though without avail, set in motion every possible agency to avert his fate, and she had devoted herself absolutely to him till his tragic death. Then, after a period of the deepest despondency, she entered again upon the duties that lay before her. She conducted the education and arranged the marriages of her three children. She showed herself an excellent business woman in the management of her estate. And she steadily interested herself in securing benefices and other offices for persons of whom her husband would have approved. Her Letters as published contain a few during the first years of her happy married life; many written concerning the "judicial murder" of Lord Russell; and very many concerning family affairs and the candidates for whom she was seeking favor. As letters they are uninteresting. The subject-matter is generally too local and temporary to hold the attention of the modern reader, and the style is dry and hard. Even the records of her bitter grief and of her struggle to attain a mood of Christian resignation are less affecting than might be expected. A kind of apathy seemed to settle down over her spirit. She was too deeply hurt to find in words any balm for her sorrows. She answered condolences when she must, but briefly, and with no lightening of the gloom that encompassed her. Of all her letters the longest and most valuable as a personal revelation is one written to her children July 21, 1691, "a day of sad remembrances," for it was the anniversary of her husband's execution eight years before. In 1691, Rachel, the oldest child, was twenty years old, and Wriothesley, the youngest, was eleven. The five or six pages in which Lady Russell recounts, probably especially for the benefit of Rachel, her method of personal spiritual watch-care, has great value as a religious document, for she was not alone in her way of seeking salvation, in her heart-searchings, in her dependence on the external means of grace, in her sedulous striving after perfection. It was the devout habit of devout people of the time, but perhaps carried to a meticulous excess by Lady Russell. She says that she was always provided with a little piece of paper on which she wrote her faults and temptations as they occurred during the day. At night a careful review of this record contributed to a better watch and ward.

And then [she continued], upon Friday morning when I have prayed my usual daily prayers (which have bin most constantly for many years those in taler's holy living) before I pray that of intercession pa: 35. I stop ... and look upon my dayly notes for that weeke, I recollect my fautes; consider what care I have taken to correct or forsake them—but alas when we do best we shall find enof to be humbled for—therefore I chuse some prayer of confesion most times that in taler's holy living page 302. When I have done it, I make my resolutions to do better for ye time to come, and especialy to watch myselfe where i ame most apt to fal, naming in what I ame so—then I pray some prayer for grace to keep these promises of better obedience—as in pa: 31—for grace to spend our time wel, on page 271, for the grace of faith, hope & charity. Then I pray the dayly prayer of intercession that I left of at in pa:35—after this I praise God ... for all the blessings vouchsafed to me both spiritual & temporal—as that I was born of Christian parents, not suffered to be strangled in the womb, that I was baptized, and sence, educated in Christian Religion. I blesse thee for al checks of Conscience I have had especially those I have profited by.... And then I goe on, I bless thee for our creation, preservation &c.—close with ye lords prayer.

After this service she went over her faults of the week, making a summary of them. A similar abridgment for the month was entered in a book kept for that purpose, the incriminating little pieces of paper were torn up, and a new record entered upon. She found that a frequent re-reading of the book "saved much time in looking back" and contributed to humility. Evidently Lady Russell was as orderly in religion as she was in her business affairs. She finds her definite tabulations "hugely more satisfying to her mind, than a more carelesse loose way of living is, and no settled method." The letter closes with the admonition, "Be devout & reguler in your dutys to God—heaven wil be secure, and pleasures innocent."[153] Lady Russell's letters reveal a devout, difficult, over-burdened life, so much concerned with the means of grace as never to have any happy consciousness of grace itself.

Elizabeth Blake, Mrs. Burnet (1661-1712)

Elizabeth Burnet (1661-1712), daughter of Sir Richard Blake, married at seventeen into a Catholic family. Her husband, Robert Berkeley, was a ward of Bishop Fell, through whom the marriage was brought about. The firmness and tact necessary to maintain her own views as a Protestant and hold her husband to that faith, and yet not antagonize the family, could hardly be expected of so young a girl. But Bishop Fell had judged her character well and she met all the demands of so delicate a situation. She took advantage of many leisure hours in the country to investigate fully the questions at issue between the Catholics and the Protestants. She did not know the learned tongues, but she studied the Scriptures, read commentaries, and conversed with clergymen. When she became a widow in 1693, at thirty-two, she employed her time in two characteristic ways. In the administration of her husband's charitable schemes she found congenial activity. And she gave way to her natural instinct for writing. In 1700 she became the wife of Bishop Burnet. His approval of her literary work and his request that it be published led to the production of her Method of Devotion. It was so popular that she revised and enlarged it and brought out a second edition. And it was republished in 1713 after her death. The book contained "Rules for holy and devout Living," "Prayers on Several Occasions," "Advices and Devotions on the Holy Sacrament." Mrs. Trotter said of her in 1701, "She has an extraordinary clear and solid judgment, the truest goodness and prudence, and the most charming affability in her behaviour; in short, I have met with no such perfection in any of my sex."

Elizabeth Bury (1644-1720)

Elizabeth Bury was another young woman whose bright, acquisitive mind resented conventional inactivity and put out tentacles in all directions for knowledge. Philology, philosophy, history, heraldry, geography, mathematics, were among her interests. She contended that souls were of no sex and that women were often "disposed to an accurate search into things curious and profitable, as well as others." She studied anatomy and medicine until she had gained "a surprizing knowledge of the human body, and of the Materia Medica," so that she could state the symptoms of the most difficult and intricate cases in the physician's own terms. She learned French that she might talk with French refugees to whom she was a benefactress. Her correspondence and conversation were both highly prized. But all these interests must be counted merely as diversions. "Her constant favourite and darling study was divinity." The Bible, Mr. Henry's Annotations, a few works on practical divinity, and a competent number of Hebrew books made up her working library. Hebrew because of its scriptural importance was the subject on which she concentrated her attention and she was reputed to have a critical knowledge of its idioms and peculiarities. It was said that she could even quote the original in common conversation if the elucidation of some text were in question. As the years passed, books and writing, "morning hours with God," and many arduous charitable duties so fully occupied her that she found mere social life an unrewarded tax. Of ordinary conversation she said that though one might strike fire "it always fell on wet tinder." The mass of manuscripts found after her death reflected the variety of her interests, but the majority were on topics such as Meditations on the Divinity of the Holy Scriptures, The unreasonableness of Fretting against God, and similar subjects. She kept also a voluminous Diary, an abridgment of which was published by her husband in Bristol in 1721. Mr. Watts's Elegy indicates something of the reverence with which Mrs. Bury was regarded by her contemporaries; and a woman of her personal charm, executive ability, alert responsiveness to the calls of charity, along with her quick mind, and multifarious, if not always profound, learning would take an even higher place in any organized community to-day.

Susanna Hopton (1627-1709)

Women also entered the less feminine fields of controversy. Susanna Hopton is an interesting example. In her youth she had become a Catholic, but under the influence of her husband she entered upon a thorough study of the points at issue between the Catholics and the Protestants. Dr. Hickes says of her: "She made herself as perfect in the controversie, as English writers could make her, who managed the controversie on both sides. I have (says he) above twenty popish authors, which she left me, and some of them with marginal notes in her own hand. She was well versed in Bishop Moreton's, Archbishop Laud's and Mr. Chillingworth's works, and Ranchin's Review of the Council of Trent, etc."[154] As a result of this reading she drew up a long and learned letter to Father Tuberville, showing him why she had renounced the Church of Rome. This letter was published by Dr. Hickes immediately after her death in his volume of Controversial Letters in 1710. Mr. William said that she was an excellent casuist and divine, and could encounter and confute all enemies of the church. "Her discourse and stile upon serious matters was strong, eloquent and nervous; upon pleasant subjects, witty and facetious: and when it required an edge was sharp as a razor." Daily Devotions, Meditations on the Six Days Of Creation, and Meditations on the Life of Christ were her other works. As a wife, a neighbor, and a friend she seems to have been in high esteem, but her life had the church as its center.

Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham (1658-1708)

Damaris Cudworth and Mary Astell, two of the most gifted women of the period, became involved in the theological discussion between John Norris and John Locke. Miss Cudworth knew both disputants well. As a young woman she had corresponded with Norris on the subject of "Platonic Love," and in 1689 he had dedicated to her his Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life, with reference to the study of learning and knowledge. But it was Locke who had a permanent influence on her opinions. While she was still in Cambridge with her father, Ralph Cudworth, Locke taught her divinity and philosophy. After her marriage to Sir Francis Masham in 1685, Locke was a frequent visitor at their home, and from 1691 till his death in 1704 he lived permanently with them. Her polemical articles were doubtless written under his inspiration. In 1694 the correspondence between Mary Astell and John Norris was published, under the title, Letters concerning the Love of God. Two years later Lady Masham answered their arguments in her Discourse concerning the Love of God,[155] which was attributed to Locke and answered by Norris. In 1700 Lady Masham published Occasional Thoughts in reference to a virtuous Christian Life, which is her closing word in the controversy.

Damaris Cudworth was a woman of remarkable intellect. Her father was delighted with the early manifestations of her power and he took pride in securing for her the best possible education. The curious epitaph on her tomb praises her learning, judgment, candor, penetration, and love of truth, and credits her with being a devoted and intelligent mother. It sums up her character in the statement, that "to the Softness and Elegancy of her own Sex" she added "several of the noblest Accomplishments and Qualities of the other," and that "she possessed these advantages in a degree unusual to either." The conventional eulogy on a tomb is always open to suspicion, but in this case the vague generalities of the epitaph fall below the truth. Locke, in a letter to Phillipp van Limborch, said of her: "The Lady herself is so well versed in theological and philosophical studies and of such an original mind that you will not find many men to whom she is not superior in wealth of knowledge and ability to profit by it. Her judgment is excellent, and I know few who can bring such clearness of thought to bear upon the most abstruse subjects, or such capacity for searching through and solving the difficulties. I do not say of most women, but even of most learned men."[156]

Lady Masham was also recognized as one of the early champions for woman's education, for when Mary Astell's Serious Proposal appeared anonymously in 1694 it was by some attributed to Lady Masham. She took the subject up definitely in her Occasional Thoughts. After commenting on the lack of knowledge of science, law, history, politics, morals, and religion, of most English gentlemen, Lady Masham continued:

Thus wretchedly destitute of all that Knowledge which they ought to have, are, generally speaking, our English gentlemen, and being so, what wonder can it be, if they like not that women should have knowledge; for this is a quality that will give some sort of superiority even to those who care not to have it?... But such men as these would assuredly find their account much better therein, if tenderness of that prerogative would teach them a more legitimate way of maintaining it, than such a one as is a very great impediment or discouragement at the least, to others in the doing what God requires of them. For it is an undesirable truth that a lady who is able to give an account of her faith, and to defend her religion against the attacks of the cavilling wits of the age, or the abuses of the obtruders of vain opinions: that is capable of instructing her children in the reasonableness of the christian religion, and of laying in them the foundations of a solid virtue: that a lady, I say, no more knowing than this does demand, can hardly escape being called learned by the men of our days, and in consequence thereof, becoming a subject of ridicule to one part of them, and of aversion to the other; with but a few exceptions of some virtuous and rational persons. And is not the incurring of general dislike one of the strongest discouragements we can have to any thing?[157]

Grace Norton, Lady Gethin (1676-1696)

There was published soon after Lady Gethin's death, from loose papers left by her, a work entitled Reliquiæ Gethinianæ. Congreve's poem, entitled Verses to the Memory of Lady Grace Gethin, occasioned by reading her Book, speaks in high praise of her. He says the book shows all that study or time could teach.

But to what height must his amazement rise,

When, having read the work, he turns his eyes

Again to view the foremost opening page,

And there the beauty, sex, and tender age,

Of her beholds, in whose pure mind arose

Th' ethereal source, from whence the current flows.

Lady Gethin was counted a marvel of wisdom, but when we read her Apothegms and Essays and Witty Sayings we are more impressed by her accurate memory of Bacon and other earlier essayists than by any profound knowledge of life on her own part.

Mrs. Eleanor James (fl. 1685-1715)

Mrs. Eleanor James[158] was a writer on religious and political topics. No complete list of her works has ever been compiled. She gained publicity for her religious views by numerous single printed sheets between 1685 and 1715. John Dunton described her husband as being well known because he was an excellent printer, and "something the better known for being the husband of that she-state-politician, Mrs. Eleanor James." She is said to have constituted herself a sort of "adviser to reigning sovereigns" from Charles II to George I, whom she visited in turn for counsel and admonition. Her chief published works are on religious controversy. Her Vindication of the Church of England (1687) created considerable antagonism. In answer to a satirical Address of thanks to Mrs. James on behalf of the Church of England she wrote Mrs. James's Defence. A lady also appeared in the lists against her in a book entitled Elizabeth Rowe's Short Answer to Eleanor James's Long Preamble or Vindication of the new Test. Mrs. James's Apology (1694) and her Reasons humbly presented to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal (1715) complete the list of her more important publications.

Mrs. Newcome (fl. 1728)

Mrs. Newcome's Enquiry into the Evidences of the Christian Religion was published in 1728. Mr. Bowyer says that she was by every one accounted a most excellent and worthy woman, and that her learning was attested by more than one volume. Mr. Grey mentioned her in his Hudibras as "the very learned lady" who gave him the note about Penguins in Book I. Nichols quotes a Mr. "T. F." who says that she had great fame for learning, but adds cautiously: "All that I know of that matter is, that as often as I have been in company with her, and when things were thrown out designedly to tempt her to speak, and discover herself, as the armour produced to Achilles, it never took effect. So that I can not speak of her learning from my own knowledge; but if she was not that, she was something better, a very good woman."[159]

Catherine Trotter, Mrs. Cockburn (1679-1749)

The most distinguished woman in the field of polemics in the first half of the eighteenth century was Catherine Trotter, better known as Mrs. Cockburn. The contemporary recognition accorded Mrs. Cockburn is to-day the most surprising fact about her. Her father was a Scotchman, a commander in the royal navy, and highly thought of by Charles II, but his death at sea in 1683, and many ensuing disastrous business complications, left the family in serious financial difficulties. Mrs. Trotter was, however, nearly related to the Duke of Lauderdale and the Earl of Perth, a fact which secured her social recognition no matter how narrow her circumstances. Catherine, her youngest child, began writing poetry at a very early age. She also early showed unusual mental alertness, for "she both learned to write and made herself mistress of the French language, by her own application and diligence, without any instructor." In Latin and Logic she had some guidance. Logic was so interesting to her that while still young she drew up an abstract of its principles, for her own use.

Catherine's first extant poem was a thanksgiving in heroic verse for the recovery of Mr. Bevil Higgons from small-pox. She was then fourteen, but the labored lines have a kind of heavy maturity prophetic of her later verse. In her seventeenth year she entered fully upon her literary career. For thirteen years she devoted herself to study and writing, and if applause from high authorities could justify her serious preoccupation with things of the mind, such justification was hers in full measure. Before she was seventeen her tragedy, Agnes de Castro, was acted at Drury Lane. It was by the advice of the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex that she had allowed "this little off-spring of her early muse"[160] to try its fortune in the world, and such success as it had must be attributed largely to the protection of influential patrons. But with or without patrons, whatever Miss Trotter did was sure to win praise. When she wrote a eulogistic poem to Congreve on his Mourning Bride, in 1697, he expressed himself as heartily vexed that her lines came too late for publication with his play, and said of her poetical commendation, "It is the first thing, that ever happened to me, upon which I should make it my choice to be vain."

In 1698 there appeared, at the new theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Miss Trotter's second tragedy entitled The Fatal Friendship. Mr. Betterton, Mr. Verbruggen, Mr. Thurmond, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Bracegirdle, took the chief parts. The play ran several nights and was seen occasionally on the stage until far down in the eighteenth century. Its immediate success was great and the praise that poured in upon the nineteen-year-old author must have been bewilderingly sweet. Mr. Higgons evened up the score for the small-pox poem by some verses which declared her direct descent from Sappho. Mr. Harman said that she maintained the true empire of the stage along with Congreve, Granville, and a few others "well read in honour's school." From "an unknown hand" came a poem addressed to "my much esteemed Friend." This author writes of his consuming anxiety at the beginning of the play, and of the joy that gushed forth as he observed its success. The impression from his poem is that he had known the play intimately before its appearance. According to "the elegant pen of Mr. John Hughes" Miss Trotter's "virgin voice offends no virgin ear," her chaste thoughts and clean expressions set her nobly apart as a reformer of the stage, and she is a successful champion of her sex, since her genius has destroyed the "Salique law of wit" established by men. So pleased was Mr. Farquhar with The Fatal Friendship that he sent his first comedy Love and a Bottle, which had "been scandalously aspersed for affronting the ladies," "to stand its tryal before one of the fairest of the sex, and the best judge." And he adds his thanks for the "favour and honour" she showed him by appearing on his third night. He concludes his letter with a double compliment: "But humbly to confess the greatest motive, my passions were wrought so high by representation of Fatal Friendship, and since raised so high by a sight of the beautiful author, that I gladly catched this opportunity of owning myself your most faithful and humble servant." Mrs. Manly also gave a generous tribute to her young fellow-aspirant for stage honors:

Orinda and the Fair Astrea gone

Not one was found to fill the Vacant Throne;

Aspiring Man had quite regain'd the Sway,

Again had Taught us humbly to Obey;

Till you (Nature's third start, in favour of our Kind)

With stronger Arms, their Empire have disjoyn'd, etc.

Dela Manley

After The Fatal Friendship Miss Trotter's work for the stage need not be particularly dwelt upon. She had a comedy brought out at Drury Lane in 1701. A new tragedy in the same year at Drury Lane, and a tragedy at the Haymarket in 1706, complete the list. Some occasional poems appeared during this period. In 1700 she was one of the nine ladies who wrote on the death of Dryden, under the title The Nine Muses; or Poems written by as many ladies on the death of the late famous John Dryden, Esq. In 1704 she entered the lists with Mr. Addison and Mr. John Philips in celebrating the victory of Blenheim, but she did not venture to publish her poem till the manuscript had been submitted to the Duke of Marlborough. When the duke and the duchess and the lord treasurer Godolphin declared themselves "greatly pleased" she sent her lines to the press.

Besides her dramatic and poetical work Miss Trotter wrote in prose on critical and theological subjects. An interesting disquisition on "the poets of the last age" appeared in the dedication of her The Unhappy Penitent in 1701. Of Shakespeare, Dryden, Lee, and Otway she speaks with independent judgment and considerable discrimination. But none of the works so far listed are those on which her fame rested. It was not in poetry, drama, or literary criticism that she found satisfaction. Religion and philosophy were her true field. Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding was published in 1690, and among the antagonistic criticisms it called forth were three series of Remarks published anonymously in 1697 and 1699. Young as she was Miss Trotter pursued the controversy with the keenest interest and in 1701 she drew up a Defence of The Essay of Human Understanding. Mr. George Burnet of Kemney, then in Holland, and Mrs. Burnet, the wife of Bishop Burnet, were entrusted with the secret of her Defence, and both advised anonymous publication, agreeing with her that her youth and sex would, if known, count against a work of that nature. Her Defence appeared in print in 1702. Mrs. Burnet on finding that the Bishop, Mr. John Norris, and Mr. Locke himself, were highly pleased with it, could keep the secret no longer.[161] Mr. Locke sent Miss Trotter a present of books and a letter in which he expressed his gratitude for "an opportunity to own you for my protectress, which is the greatest honour my Essay could have procured me. Give me leave therefore to assure you, that as the rest of the world take notice of the strength and clearness of your reasoning, so I can not but be extremely sensible, that it was employed in my behalf."[162]

A second pamphlet was entitled A discourse concerning a guide in Controversies and grew out of her own spiritual conflicts. Although of a Protestant family she had become a Catholic early in life, but had gradually found herself less and less in harmony with that church till 1707 when, in this Discourse, she announced her return to the Church of England.

The polemical years between 1701 and 1707 had been diversified by several love affairs. Mr. George Burnet of Kemney, Mr. Fenn who was an eloquent young clergyman,[163] Mr. Cockburn, "and some others," are indicated in her letters. Miss Trotter's letters to two of these lovers, Mr. Fenn and Mr. Burnet, are nearly as polemical as her Defence and Discourse. She uses all her old Art of Logic to reason her lovers into friends. She had, in fact, no particular respect for the passion of love as a factor in human life. She apologized for having given it so important a place in her plays, for it was "not noble enough to fill a whole tragedy."[164] When Mr. Burnet professed "the most passionate ardour of mind and soul" for her,[165] she responded with a eulogy of "just and beneficent friendship." "It is only that niggard passion, which is distinguish'd by the name of love, that excludes all but one object from having a part in it, and is not satisfied without monopolizing the affections of the heart."[166] She offered Mr. Burnet "due gratitude" and she surely owed him some return for the pains he took to spread the fame of her works. He wrote so highly of her to the Princess Sophia that the royal lady wrote in answer: "Je suis charmée du portrait avantageux, que vous me faites de la nouvelle Sappho Ecossoise, qui semble meriter les eloges, que vous luy donnez."[167]

Miss Trotter's letters to Mr. Cockburn, whom she married in 1708, are also full of argument and business. If she had a deep affection for him she certainly never allowed herself to speak out. She says that their chief aim in marriage was to assist each other in performing those duties that flow from the love of God.[168] Of the ensuing twenty years she wrote in 1738 as follows: "Being married in 1708, I bid adieu to the muses, and so wholly gave myself up to the cares of a family, and the education of my children, that I scarce knew there was any such thing as books, plays, or poems stirring in Great Britain."[169] It was an attack on Mr. Locke that again drew her into public controversy. Dr. Winch Holdsworth published in 1720 a sermon on Mr. Locke's "false reasonings" against the resurrection of the same body. The sermon came to her hands some years later and she published in 1726-27 A Letter to Dr. Holdsworth. In 1727 he published A Defence of the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the same Body. Her answer, A Vindication of Mr. Locke's Christian Principles, remained in manuscript till the publication of her works in 1751. She also wrote in 1739 Remarks upon some Writers in the Controversy concerning the Foundation of Moral Duty and Moral Obligation which was published in 1743 in The History of the Works of the Learned. In 1747 she entered upon a confutation of Dr. Rutherforth's Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue. Her Remarks on this Essay was published by Mr. Warburton with a laudatory Preface in which he spoke of her "fine genius," "clearness of expression, strength of reason, precision of logic, and attachment to truth."

From 1731 to 1748 there is a series of letters between Mrs. Cockburn and Anne Hepburn (afterwards Mrs. Arbuthnot), her niece. It is almost entirely a literary and religious correspondence and shows that Miss Hepburn's interests were on almost as high a plane as her aunt's. A list of the books they exchanged and commented on would include most of the important new works in England during the first half of the century. The most interesting literary taste revealed is Mrs. Cockburn's partiality for Pope. In 1738 she wrote him a long letter in which she said, "Your Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and Essay on Man, gave me some idea of your morals. But when I read your private letters, where, as you express it, you throw yourself out upon paper, I thought I saw your heart open and undisguised. I was charmed with the sincere, ingenuous, unsuspecting friend, the unwilling enemy, the benevolent mind, extending to all parties, all religions, all mankind; the filial piety, the tender concern for a mother's approaching death, at an age, when most men would have considered theirs only as a useless burden. In short, I saw so many amiable qualities opening on every different occasion, that I began as much to admire the valuable man as the great genius." She chides him gently for thinking too lightly of his genius, for while he is measuring syllables and coupling rhymes to such excellent moral ends, she is ready to assure him of a final "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." It is a pity this epistle was never sent. It would doubtless have been almost as surprising to the wicked wasp of Twickenham as to the crowd of enemies for whose benefit he was preparing the New Dunciad.

Mr. Birch, who edited Mrs. Cockburn's Works in 1751, said of her:

Posterity at least will be solicitious to know, to whom they will owe the most demonstrative and perspicuous reasonings, upon subjects of eternal importance; and her own sex is entitled to the fullest information about one, who has done such honour to them, and raised our ideas of their intellectual power, by an example of the greatest extent of understanding and correctness of judgment. Antiquity, indeed, boasted of its female philosophers, whose merits have been drawn forth in an elaborate treatise of Menage. [Historia Mulierum Philosophorum, 8vo. Lyons, 1690.] But our own age and country may without injustice or vanity oppose to those illustrious ladies the defender of Locke and Clarke; who, with a genius equal to the most eminent of them, had the superior advantage of cultivating it in the only effectual method of improvement, the study of a real philosophy, and a theology worthy human nature, and its all perfect author.

Mrs. Cockburn had a strong, clear, acute mind. The impression she made on the best thinkers in her generation is due to this fact, and, further, to the fact that she used her mentality on topics then counted vital. She was didactic, she was morally irreproachable, she was unassuming. That her editor's confident prediction of her fame has been discredited by time, that she is in reality hardly so much as a name to-day, is due partly to the oblivion that has overtaken her subjects, but also, and even more justly, to the dead level of her excellence. She has no wit, no fancy, no imagination, no sprightliness of thought, no humor. Mary Astell and "Sophia" were occasionally roused to picturesque indignation. But not so with Mrs. Cockburn. She is as cold, as orderly, as unstimulating as a formula.

Mrs. Margaret Fell (1614-1702)

Among dissenters there is less literary record. We find more among the Quakers than elsewhere, yet even there not so much as might be expected from the fact of their recognition of the equality of the sexes. It was stated in their creed: "As we dare not encourage any ministry but that which we believe to spring from the influence of the Holy Spirit, so neither dare we attempt to restrain this ministry to persons of any condition in life, or to the male sex alone; but as male and female are one in Christ, we hold it proper that such of the female sex as we believe to be endued with a right qualification for the ministry should exercise their gifts for the general edification of the Church."[170] As a rule, however, the Quaker women were too busy on their preaching tours to have much time for authorship. Margaret Fell is their chief representative writer.[171] Her activities began before the Restoration. As the wife of Judge Fell of Swarthmore Hall she was of distinct social importance, and she showed unusual ability in the conduct of the household affairs incident on her husband's wealth and large landed properties. She was always exceedingly devout and Swarthmore Hall was traditionally recognized as the home of "lecturing ministers." Among these itinerant speakers, in 1652, was George Fox. His brief sojourn at Swarthmore was epoch-making, for when Judge Fell returned from a distant visit he was met as he crossed Ulverston Sands by a solemn conclave of gentlemen on horseback whose purpose it was to announce that his wife and most of his household had become Quakers. On investigation he became himself at least sufficiently sympathetic with the new views not to interfere with his wife's convictions. For half a century she was identified with Quaker interests. The great dining-room at Swarthmore was for many years the regular meeting-place of the Friends. In 1669, eleven years after the death of Judge Fell, Margaret married George Fox, and till his death in 1691 she gave her time, her thought, her money, to a defense of persecuted Quakers. Three of her daughters became preachers. She traveled from jail to jail, from house to house, to comfort the imprisoned and their families, and from meeting to meeting to preach the word. As the "nursing mother" of the church she had an immense correspondence. The petitions to the king and to powerful noblemen were often composed and personally presented by her. The importance attached to her advice and opinions is indicated by the hundreds of letters still extant addressed to her by the preachers who gathered about George Fox. During her most active years the practical conduct of church affairs occupied her to the exclusion of other work. But earlier, especially during 1665-1668, she made use of the enforced leisure consequent on various imprisonments to write in defense of Quaker principles. Of the ten tracts thus produced one of the most interesting was on the vexed question of the right of women to preach and was entitled Women's Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures.

Anne Finch, Lady Conway (d. 1679)

Another important lady who, after long study in other religions came finally into the Quaker faith, was Anne Finch, a daughter of Sir Henry Finch. In 1651 she married Lord Conway and was established as mistress of Ragley Castle in Warwickshire. As a young woman she had been attracted by the teachings of Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist. After she became Lady Conway he spent much time at Ragley where he wrote several of his books. During his various absences Mr. More and Lady Conway corresponded regularly on theological subjects. The questions in her letters sufficiently indicate the metaphysical perplexities that absorbed her thoughts. She knew the learned tongues and read eagerly the works of "Plato, Plotinus, Philo Judæus, and the Kabbala Denudata." She was a theosophist and a mystic. The esoteric, the mysterious, the miraculous, captured her imagination. "Under her inspiration Ragley became the home of religious marvels." One chapter of John Inglesant, the novel in which Mr. Shorthouse so sympathetically described Little Gidding, is said to be based on the life at Ragley. Lady Conway suffered from headaches so severe and persistent as to defy the best skill of London and Paris. Under the influence of Mr. More, who said there might be "a sanative and healing contagion as well as a morbid and venemous," she summoned to Ragley the famous Valentine Greatrakes, "the Stroker," but the magic of his hands failed in her case. Her headaches made of her life one long disease, but never conquered her intellectual eagerness and hardly abated her learned pursuits.

When she finally joined the Quakers it was against the advice of Mr. More, but she was one, he said, "who never submitted all her judgment to any one." Her friendship with Robert Barclay and William Penn followed her acceptance of the new doctrines. While Lady Conway was undoubtedly one of the most distinguished converts to the Quaker faith, her invalidism and then her death in 1679 interfered with any such active service as that of Margaret Fell. The two women were, moreover, temperamentally unlike. Margaret Fell, a descendant of Anne Askew, had the blood of the martyrs in her veins. A "cause" could capture her mind and heart. She was energetic, an organizer and administrator. Lady Conway, on the other hand, beyond almost any woman of her time, lived in things of the mind.

Of Lady Conway's numerous works only one has been printed. In 1690 there appeared at Amsterdam a collection of philosophical treatises written in Latin. The first one of the series was a translation of "a work by a certain English countess, learned beyond her sex." Leibnitz, on the authority of Van Helmont, attributed this to Lady Conway. This treatise was re-translated into English in 1692.[172]

Jane Ward, Mrs. Lead (1623-1704)

Mrs. Jane Lead[173] was a mystic and the founder of a sect. She was the daughter of Schildknap Ward, of a good Norfolk family, and it is said that there were no external influences to account for her unusual experiences. As a child in the midst of the Christmas gayeties at her father's house, she heard a miraculous voice that summoned her to a religious life. She became a widow while still young and thereafter followed without hindrance, in the completest seclusion, in London, her recognized vocation. She studied mystical works and had nightly prophetic visions which she recorded in her spiritual diary. Between 1681 and 1702 she published fifteen volumes and another one appeared immediately after her death. In 1693 Mr. Francis Lee, a young Oxford man and a medical student at Leyden, visited her, gave allegiance to her doctrines, and devoted himself to her service. Mr. Lee and Mrs. Lead became the center of an important theosophical organization called The Philadelphian Society, which existed till 1702. Mrs. Lead died in 1704 "in the 81st year of her age and the 65th of her vocation to the inward life." Mr. Lee wrote to the Countess Kniphausen and others in France and Germany a letter entitled The Last Hours of Jane Lead by an Eye and Ear Witness. Five years before her death Mrs. Lead's spiritual diary was published under the title, A Fountain of Gardens, watered by the Rivers of Divine pleasure, and springing up in all the variety of spiritual plants, blown up by the pure Breath into Paradise. To which is prefixed, A Poem, introductory to the Philadelphia Age, called Solomon's Porch, or The Beautiful gate to Wisdom's Temple.

Susannah Annesley, Mrs. Wesley (1670-1742)

One of the most notable women of the early eighteenth century was Susannah Wesley, the mother of John and Charles Wesley. She came of a fine old Nottinghamshire family, and her father, Dr. Annesley, a man of power and influence, "the St. Paul of the Nonconformists," secured for his children an education suitable to their birth. At twenty-one Susannah, a beautiful and gifted young woman, married Samuel Wesley and entered upon her career as wife of a rector of humble position and small means.

It is said that large families either submerge the individual, or result in characters of exceptionally fine discipline. From this test Susannah emerged triumphant. She was the twenty-fifth child of her father, and in the first twenty-one years of her married life she had nineteen children. So, as child and parent, she was always in close touch with many varied personalities, an experience the conditions of which demanded both firmness and flexibility.

Her married life seemed made up of difficulties. Most of it was passed in a remote rectory, at Epworth, in the Lincolnshire fens, among the crudest and most boorish people.[174] Not even the strictest economy could hold the outgo within the meager limits of the rector's stipend. There were fevers, small-pox, and other diseases to combat, and five of the children died young. There were also disasters through fire and flood and through the hostility of malicious parishioners, but Mrs. Wesley held herself steadfast to her ideals. Her spirit was never daunted. In the most unpromising environment, under the most adverse conditions, she created a family life remarkable for its order, serenity, good breeding, and aspiration. Even as a child the quality of her mind and character had been apparent. It is reported that at thirteen, having heard at home much discussion of the points at issue between the Nonconformists and the Church of England, she had reviewed the questions for herself and had decided in favor of the Church. Throughout her married life she showed the same independence and self-reliance. Mr. and Mrs. Wesley were always very happy together, but she was in no sense the ideal submissive wife of the eighteenth century. She wrote to her son John when he was in Oxford, "'T is a misfortune almost peculiar to our family that your father and I seldom think alike."[175] She considered King William a usurper and consistently refused to say Amen to the rector's prayers for the new monarch. Mr. Wesley celebrated the victory of Blenheim in a poem, but Mrs. Wesley disapproved of the war and she wrote: "Since I am not satisfied of the lawfulness of the war, I cannot beg a blessing on our arms till I can have the opinion of one wiser and a more competent judge than myself in this point; namely, whether a private person that had no hand in the beginning of the war but did always disapprove of it may, notwithstanding, implore God's blessing on it, and pray for the good success of those arms which were taken up, I think unlawfully." And she declined to join in the worship on the day appointed for prayers for the success of English troops.[176]

Mrs. Wesley had a natural genius for teaching and she became the school-mistress of her family. Her methods were uniform and rigorous. At five each child was given in one day, during two sessions of three hours each, such effective tutoring in the alphabet that by night he knew it and could begin reading the Book of Genesis the next day. The various studies counted necessary followed in due order. Each child was kept closely to the task in hand and the progress made was surprising. Mrs. Wesley said, "It is almost incredible what a child may be taught in a quarter of a year by a vigorous application if it have but tolerable capacity and good health." The virtues inculcated were prompt obedience, quiet manners, correct speech, and courtesy. The religious training of the children received especial emphasis. Mrs. Wesley wrote out for them a clear series of explanatory comments on the Catechism and the Creed, she trained them to take part in family devotions, and once a week she met each child for an hour of private religious conversation and instruction. So precious were these hours to the children that when John was a Fellow in Oxford, he wrote urging his mother to devote her thought and prayer to him during the Thursday evening hour that had been his.

Mrs. Wesley's devout ministrations to her own family, during her husband's absence, became known to some of the neighbors who desired to join her circle. The numbers increased so rapidly that on the first Sunday of February, 1712, more than two hundred were present and many went away for want of room. The curate objected to these meetings and Mr. Wesley wrote in deprecation of them. Mrs. Wesley, too, was seriously in doubt whether one of her sex could find Scripture authority for thus breaking the bread of life to the people. But the manifest needs of the poor parishioners and their eagerness for the gospel prevailed over all doubts and the meetings continued.

The power of Mrs. Wesley in her own home and immediate neighborhood was, through her son John, felt throughout England. Mr. Winchester says truly:

John Wesley was the son of his mother. From her he inherited his logical cast of mind, his executive capacity, his inflexibility of will, his union of independence of judgment with respect for authority, his deep religious temper. And all the characteristics were developed and fixed by his early training. His precision and order, his gift of organization and mastery of details, his notions of education, even some specific rules and customs of his religious societies, can be traced to his mother's discipline. It is often said that Methodism began in the University of Oxford: with more truth it might be said that it began in Susannah Wesley's nursery.[177]

The religious writers so far mentioned only partially represent the great amount of similar literary activity. In many homes where rank or wealth made social diversions an alluring possibility there was carried on by wives and daughters not only a life of austere piety and great practical benevolence, but a life also of intellectual ambitions and instincts. The fact that many of the questions which these ladies discussed are now dead issues cannot obscure the more significant fact that on questions then counted vital they wrote always with energy, often with logical acumen, and sometimes with effectiveness. The home and social life that emerges from scattered hints and records in these religious writings is as remote from that portrayed in contemporary court memoirs or diaries as is the general tone of Paradise Lost or Pilgrim's Progress, and is worth dwelling upon as illustrative of that body of almost unrecognized solid morality that gave to Jeremy Collier a background of public approval when he attacked the immorality of the stage, and through the stage, the immorality of the stage-going people.

WRITERS ON PRACTICAL BENEFICENCE

The piety that finds genuine expression in the writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had almost as frequent expression in the practical necessities of daily life. On the great ladies of the land was laid the responsibility for the physical well-being, the education, and the happiness of those beneath them in birth and wealth. Responsibilities now provided for by multifarious overworked organizations then devolved upon individuals. And many women in the distribution of their money and leisure showed so much insight and practical ability as to become ruling influences in their communities. The fame of some of these women spread through the nation. The combination which they showed of munificent giving, on the one hand, and of rigid self-discipline, on the other, exalted them almost into saints. The two ladies who most fully illustrate the type are Mrs. Bovey and Lady Elizabeth Hastings. Their learning was chiefly in the realm of theology.

Catherine Riches, Mrs. Bovey (1670-1726)

Mrs. Bovey,[178] the daughter of a London merchant, was a great heiress and a great beauty and was consequently much sought after. At fifteen she married William Bovey, Esq., Lord of the Manor of Flaxley, Gloucestershire. After seven years of unhappiness she was left a childless widow with a large fortune at her command. She refused to marry again, but entered into a close friendship with Mrs. Mary Pope. The two ladies lived together in retirement for thirty-two years, making it the purpose of their lives to manage Mrs. Bovey's fortune and estate and to dispose of most of the income in wisely regulated charities. Mrs. Bovey was the subject of much praise from all kinds of people. Mrs. Manley gives the following vivid picture of her:

She is one of those lofty, black and lasting beauties that strike with Reverence, and yet Delight; there is no Feature in her Face, nor any thing in her Person, her Air and Manner, that could be exchanged for any others, and she not prove a Loser: Then as to her Mind and Conduct, her Judgment, her Sense, her Stedfastness, her Reading, her Wit and Conversation, they are admirable; so much above what is most lovely in the sex, shut but your Eyes, (and allow for the Musick of her Voice) your Mind would be charmed, as thinking yourself conversing with the most knowing, most refined of ours; free from all Levity and Superficialness, her Sense is sold [solid?] and perspicuous. Lovely Porcia is so polite, so neat, so perfect an economist, that in taking in all the greater Beauties of Life, she does not disdain to stoop to the most inferiour; in short, she knows all that a Man can know, without despising what, as a woman, she should not be ignorant of.

In 1714 Steele dedicated the second volume of his Ladies' Library to her. With his genius for giving delightful compliments, he says: "Thus with the charms of your own sex, and knowledge not inferior to the more learned of ours, a closet, a bower, or some scene of rural nature, has constantly robbed the world of a ladies appearance, who never was beheld but with gladness to her visitants, nor ever admired but with pain to herself."

Dr. Hickes, in the Preface to his Linguarum Septentrionalium Thesaurus (1702), eulogized this præstantissima & honestissima matrona as the Angliæ nostræ Hypatia Christiana. She had received no formal education, yet by frequent converse with some of the most learned men of the day and by intense application to study she gained a great share of knowledge. She was interested in educational matters, and she gave with particular pleasure to organizations for the training of poor children. At her death Mrs. Pope, her executor, was instructed to pay large sums to such charitable schemes as the gray-coat school, the blue-coat school, the charity school of Christ's Church Parish in Southwark, and a college to be founded in the Island of Bermuda.

Mrs. Bovey's attractive personality may be further emphasized by the persistence of the rumor identifying her with "the perverse widow" whose charms and whose coldness destroyed the peace of Sir Roger de Coverley's heart. Her beauty, her wealth, her learning, her kindness of heart, her general beneficence, and, finally, her inaccessibility, made her admired, loved, and longed for, till she was idealized into something quite above human nature's daily food.

Catherine Riches's father belonged to the wealthy merchant class of London. It would be interesting if we could know the kind of home life and training given to this young city heiress. Was it the unhappy disciplinary years of her married life that turned her so decisively from the pomps and pleasures apparently awaiting one so young and beautiful and rich?

Lady Elizabeth Hastings (1688-1739)

Lady Elizabeth Hastings was the daughter of Theophilus, seventh earl of Huntingdon, by his first wife, through whom, in 1704, she came into a fortune and the possession of Ledstone Park, an estate near Pontefract, Yorkshire. From twenty-two to her death at fifty-seven Lady Elizabeth lived almost continuously at Ledstone. Of these thirty-five years not a striking event is recorded. Her days were "bound each to each by natural piety" and her tranquil life developed along an uninterrupted course of charity and devotion.

To live in Yorkshire, in the eighteenth century, was to be buried. Social and intellectual life were alike without sustenance. Yet from this remote home Lady Elizabeth's fame traveled to London and she became the subject of remarkable eulogies. Number 42 of The Tatler, written possibly by Congreve, appeared in 1709 when the "divine Aspasia" had been but five years at Ledstone. She must have gone there with well-formed ideas of life, for with no vacillations, no period of experimentation, she seems to have entered immediately on that career of religious contemplation and good works which had, in five years, given her the reputation of being a "female philosopher" of the most exalted type. The Tatler paper says that she put into practice the schemes and plans the ancient sages had thought beautiful but inimitable. Steele, in The Tatler, number 49, gave perfect expression to the reverent admiration with which Lady Elizabeth had come to be regarded:

Aspasia must therefore be allowed to be the first of the beauteous Order of Love, whose unaffected freedom, and conscious innocence, give her the attendance of the graces in all her actions. The awful distance which we bear towards her in all our thoughts of her, are certain instances of her being the truest object of love of any of her sex. In this accomplished lady, love is the constant effect, because it is never the design. Yet, though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose behaviour; and to love her is a liberal education.

A somewhat closer view of the life of the Lady Elizabeth comes from casual notes by Thoresby who, in his travels about the northern counties between 1711 and 1724, frequently spent a few days at Ledstone. From the unconnected details scattered through his letters and diaries there emerges a fairly clear picture of a great house exactly ordered on the basis of the religious life. Private prayers, family devotions in which all the servants were included, at several stated hours each day, preparation for church festivals, frequent assemblages for the reading of sermons and holy books, refreshing conferences on mooted points of doctrine, friendly communion on the present and future joys of the Christian, filled the days to the exclusion of worldly interests. No mother superior could have felt a responsibility more definite or have exerted a power more minutely organized for the promotion of the spiritual welfare of those under her charge.

Lady Hastings was also engaged in schemes of wider application. She became as noted for her benefactions as for the saintliness of her recluse life. "Human learning as the handmaid of religion" was the basis on which her gifts were made. She therefore became definitely associated with the new schemes springing up in England for the education of poor boys and girls. In one of Thoresby's visits they walked across the fields to see the new school she was building and endowing for the absolute maintenance and education of fourteen poor girls. The Victoria History of the County of Yorkshire records "Lady Hastings's Schools" at Thorp Arch, Ledsham, Collingham, and Wick. The formal deeds conveying these schools to trustees are dated in 1738, probably because at that time she knew she could not recover from the cancerous affection of which she died the following year. But some of these schools had been established and supported by her much earlier. The account given of the Ledsham school is typical of the others: "These schools are part of the general charity founded by Lady Elizabeth Hastings by deed 14 December, 1738. In a charity school for boys 20 scholars were to be taught and one youth between the ages of 17 and 23 as a charity school-master. The girls' school was for 20 scholars, who were to be clothed partly out of the proceeds of their spinning. The boys' school is now public and elementary, while the girls' school gives a free education in elementary subjects and household duties. The expenses of this school amount to about £400 a year, and this is wholly derived from the endowment." Lady Elizabeth also left a large bequest to Queen's College, Oxford, for poor scholars from schools in Yorkshire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland.[179] Berkeley's missionary project found in her one of its most generous supporters, and her name headed many a list of charities for educational and religious purposes.

So well known did she become that in 1735 a remarkable tribute to her was planned and partly executed. An anonymous donor offered to The Gentleman's Magazine a series of prizes for the four best poems entitled The Christian Hero. The chief prize was to be a "Gold Medal (intrinsic value about Ten Pounds) which shall have the Head of the Rt. Hon. the Lady Elizabeth Hastings on one Side, and that of James Oglethorpe Esq. on the other, with this Motto, England may Challenge the World, 1736."[180] This announcement was in December, 1735. In the January number for 1736 the editor expressed his great concern at having given offense to a Lady, whose name even they did not venture to mention again, by the publication of the proposed Gold Medal prize without her consent.[181] In February the donor humbly asked her Ladyship's pardon for the uneasiness he had so undesignedly caused her, saying that he had not the honor to know her personally, but had been animated solely by the feeling of respect and deference due to the eminence of her character.[182]

When Lady Hastings died, in 1739, The Gentleman's Magazine published a memorial notice said to be by Dr. Johnson. In heavy, analytic fashion it sums up her reputation for sanctity and benevolence, and closes with the statement that "scarce any age has afforded a greater Blessing to many, or a brighter Pattern to all."[183] The year after her death, Law, the noted author of The Serious Call, cited Lady Hastings as a sufficient refutation of the charge that saintliness was not a natural product of the English Church. In 1741 Wilford's stately folio contained a laudatory account of Lady Hastings, and in 1742 Mr. Barnard published An Historical Character, relating to the holy and exemplary Life of the Right Honourable Lady Elizabeth Hastings. To which are added, 1. One of the Codicils of her last Will, setting forth her Devise of Lands to the Provost and Scholars of Queen's College in Oxford, for the interest of 18 Northern Schools. 2. Some Observations therefrom. 3. A Schedule of her other perpetual Charities, with the Principal Rules for their Administration.

Few of the people who praised Lady Hastings knew her personally. Even more strongly than in the case of Mrs. Bovey there seems to have grown up in the public mind a kind of idealized picture of her. She was a saint set apart from the world, not only by a voluntary isolation, but by virtue of her beauty, beneficence, and nobility. She was enshrined. The reverence, affection, and praise accorded her have a definite note of Platonism. She becomes an embodiment of the highest charm and excellence, and the actual "Lady Betty" seems lost in the process.

What were the diversions at Ledstone? Lady Elizabeth's four younger half-sisters, Anne, Frances, Catherine, and Margaret, usually lived with her. After the death of Lady Elizabeth, Margaret, who had become a convert to Methodism, married one of the leaders in that new communion and it was through her influence that Selina, the wife of Theophilus, the brother of these young ladies, was likewise converted to Methodism. The five sisters were apparently a unit in their predisposition to a religious life. But they were too young and too free not to have had some other elements in their life. Had they any such relief as the book-binding at Little Gidding? Our knowledge of the life at Ledstone is tantalizingly incomplete because every one who wrote about Lady Elizabeth took at once an exalted tone, and generalized his picture into abstractions.

Lady Huntingdon (1707-91)

Closely connected with Lady Hastings and the life at Ledstone is another leader in the religious world, the famous Lady Huntingdon, the wife of Lady Hastings's brother Theophilus. Margaret Hastings had accepted the doctrines of the Methodists and through her influence Lady Huntingdon allied herself with the same obscure body. Lady Huntingdon was from childhood introspective and religious. As the daughter of Earl Ferrars and the wife of the Earl of Huntingdon, a brilliant social career was almost inevitable. But in the midst of the splendid scenes in which she took a vivacious and apparently happy part she was spiritually aloof. She was always resisting the encroachments of the world, and striving by self-denial, a rigid course of devotional exercises, and systematic beneficences, to secure inward peace. But she never came into a free and joyous religious consciousness till she accepted the new doctrines taught by the group of Oxford men known as Methodists.[184] In 1739 she sent for John and Charles Wesley to visit her and she became a fearless advocate of their views. After her husband's death in 1746 she devoted her time, her great wealth, and her influence to the cause of Methodism. With several clergymen, her two daughters, her sisters, Anne and Frances, and a few friends, she made a sort of home missionary tour from Bath through Wales for the purpose of studying the needs of the poor in the matter of religious education. In 1748-49 she opened her fine mansion in Park Street, London, for Methodist preaching services. The most distinguished men and women of the time attended these services, but not always as reverent listeners. The whole scheme was met with varying degrees of ridicule. Coventry wrote a description of the meetings at Park Lane, it is supposed, in his account of "Lady Harridan" and her assembly:

It was a sisterhood of the godly, met together to bewail the vanities of human life, and congratulate one another on their breaking from the enchantments of a sinful world.

The causes which had converted them to Methodism, were as various as the characters of the converts. Some, the ill success of their charms had driven to despair; others, a consciousness of too great success had touched with repentance.... But the greater part, like the noble president, were women fatigued and worn out in the vanities of life, the superannuated jades of pleasure, who, being grown sick of themselves, and weary of the world, were now fled to Methodism, as the newest sort of folly that had lately been invented.[185]

One particularly offensive element in Methodism to people who set store by birth and breeding was its leveling effect. Social position counted for little in the face of the all-important classification into saints and sinners. The Duchess of Buckingham wrote in violent protest: "The doctrines of these preachers are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl upon the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding."[186]

The fruition of Lady Huntingdon's remarkable work belongs later in the century, but its inception is between 1739 and 1760 and is of great importance.

DRAMATIC WRITERS

In July, 1867, there was dispersed at Sotheby's rooms the library of the Reverend A. J. Stainforth. "The collection was formed entirely of works of British and American poetesses and female dramatic writers. The books were arranged in over three thousand lots, and the catalogue extends to 166 pages." That Mr. Stainforth spared neither money nor diligence in securing the books for this collection is evident from a single illustration, namely, his search for so obscure a book as Eliza's Babes. "When Mr. Stainforth was forming his collection of Female Poets without regard to cost, he failed to procure a copy of Eliza's Babes, although the hue and cry was circulated far and near."[187] I have not had access to this catalogue and I do not know how many items the "three thousand lots" contain, nor how many individual names are catalogued. If the arrangement is chronological it would doubtless serve to indicate the very rapid spread of female authors after about 1750. Yet even the century from 1650 to 1750 is not without its large contribution. In the preceding sections of this study there has been some indication of the mass of devotional and polemical writing by women. Among poets, playwrights, essayists, novelists, and letter-writers we shall find not only an even greater volume of production, but work of higher intrinsic value.

The Duchess of Newcastle (cir. 1625-1673)

The Duchess of Newcastle wrote numerous plays. Twenty-one were published in 1662, and in 1668 five more appeared. They are described as hardly more than allegorical dialogues arranged in successive scenes, but without plot, and showing no power of dramatic portrayal. The Duchess herself is evidently the original of several of the characters. In her plays as in her scientific studies the particular boast of the Duchess is that whatever she writes is spun out of her own fancy:

But noble readers, do not think my plays

Are such as have been writ in former days;

As Johnson, Shakespear, Beaumont, Fletcher writ,

Mine want their learning, reading, language, wit.

The Latin phrases, I could never tell,

But Johnson could, which made him write so well.

Greek, Latin poets I could never read,

Not their historians, but our English Speed:

I could not steal their wit, nor plots out-take;

All my plays plots, my own poor brain did make.

From Plutarch's story, I ne'er took a plot,

Nor from romances, nor from Don Quixote.[188]

It goes without saying that these plays were not suited for stage presentation, and, in point of fact, very few of them were ever put into rehearsal. One of the plays that did appear drew a great crowd, but the motive was curiosity to see the Duchess rather than any interest in the play. Pepys, who went to hear this play March 30, 1667, wrote concerning it, and its author:

The whole story of this lady is a romance and all she does is romantic. Her footmen in velvet coats, and herself in antique dress, as they say; and was the other day at her own play, "The Humorous Lovers"; the most ridiculous thing that ever was wrote, but she and her Lord mightily pleased with it: and she at the end, made her respects to the players, and did give them thanks. There is as much expectation of her coming to Court, that so people may come to see her, as if it were the Queen of Sheba.

Aphra Amis, Mrs. Behn (1640-1689)

The only important dramatic work by a woman during the second half of the seventeenth century was by Mrs. Behn. She was born at Wye, in Kent.[189] While she was still very young the Amis family went to Surinam, West Indies, where Aphra's girlhood was spent. At about twenty-three[190] she returned to England and soon thereafter married Mr. Behn, a London merchant of Dutch parentage. At his death, before 1666, she was left nearly penniless. For a short time she was in Holland as a secret political agent for the English court. But her services received scant official recognition and the pay was so meager and uncertain that she returned to England and began to look about for other means of support. The new passion for the theater was not yet exhausted and she turned instinctively to play-writing as her most hopeful resource. During the years 1670-1689 her literary output extended into many other fields and shows continuous work at high pressure. Not only was she one of the chief assets of the Duke's Theater as a playwright, but she also translated French verse and prose; she wrote numerous occasional poems; she edited miscellanies; and she wrote novels. Her comedies had a most flattering contemporary vogue and some of them maintained their popularity well into the next century. She satisfied the taste of the day for rapid, bustling plots, with many and varied characters, and her intrigues were cleverly manipulated, while she surpassed most of her contemporaries in vivacious, easy, rapid dialogue. She is never dull or insipid. Her plays show that she had a vigorous mind, an overflow of spirits, a reckless mental energy. There is apparent a sense of power conscious of itself and careless of precedents or restrictions. In defiance of Ben Jonson, Dryden, and Shadwell she spoke contemptuously of "the musty unities." The material for her plays she took wherever she found it, from preceding plays, from romances, from real life, used it, made it over, and often so improved it that she could justifiably laugh at charges of plagiarism. One charge she could not evade and that had to do with the immorality of her writings. Dryden, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Etherege, and the audiences who applauded their plays, seemed to find the vis comica in an open indecency of character, situation, and conversation that is to-day almost unbelievable. And of Mrs. Behn it must be admitted that she vied with the most corrupt. She said, in extenuation, as Dryden also said in answer to Jeremy Collier's strictures, that she wrote to please. She did not consider comedy "a reforming or converting agent," it was meant to be "an entertainment." Her emphasis on the vicious elements of the life about her was a clear case of supply and demand, but it had an unhappy personal result. There early gathered about her name a hostile tradition based on the fact that she was not only a woman writer, but an eminently successful woman writer, and on the further fact that, being a woman, she had not the modest reserve for which the chaste Orinda was idolized, but presented debaucheries in the bold and open manner characteristic of contemporary male playwrights. This hostile tradition, crystallized by Pope in a witty couplet,[191] became a commonplace of adverse criticism, and Astræa's undeniable talents have sunk into oblivion. A general revival of Mrs. Behn's comedies would be impossible, undesirable, but by the student of social and political history in the Restoration period they cannot be ignored.

MRS. APHRA BEHN

From a picture by Mary Beale in the collection of his Grace the Duke of Buckingham. Drawn by T. Uwins. Engraved by J. Fittler, A.R.A. From an engraving in Effigies Poeticae, London, 1824, Vol. II

Mrs. Behn's novels are now as little known as her plays, but in her own day were very popular. Oroonoko, the first and by far the best, was based on her life in Surinam. At a time when French heroic romances, with their high-flown adventures, unreal characters, and stilted dialogue, were the only works of fiction, Mrs. Behn's short, simple, vigorous, and affecting story of real life comes with a startling sense of novelty.[192] The vivid portrayal of the cruelties incident to the slave trade, though probably written without didactic intent, gives the story a modern humanitarian note not unprophetic of Uncle Tom's Cabin. And the description of the Indian Prince as the ideal natural man, his innate virtues in their pristine purity unvitiated by civilization, foreshadows the theories of Rousseau. The descriptions of nature, however exaggerated, are vivid and attractive, and show a delight in scenic detail not found again in fiction before Mrs. Collyer in 1730. Thus in four ways, choice of real life as a theme, interest in scenery, emphasis on the natural man, and on humanitarianism, Mrs. Behn's little story links itself with the novel of the future rather than with the romances of the past. In the plays Mrs. Behn showed exceptional ability in a realm in which women have seldom excelled. In her novels she marked out a path where women have gained marked literary success.

In one other way she is an important, outstanding figure. She was the first woman in England who made authorship a profession, the first one who definitely set out to earn her living by her pen. It is unfortunate that the first literary lady to achieve "economic independence" should likewise be the first whose writings were notably immoral. But it is a law of human nature that an unaccustomed freedom seldom contents itself in its early exercise of power with destroying merely the unjust bonds by which it has been confined. Freedom is likely to begin by being license. And when Aphra Behn so far defied convention as to compete with men as a playwright on the public stage, when she openly criticized her contemporaries and boasted that her comedies did not fall below most that she read, she had so set herself apart in an unfeminine realm that prudishness and decency fell together. Psychologically the actress and the writer of comedies seem to have gone through similar experiences.

Plays between 1696 and 1706

Mrs. Behn had no feminine contemporary rivals, but later in the century a number of women attempted to write for the stage. In Genest's record for Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields seven plays by six women are listed in 1696. In the ensuing ten years at least eighteen more plays by women appeared. This exceptional activity did not pass without satiric comment. In 1697 "W. M.'s" Female Wits,[193] with its attack on Miss Trotter, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Pix, was acted six times without intermission, a run showing exceptional popularity. In 1702 the hostility of the wits towards women playwrights was again voiced in Gildon's The Two Stages.[194] Genest says that about this time "prejudice against females rose so high that Mrs. Centlivre in Stolen Heiress and Mrs. Pix in Conquest of Spain spoke of their plays as if by men."[195] The authors of these twenty-five plays were Miss Trotter, Mrs. Pix, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Wiseman, "A Lady," "A Young Lady," "A Lady of Quality," and "A Club of Ladies." Fourteen of the plays were tragedies, the best one being, probably, Miss Trotter's Fatal Friendship, almost the only one of the fourteen that survived on the stage after its initial season. The writers of comedy were more successful.

Few of these authors need particular notice. Miss Trotter's work has already been discussed.[196] Mrs. Manley's three plays appeared at ten-year intervals, 1696, 1706, 1717. They were unsuccessful on the stage and they have no qualities that would claim the reader's attention. It is in fiction, not in drama, that Mrs. Manley gained her reputation.

Mrs. Pix (1666-1720?)

Mrs. Pix, daughter of the Reverend Roger Griffith, Vicar of Nettlested in Oxfordshire, and wife of George Pix, a merchant tailor of London, was thirty when she brought out her first play. During the ensuing ten years she put on the stage five tragedies, one comedy, and possibly other plays not under her name. Her tragedies, though written in blank verse, yet belong to the heroic genre, and their chief interest lies in the fact that they represent that genre in its dying throes. In Mrs. Pix's tragedies the heroic play of Dryden's day could look upon its enfeebled and distorted image. We have the war background, the remoteness of time and place, the historical source with free alterations of persons and events, that mark the heroic drama. The type characters are the same. The heroine is unapproachable in beauty, unassailable in virtue. The hero, godlike in personal prowess, the idol of the army, framed by nature to be the darling joy of womankind, cares for glory only that he may lay it at the feet of his beloved. Blest by her he will leave unenvied monarchs to "fight for this Dunghil Earth." This noble pair, joined by indissoluble vows or by a secret marriage, are subjected by the plot to the machinations of the beautiful wicked woman in whose heart has sprung into being a passion for the hero, and to the arrogant demands of the tyrant who claims the heroine as his prey. The result is disaster and the last act is a holocaust. Fights, murders, and suicides carry off all the important dramatis personæ. Disguises, mistaken identity, the ravings of sudden madness, ghosts, and secret documents, determine the events of the play. Passion is torn into exclamatory tatters from the first scene to the last. We have rant and bluster and tortured similes, until taste, good sense, and correct English suffer the same fate as the chief characters. The description of Mrs. Pix as "a fat female author," appropriately called "Mrs. Wellfed," would prepare us for something more placid than the chaos into which she leads us.

The one possible explanation of Mrs. Pix's acceptance year after year by the audiences of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields is that the business of her plays never lags. They are short, full of action and surprising turns. An event is never delayed by a disquisition. They also gave excellent opportunity for scenic effects of palaces, prisons, and camps.

Susanna Freeman, Mrs. Centlivre (1680?-1723)

The only woman writer of plays of real importance in this period is Susanna Centlivre.[197] She was the daughter of a Mr. Freeman of Holbeach, Lincolnshire. He is said to have had a considerable estate at the time of the Restoration, but being a zealous dissenter, he was persecuted, his estates were confiscated, and he was obliged to seek refuge in Ireland, where Susanna was born. Her early life is involved in obscurity, but there cling to her name biographical details of a picturesque and romantic sort, though of rather questionable authenticity. Left an orphan at nine and subjected to the ill-usage of a stepmother, the child, at twelve, finally escapes and makes her way to London which she enters penniless, innocent, beautiful. She is rescued by a Cambridge student, a Mr. Hammond, and disguised as a boy she accompanies him to the University. Later she marries the nephew of Stephen Fox, but is left a widow before she is sixteen. A second marriage to a Mr. Carroll results in a second widowhood before she is eighteen. At twenty her first tragedy is played at Drury Lane. She appears soon after this as an actress in country theaters. Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Haywood could ask no richer material for an adventure novel. Then suddenly the scene changes. The buffeted Susanna marries Mr. Centlivre, Queen Anne's chief pastry-cook, and settles down into a comfortable, orderly, and apparently happy domestic life, of which, however, we know in reality even less than of her early kaleidoscopic career.[198] The events of her life are the presentation and publication of her plays.

Before her marriage in 1706 she had begun the series of comedies of which, between 1703 and 1722, she wrote seventeen. They were all successful, and four of them, The Gamester (1705), The Busy Body (1709), The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714), and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), held a fairly prominent place on the stage through the century.

In 1761 there was published a fine edition of her works in three volumes. There is a preliminary address "To the World" in which an anonymous woman endeavors to do justice to "The Manes of the never to be forgotten Mrs. Centlivre." She thus recounts the difficulties Mrs. Centlivre encountered as a female author:

She was even ashamed to proclaim her own great Genius, probably because the Custom of the Times discountenanced poetical Excellence in a Female. The Gentlemen of the Quill published it not, perhaps envying her superior Talents; and her Bookseller, complying with national Prejudices, put a fictitious Name to her Love's Contrivance, thro' Fear that the Work shou'd be condemned if known to be Feminine. With modest Diffidence she sent her Performances, like Orphans, into the World, without so much as a Nobleman to protect them; but they did not need to be supported by Interest, they were admired as soon as known, their real Standard, Merit, brought crowding Spectators to the playhouses, and the female Author, tho' unknown, heard Applauses, such as have since been heaped on that great Author and Actor Colley Cibber.

Her play of the Busy Body, when known to be the Work of a Woman scarce defray'd the Expences of the First Night. The thin audience were pleased, and caused a full House the Second; the Third was crowded, and so on to the Thirteenth, when it was stopt, on account of the advanced Season; but the following Winter it appear'd again with Applause, and for Six Nights successively, was acted by rival Players, both at Drury Lane and at the Hay-Market Houses. See here the Effects of Prejudice, a Woman who did Honour to the Nation, suffer'd because she was a Woman. Are these things fit and becoming a free-born People, who call themselves polite and civilized! Hold! let my Pen stop, and not reproach the present Age for the Sins of their Fathers....

A Poet is born so, not made by Rules; and is there not an equal Chance that the Poetical Birth should be female as well as male?... I could wish that some young Ladies of my Acquaintance, now in Boarding Schools, had classical Education, which would improve their Minds, furnish them with a more general Knowledge, and of course better fit them for Conversation, and the Management of Business.

The author of "To the World" finds great satisfaction in the union of Mrs. Lennox with "Lord Corke and Mr. Samuel Johnson" in the translation of Brumoy's Greek Theatre.

This convinces me [she says] that not only that barbarous Custom of denying Women to have Souls, begins to be rejected as foolish and absurd, but also that foolish Assertion, that Female Minds are not capable of producing literary Works, equal even to those of Pope, now loses Ground, and probably the next Age may be taught by our pens that our Geniuses have been hitherto cramped and smothered, but not extinguished, and that the Sovereignty which the male Part of the Creation have, until now usurped over us, is unreasonably arbitrary: And, further, that our natural Abilities entitle us to a larger Share, not only in Literary Decisions, but that, with the present Directors, we are equally entitled to Power both in Church and State....

In 1764 Baker, in Biographia Dramatica, gave an account of Mrs. Centlivre's work, and most eighteenth-century dramatic collections included plays by her. In 1776 The New English Theatre, which professed to assemble "the most Valuable Plays which have been Acted on the London Stage," published The Busy Body, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, and The Wonder. Her plays were included by John Bell in various collections from 1776 to 1792. Mrs. Inchbald, in her British Theatre (1808), and Oxberry, in The New English Drama, 1818-1824, carried the publication of her plays into the nineteenth century. Such brief notices as occur are highly laudatory. Mr. Baker says: "In a word we cannot help giving it as our opinion, that if we do not allow her to be the very first of our female writers for the stage, she has but one above her, and may justly be placed next to her predecessor in dramatic glory, the great Mrs. Behn." Nearly half a century later Mrs. Inchbald gave even stronger praise when she said that Mrs. Centlivre "ranks in the first class of our comic dramatists." Of the Busy Body Mrs. Inchbald said: "This comedy is by far her best work. In excellence of fable, strength of character, and intricacy of occurrences, it forms one of the most entertaining exhibitions the theatre can boast." Of The Wonder she wrote: "Garrick thought Don Felix worthy his most powerful exertions, in describing the passion of jealousy; and his character was upon the lists with the favorite parts he performed.... Mrs. Centlivre has somewhere said 'the Muses, like most females, are least liberal to their own sex.' She was ungrateful if she did not acknowledge her obligation to them in the composition of this work; for they presided with no niggardly influence over the whole production."

Modern study of Mrs. Centlivre's work has taken a surprising turn. It has to do entirely with Quellen and Verhältnisse. In 1900-1905 there were seven German dissertations dealing with the sources of her plays.[199]

The impulse to play-writing seems to have expended itself with Mrs. Centlivre. Hannah Cowley's popular Belle's Stratagem (1782) is the only other play of even moderate importance through the rest of the century. The situation with regard to play-writing is rather curious. Virtuous ladies were at liberty to write tragedies because tragedies were supposed to be moral and elevating. But unfortunately none of these ladies succeeded in tragedy. On the other hand, ladies who were not virtuous wrote comedies and were eminently successful. The realm between tragedy and comedy, the sentimental comedy, in its combination of didacticism and morality with social studies from middle-class life and the opportunity for rapid intrigue, might have seemed the very medium in which women could most advantageously work. But the successful sentimental comedies from The Conscious Lovers to False Delicacy were written by men playwrights.

General Learning and Literary Work

Besides the women whose work was sufficiently specialized to be grouped under particular subjects or species there were many women to whom learning was itself an avocation with no thought of any literary outcome, and there were many more whose interests were in the general field of belles-lettres and who wrote either in verse or in prose, and on such varied themes as the occasion might suggest. Since no effective principle of classification suggests itself in connection with these writers, it will probably be in the interests of clearness to discuss them in an order as nearly chronological as may be.

Joan Philips (fl. 1679)

An early, almost unknown, little volume of poems, published in 1679 under the title, Female Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Ephelia, is the work of Joan Philips whose portrait accompanies the poems. Such of Miss Philips's poems as can be dated belong but a year or two before the publication of the book. She apparently had some rather close connection with court circles. Her little volume is dedicated to the "Most Excellent Princess Mary, Dutchess of Richmond and Lennox"; she sends a congratulatory poem to Charles II on the discovery of the Popish Plot; and she writes an elegy on Archbishop Sheldon.

Her poems are not, however, usually concerned with court and state. The "Several Occasions" calling forth her verse are chiefly amatory or friendly. Her love-poems are highly personal. From poem to poem the lady pursues the uneven and finally disastrous course of her love for "Strephon," sometimes less poetically addressed as "F. G." From "Love's First Approach" to Strephon's final decisive nuptials with a wealthier Fair One the hopes and despairs of Ephelia are spread before us. She can find no surcease from sorrow. Books fail her as a resource, and her pen proves as recalcitrant as that of the White King in Looking Glass Land.

Sometimes with Books I would divert my mind,

But nothing there but F's and G's I find.

Sometimes to ease my Grief, my Pen I take

But it no letters but F. G. will make.

Miss Philips's friendship poems, in their addresses to "the honoured Eugenia," "the beauteous Marinda," to "Damon," and to "Phylocles inviting him to friendship" show how definitely Ephelia formed herself on the model of the great Orinda whom she praises as having reached the summit of excellence.

Miss Philips also wrote in awe-struck admiration of "Madam Behn" whose "strenuous polite lines" seemed to her a union of "Strong and Sweet" such as might be envied by the wittiest men. And she followed in the footsteps of Mrs. Behn to the extent of writing one comedy, The Pair-Royal of Coxcombs which had the humble success of being acted at a dancing-school. The deprecatory Prologue and Epilogue were included in her poems together with some of the love-songs in the play.

Ephelia seems to spread her life before us, but as a personage in the real world she escapes us. She and Strephon have faded into obscurity. She is contemporary in comedy with Mrs. Behn. Had they some literary comradeship? But twelve years separate the published work of Joan Philips from that of Mrs. Katherine Philips. Were the two poetesses perhaps related? Lady Winchilsea was eighteen when the volume by Ephelia appeared. About fifteen years later we find Lady Winchilsea as "Ardealia" writing on Friendship to one "Ephelia." Could it possibly be this Ephelia? Did Ephelia publish the poems herself with her own portrait as frontispiece? If so she was strangely lacking in the reserve characteristic of Orinda and Ardelia. But even with no biographical data whereby to substantiate or correct the poems, the thin little volume holds its place of interest because of its early date and because of the literary ambitions it indicates.

Anne Killigrew (1660-1685)

Anne Killigrew came of a family prominent in the court of Charles II. Her uncle Thomas, the "court wit," was given a patent for the Theater Royal; her uncle Henry was admiral under James, Duke of York; her father was chaplain to James and Master of the Savoy; and Anne was maid of honor to Mary of Modena. She was born in St. Martin's Lane and died at her father's lodgings within the Cloisters of Westminster. London and the court were her habitat. Ballard says she had "a polite education," but no details are given. She apparently was taught the accomplishments counted necessary for a girl in her social position. That she went beyond mediocrity in painting we have already seen.[200] In poetry, also, according to Dryden, she excelled. The thin volume of her published verse (1686) scarcely justifies his eulogy, but Wood, in Athenæ Oxoniensis, says that Dryden in no way exceeds the truth. Her poems sent anonymously from hand to hand received high praise and were even at first attributed to the best poets of the age. They gradually came to be known as hers, but she gives no evidence of having suffered any contumely as a poetess. She has nowhere any complaint of undue or irritating feminine limitations. She is pessimistic, scornful, rather hard and drastic, in her judgments, but it is greed for gold, ambition for place or power, unbridled love, atheism, war, that are the subjects of her invective. There is not a light or playful, or even a happy, touch in her poems. They have a crude virility, what Dryden calls a "noble vigour," and a contemptuous outlook on "the truly wretched Human Race."

Personally Miss Killigrew must have been attractive. Her epitaph eulogizes her as a daughter and a sister:

In a numerous race

And vertuous, the highest place

None envy'd her: sisters, brothers,

Her admirers were and lovers:

She was to all s' obliging sweet,

All in one love to her did meet.

And she was an acknowledged favorite at court, especially with her royal master and mistress. Dryden emphasizes her beauty and charm. The portrait she painted of herself shows her in no sense averse to pomps and vanities of attire.[201] In actual life she must have moved along in fairly smooth accord with the life about her, but there could have been few ladies within the circle of the court more alien to it in spirit than Anne Killigrew. It is difficult to place her mentally amid the gayeties of London life. She presents an anomaly. To be young, beautiful, gifted, high in social opportunities, praised and loved, and yet to look out upon life with bitterness and distaste, to be conscious at twenty-five that all this world has to offer will turn to dust and ashes in the mouth—such is the curious combination we find in her. While the few accessible details concerning her indicate a considerable degree of lovableness, her poems are those of an implacable moral censor.

Anne Killigrew was but four when Mrs. Philips died, but the spell of the "Matchless Orinda" descended early upon her, and she gives one of the earliest of the many eulogies written by women concerning their distinguished ancestor among British Muses.

Orinda (Albion, and her sex's grace)

Ow'd not her glory to a beauteous face:

It was her radiant soul that shone within,

Which struck a lustre thro' her outward skin;

That did her lips and cheeks with roses dye,

Advanc'd her

height

, and sparkled in her eye.

Nor did her sex at all obstruct her fame.

But high'r 'mongst the stars it fixt her name;

What she did write, not only all allow'd,

But ev'ry laurel, to her laurel bow'd!

Mrs. Evelyn (1635-1709) and Mary Evelyn (1665-85)

John Evelyn's flattering letter to the Duchess of Newcastle, already quoted, with its list of learned women, his suggestion to Lord Cornbury that he add two ladies to his gallery of notables, the trouble he took to conduct a party of ladies to see the girls' "colleges" at Hackney, and various references in Numismata (1697) indicate a genuine interest in the intellectual achievements of women. Mrs. Evelyn seems at first to have been of a different temper. She wrote as follows to her son's tutor, Mr. Bohun, in 1672:

Women were not borne to reade authors, and censure the learned, to compare lives and judge of virtues, to give rules of morality, and sacrifice to the Muses. We are willing to acknowledge all time borrowed from family duties misspent; the care of children's education, observing a husband's commands, assisting the sick, relieving the poore, and being serviceable to our friends, are of sufficient weight to employ the most improved capacities amongst us. If sometimes it happens by accident that one of a thousand aspires a little higher, her fate commonly exposes her to wonder, but adds little to esteeme. The distaffe will defend our quarrels as well as the sword, and the needle is as instructive as the penne. A heroine is a kind of prodigy: the influence of a blazing starre is not more dangerous, or more avoyded. Though I have lived under the roofe of the learned, and in the neighborhood of science, it has had no other effect on a temper like mine, but that of admiration.

But these very letters, in which Mrs. Evelyn disclaims learning, would be a capital point in refutation of Macaulay's charge of general feminine illiteracy. In subject-matter, in style, and in the mechanics of writing they show a development not unworthy of that "roofe of the learned" under which she dwelt. At the time Mrs. Evelyn wrote the letter just quoted her daughter Mary was but six years old, but her literary and artistic tastes must have soon become manifest, for when she died of small-pox at nineteen she was an accomplished young woman, on the road, apparently, to be the dangerous "blazing starre" her mother decried, and her training must have been going on for ten or twelve years in the home with the active connivance of her parents. Her father was exceedingly proud, not only of her excellence in dancing and music, but especially, it would seem, of her passion for books. She had, he said, "read abundance of history, and all the best poets, even Terence, Plautus, Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid; all the best romances and modern poems." After her death they found among her papers a commonplace book in which she had entered "an incredible number of selections from historians, poets, travellers." Her piety and her impulse towards expression were both shown in the many "resolutions, contemplations, prayers and devotions" she left in written form. Of the extent to which both Mrs. Evelyn and her daughter carried their work in painting and enamel I have already spoken.[202]

The Evelyn household may stand doubtless as one of many where, without any tinge of pedantry or any especial outward manifestations of learning, there was yet a natural interest in arts and letters, an interest shared, in quite a simple, normal way by all the members of the family.

The Honorable Miss Dudleya North (1675-1712)

The Honorable Miss Dudleya North was a niece of the Honorable Roger North, and it is through the memorable Lives of the Norths that we come upon an account of her life. Dudleya and her two younger brothers were brought up together. She learned the same lessons and read the same books as her brothers, and joined in their amusements. When they went to the University, she carried on her studies at home and she became one of the most highly cultured and learned women of her time. After she had conquered Greek and Latin she advanced to Hebrew, and finally, "by a long and severe course of study," she gained "a competent knowledge in the whole circle of Oriental learning." Her uncle Roger laconically described her life as follows: "The eldest sister, Catharine, died ... and the youngest, named Dudleya, having emaciated herself with study whereby she had made familiar to her, not only Greek and Latin, but the Oriental languages, under the infliction of a sedentery distemper, died also."

The fine collection of Oriental books left by Miss North was given by her brother, Lord North and Grey, to the parochial library at Rougham in Norfolk. Her uncle wrote: "I have had a design to build a parochial library at Rougham, and now shall finish it this summer, and placing my niece's books there, entitle the Catalogue Ex dono, etc., e libris eruditissimæ virginis, etc., which will be a monument more lasting than marble."[203]

Anne Lee, Lady Wharton (1632?-1685)

Anne Lee, the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Lee, married in 1673 Thomas Wharton, whose chief interest in her was based on the large dowry she brought him. The unhappiness of her married life received some alleviation from the wise and steadfast friendship of Dr. Gilbert Burnet. In 1680-81, she was in France for her health and during this time she corresponded regularly with Dr. Burnet. He addressed to her various poems with titles such as The Secrets of Friendship, Friendship's Mysteries, Pure Love, and Love's Magnetism. She wrote a tragedy in blank verse on the love of Ovid for Julia, a number of Scripture paraphrases, and some occasional poems.[204] Some of these poems drew approving verses from Dryden in his Eleonora, a panegyrical poem on the death of Mrs. Wharton's elder sister, Lady Abingdon, in 1691, and from Waller, who, in his old age, was still equal to flattering a new "Chloris," under which name he celebrated her learning and her poetry.

Ann Baynard (1672-1697)

Ann Baynard had a natural propensity to learning and her father Dr. Edward Baynard, Fellow of the College of Physicians, London, gave her a very liberal education. Dr. Prude[205] says of her:

As for learning, whether it be to know and understand natural causes and events, to know the courses of the sun, moon, and stars; the qualities of herbs and plants; to be acquainted with the demonstrable verities of the mathematicks; the study of philosophy; the writings of the antients; and that in their own proper language, without the help of an interpreter: These and the like are the most noble accomplishments of the human mind, and accordingly do bring great delight and satisfaction along with them, these things she was not only conversant in, but mistress of, and that to such a degree, that very few of her sex did ever arrive at. She had from her infancy been trained up in the knowledge of these things, and had made a great progress therein; and even in her green years, at the age of 23, was arrived to the knowledge of a bearded philosopher.[206]

She was a "nervous and subtle disputant" in the "hard and knotty arguments of metaphysical learning." She was always coveting more knowledge, saying that it was a sin to be contented with but a little. She was exceedingly religious and learning was to her but a handmaid of piety. Her last words were a recommendation to women to study philosophy and the great book of nature which would give them a sound basis for wisdom in practical life. Women, she said, are capable of such study, and could accomplish much if they would "spend of that time in study and thinking, which they do in visits, vanity and folly." Mr. Collier, in the Great Historical Dictionary, says of her that it is doubtful whether the first Ralph Baynard, who for his conduct at the battle of Hastings was rewarded with eighty-five lordships, did more honor to the name of Baynard or the last Anne.

Mrs. Alicia D'Anvers (fl. 1691)

Academia: or the Humours of the University of Oxford in burlesque verse is a thin quarto by Mrs. Alicia D'Anvers. It was printed in May, 1691, and again with a fuller descriptive title in June of the same year. The poem is an account given to his fellow-servants by John who has recently visited Oxford. Mrs. D'Anvers puts herself in John's place. She uses his crude and even rough language, she gives his point of view, and relishes the misconceptions due to his ignorance. Heavy and clumsy as the poem is there is something refreshing and original in its tone. As an attempted realistic portrayal of a servant's experiences it stands quite by itself, except in comedies, in the decades before the novel widened human interests. Mrs. D'Anvers is neither patronizing nor didactic. She simply finds genuine humor and entertainment in the comic juxtaposition of John's mind and the ancient customs and glories of Oxford.

Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710)

Lady Chudleigh[207] was a lady of much repute in the eighteenth century for her writings in both prose and verse. Her Poems were published in 1703 and her Essays in 1710, but her chief literary activities belong in the late seventeenth century. Her Essays are disquisitions on Pride, Humility, Self-love, Friendship, Death, Anger, Avarice, Solitude, and kindred themes. Mr. Ballard says of them: "They appear to be, not the excursions of a lively imagination ... so much as the deliberate results of a long exercise in the world, improv'd with reading, regulated with judgment; softened by good breeding, and heightened with sprightly thoughts and elevated piety." Her prose style is fluent, energetic, and, for the most part, correct. In her Preface to her Song of Three Children Paraphrased she makes several points that indicate mental independence. In the height of the dominance of the heroic couplet she chooses Pindaric verse because she does not wish to be tied up to the rules of the couplet, and because she desires to give her fancy greater scope. She begs pardon for introducing into her poem ideas "not generally received," such as Dr. Burnet's conception of the "Ante-diluvian Earth as Smooth, regular, and uniform; without Mountains or Hills." Concerning her poetic use of the doctrine of preëxistence she says, "To me 't is indifferent which is true, as long as I know I am by the Laws of Poetry allow'd the Liberty of chusing that which will sound most gracefully in Verse." In regard to the stars she adopts "the Cartesian Hypothesis" because it makes the universe "appear infinitely larger, fuller, more magnificent." Her imagination is as genuinely excited as was Tennyson's by her conception of the "boundless Spaces" of the heavens and the splendor of the "huge Globes which roll over our Heads." She believes also in a millennial existence on "a new habitable earth." The poem itself is an unbroken ecstasy ninety long stanzas in duration, and becomes undeniably wearisome. But the woman who could spend months in a lonely country place absorbed in such religious and scientific reflections, who could maintain for so long a time so rapt and energetic a mental attitude towards abstract subjects, was far enough removed from the traditional hausfrau.

Though Lady Chudleigh rejoices in these learned topics she modestly disclaims any accurate knowledge. "But 't is not reasonable to expect that a Woman should be nicely skill'd in Physics: We are kept Strangers to all ingenious and useful Studies, and can have but a slight and superficial Knowledge of things." Two poems, Resolution and To Mr. Dryden on his excellent Translation of Virgil, give evidence of Lady Chudleigh's wide reading in poetry, history, drama, and divinity. Her literary dicta are of little value, for they do hardly more than echo the judgments of the day. According to her it was the poet Waller who, coming after the "transient Glimm'rings of Chaucer" and the "Lunar Beams of Spenser," announced the dawn of a new Morn, and with Dryden came "The Triumphs of refulgent Day." Taken as a whole the poems bitterly inveigh against life with its blighting sorrows, its fleeting, unreal joys, its injustice, its black despairs. The only break in the gloom comes in short periods of absorption in books, or in occasional religious ecstasies.

The first poem by which Lady Chudleigh became known is The Ladies' Defence: a sudden, angry outburst caused by a sermon on Conjugal Duty by a Mr. Sprint, a nonconformist in Sherbourn, Dorsetshire.[208] The personal animus in a little poem To the Ladies warning them against marriage, apparently grew out of her own matrimonial infelicities. And The Ladies' Defence has the same ring of indignant sincerity. The poem is in the form of a conversation between the parson who preached the sermon; Sir William Loveall, who, out of the ignorance of his unmarried state, endeavors to reconcile the warring parties; Marissa, Lady Chudleigh herself; and Sir John Brute, who thanks the parson for preaching against "those Terrors of our Lives, those worst of Plagues, those Furies call'd our Wives." The parson replies:

Not led by Passion, but by Zeal inspir'd,

I've told the Women what's of them requir'd:

Taught them their Husbands to Obey and Please,

And to their Humours sacrifice their Ease:

Give up their Reason, and their Wills resign,

And ev'ry look, and ev'ry thought confine.

Sure, this Detraction you can't justly call?

'T is kindly meant, and 't is address'd to All.

If you wou'd live as it becomes a Wife,

And raise the Honour of a marry'd Life,

You must the useful Art of wheedling try,

And with his various Humours still comply;

Whate'er he is, you still must think him best,

And boast to all that you are truly blest;

Also, to him you inward Reverence owe;

If he's a Fool, you must not think him so;

Nor yet indulge one mean contemptuous Thought,

Or fancy he can e'er commit a Fault.

Nor must your Deference be alone confin'd

Unto the hid Recesses of your Mind,

But must in all your Actions be display'd,

And visible to each Spectator made.[209]

After this sarcastic summary of Mr. Sprint's irritating sermon Lady Chudleigh in the person of Marissa, depicts the general condition of women and her own loftier ambitions:

'T is hard we should be by the Men despis'd

Yet kept from knowing what would make us priz'd.

Debarr'd from Knowledge, banish'd from the Schools,

And with the utmost Industry bred Fools.

Laugh'd out of Reason, jested out of Sense,

And nothing left but Native Innocence:

Or that my Sex would all such Toys despise;

And only study to be Good, and Wise:

Instead of Novels, Histories peruse,

And for their Guides the wise Ancients chuse,

Thro' all the Labyrinths of Learning go,

And grow more humble as they more do know.

Beauty's a Trifle merits not my Care.

I'd rather Æsop's ugly Visage wear,

Joyn'd with his Mind, than be a Fool, and Fair.

But spite of you, we'll to ourselves be kind:

Your censures slight, your little Tricks despise,

And make it our whole business to be wise.

The mean low trivial Cares of Life disdain,

And read and Think, and Think and read again,

And on our Minds bestow the utmost Pain.

Anne Kingsmill, Lady Winchilsea (1661-1720)

One of the important women of letters in the late seventeenth century was Anne Kingsmill.[210] Of her early life we have no definite details. That it was a gay and happy life may be inferred from one of her retrospective poems in which she says that in her youth "Pleasure's tempting Air" blew soft about her, and that she dedicated her "Prime" to "vain Amusements." Later she coveted a place at court which to her ambitious eye seemed "Paradice below." At what time this desire was realized we have no record, but in 1683 we find her listed as one of the maids of honor to Mary of Modena. Miss Strickland says that Anne Killigrew and Anne Kingsmill were "ladies of irreproachable virtue, members of the Church of England, and alike distinguished for moral worth and literary achievements," and she adds that Anne Kingsmill was "well-known as the beautiful and witty maid of honour." In 1684 Anne married Mr. Finch, gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York. At the coming of William and Mary, Mr. and Mrs. Finch went to the family place at Eastwell Park where they spent the rest of their uneventful lives in a retirement, embittered at first, doubtless, by their grief over Stuart disasters, but, as the years passed, rendered more and more delightful by the joys of country life, of books, and of friends. Mrs. Finch's best poems are those inspired by Eastwell and its associations. The Elizabethan house at Eastwell was set in a park of old yew trees and majestic beeches, forming "the very ideal of an ancestral park of the ancient noblesse," and it was by the extraordinary dignity and beauty of this park that Mrs. Finch's most imaginative work was inspired. Within doors the gathering of antiquities, the illuminating of books, the formation of a great library, and free literary productivity were the family interests. There were also many and close ties of friendship founded on natural causes of union such as loyalty to the Stuarts, devotion to the Church of England, high and even austere ideals of life. And family ties and ties of friendship received ardent acknowledgment. No woman of this period was more happily circumstanced in her home for the unhampered pursuit of literary tastes than was Lady Winchilsea. She began to write when she was a maid of honor, but it was with a nervous sense of the ridicule that would probably follow any disclosure of that fact. But at Eastwell the case was different. There are charming pictures of evening sessions when the authoress presented her work to an enthusiastic circle. A scribe entered her writings in a fair and clerkly hand in a majestic folio. With such encouragement the lady kept sedulously and joyfully to her task. And when her husband's accession to the title gave her a new position of dignity and authority she even ventured, in 1713,[211] to publish a selection from her verse, first under the pseudonym "Ardelia," and then, in a later impression, with her full name and title.

Lady Winchilsea's poems were composed between 1683 and 1720, and during this period she tried nearly all poetic forms. Songs, satires, fables, tragedies, translations, are fully represented. She was the most voluminous of the minor poets of her time, and in vigor and scope she outranks most of them. But her literary importance to-day rests not so much on the amount or variety of her work, as on the fact that in an age of didacticism and satire she delicately foreshadowed tastes that ruled in the romanticism of a century later. It was her Nocturnal Reverie, with its minute accuracy of observation, its sense of the mystery of nature and of the mystic union between man and nature, that secured Wordsworth's praise, gave her an honorable place in Ward's English Poets, and finally established her in the heaven of literary fame as, in Mr. Gosse's phrase, "a minor excelsitude."

In the present study quite other points are to be made concerning Lady Winchilsea. She is particularly interesting when considered as a heretic against certain prevailing social and educational ideals. In the gay dissipations of court life under Charles II she maintained a conception of life serious and even austere. In close association with Mary of Modena and James II she yet maintained her devotion to the Church of England. With the world of fashion flocking to the comedies of the Restoration dramatists she yet condemned the immoralities of the stage with the bitterness of a Jeremy Collier. There was, then, in Lady Winchilsea an independence of judgment, a stoutness of fiber in forming and defending her own views, which would lead one to expect some trenchant remarks on the contemporary attitude towards women. It is much to be regretted that the letters of Lady Winchilsea, if any are extant, have never been published. Her interests were so varied, her friendships so ardent, her hours of country leisure so numerous, her pen so facile, that she must have found, in what Anne Seward called "epistolary solicitudes," one of the most convenient outlets for a spirit often kicking against the pricks of social conventions, and her keenness of insight, her caustic phrasing, would make her letters worth many pages of pindarics. But in default of such letters we turn to the one prose essay and to the poems. From scattered passages we can build up the elements of her heresies. Though she loved her home and was the most devoted of wives, she utterly rejected the hausfrau theory of life. She declared that she, at least, was never meant for "the dull manage of a servile house." She asked little of her table except that it should be "set without her care." Rich food and elaborate service could be dispensed with, but leisure and a free mind she must have. The frivolous occupations of the town lady, the endless discussions of laces and brocades, the rivalries as to dishes and screens from China, the gossip and ill-natured jests at fashionable tea-tables, she found unendurable. Feminine accomplishments, such as embroidery, amateurish drawing and painting, awakened her active hostility.

This definite rejection of all that ordinarily filled the feminine mind, and a rejection, moreover, in the interests of books and writing, of course made Ardelia the unhappy victim of many a sneer. The attack on her by Pope and Gay, in Three Hours after Marriage, in 1717, may be taken as an extreme example of the indignities to which "a petticoat author" might be subjected, but there must have been many lesser evidences of social disapproval or the irritating theme would not so often recur in her poems. In "The Introduction" she says:

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem'd,

The fault, can by no vertue be redeem'd.

They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;

Good breeding, fassion, dancing, dressing, play

Are the accomplishments we should desire;

To write, or read, or think, or to enquire

Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,

And interrupt the Conquests of our prime.

She congratulates herself that she had at least had the good sense to keep her rhymes a secret while at court, where a "Versifying Maid of Honour" would have been looked upon "with prejudice, if not with contempt." During a visit to London she heard the young gossip Almeria describe a certain lady as "A Poetess! a woman who writes! A common jest!" Conscious of her growing folio at Eastwell, Ardelia resented the implied censure. What law, she asks, forbids women to think? Women, she protests, are "Education's and not Nature's fools." Ardelia had high praise from noted contemporaries and cordial appreciation at home. But these did not avail to conquer her morbid sensitiveness to criticism. She seemed to embody in herself two warring tendencies, a demand for complete intellectual freedom and the author's inevitable desire to spread his wares abroad, with the shrinking modesty of the lady to whom any sort of publicity was hateful.

The "Matchless Orinda," Lady Winchilsea tells us, was the model on whom, from her early girlhood she formed herself. The first verses she wrote were in honor of Orinda. By Orinda's example she justified the efforts and aims of her own muse, but she is in no sense a copyist. It was Orinda's fame as a noted and virtuous woman poet that inspired her rather than any close study of Orinda's work. Lady Winchilsea, in that small portion of her work on which her fame rests, is very delicately and truly original. Her spirit reacted against court life as definitely as did Anne Killigrew's, but she found no satisfaction in satiric comment. She shrank from any sort of contest. She argued and protested only when pushed to the wall. She was shy and easily intimidated, and her best work does not come from the heat of conflict or from bitterness of spirit. She is essentially contemplative. The poems on which her fame rests blossomed out quietly, exquisitely, under the gentle stimulus of a happy home life in the midst of lovely natural surroundings. She is typically a lady of letters because, without the spur of necessity, urged on by no popular applause, she yet, for more than thirty years, made the reading of books and the writing of books the central occupation of her life.

The Honorable Mrs. Monck (d. 1715)

The honorable Mrs. Monck[212] was the daughter of Lord Molesworth, a nobleman of Ireland. Mr. Ballard says of her learning: "She, purely by force of her own natural genius, acquired a perfect knowledge of the Latin, Italian and Spanish tongues: and by a constant reading of the finest authors in those languages, became so great a mistress of the art of poetry, that she wrote many poems for her own diversion." In 1716, after her death, Lord Molesworth published her poems under the title Marinda. Poems and Translations on Several Occasions. In his dedication to Caroline, the Princess of Wales, he says that the book represents the works of the leisure hours of a young gentlewoman in a remote country solitude, with no assistance but that of a good library, and with the daily care of a large family on her hands. In commending her character he says, "I loved her more because she deserved it, than because she was mine." Various slight poems show Marinda's knowledge of Italian and Spanish. Better than all these are two cleverly turned epigrams on "a lady of pleasure," and some affecting farewell lines written in her last sickness to her husband. Mrs. Monck's repute for learning comes largely by hearsay, her printed memorials are slight and unimportant, but she nevertheless gives an impression, elusive but real, of a most interesting personality.

Martha, Lady Giffard (1639-1722)

Lady Giffard was Sir William Temple's sister. She was twelve years younger than Dorothy. After her marriage and almost immediate widowhood, in 1661, she made her home with the Temples. Her Life and Correspondence has been published by Mrs. Longe as a sequel to the Letters of Dorothy Osborne. The volume contains letters from Lady Chesterfield, from Lady Sunderland ("Saccharissa"), and others, to Lady Giffard. The letters by Lady Giffard are few in number and are all written to her niece Lady Berkeley, later Lady Portland, and belong in the years 1697-1722. These letters have none of the sparkle and humor and literary charm of Dorothy's. But we get indications that Lady Giffard was a woman of intellectual interests. We find her reading Turkish history daytimes with recourse to Virgil, "as less exacting," for evenings. She knew Spanish and French, and one of the specific items in her will is a bequest of the books she had collected in these two languages.

Sarah Byng, Mrs. Osborne (1693-1775)

A third series of letters, published under the title Political and Social Letters of a Lady of the Eighteenth Century, though belonging later in the century, may be brought in here because they carry on the series of Osborne letters. Sarah Byng, the daughter of Admiral Byng, Viscount Torrington, married, in 1710, John Osborne of Chicksands Priory, the old home of Dorothy and the place from which she wrote most of her letters. Mr. John Osborne was Dorothy's grand-nephew. He died in 1719 and his father in 1720, leaving to Sarah Osborne an infant son, Danvers, the heir to the title and a heavily burdened estate. Her letters fall in several series, the first set from 1721 to 1739 being to her brother George on business matters concerning the property. Most interesting are the letters to Danvers from 1733 to 1751. When he came of age in 1736 she was able to turn over to him an unincumbered estate, and on his marriage in 1740 she superintended the establishment of the new household at Chicksands. A third set of letters has to do with the sentence and execution of her brother Admiral Byng, in 1757. Through the death of the wife of Danvers in 1743 and the death of Danvers in 1750 Mrs. Osborne was left with two grandsons to bring up, and her last letters are to John, one of these grandsons, who was traveling in Holland.

Through two generations Mrs. Osborne bore heavy administrative and financial burdens. She was both father and mother to her son, and then to her grandsons. And she was left single-handed to conduct the defense of her brother Admiral Byng. It is not strange that the letters are frequently hurried and harassed in tone. She is constantly vexed and baffled because, as a woman, she cannot conduct affairs directly. Some man must be her intermediary. She lays plans, foresees difficulties, writes explicit directions, and then she must urge and cajole her representative to due interest and prompt action. The especial interest in her letters is their abundant and exact account of social life and especially of domestic economy. Energetic, courageous, resourceful, keenly observant, and with a clear head for business, Mrs. Osborne shows herself to be. Perhaps if we had her letters before the burdens of life fell so heavily upon her we might find some hint of the charm in Dorothy's letters, for even Dorothy's letters after marriage became "tame and flat to what was before." As it is, Mrs. Osborne's letters are valuable for scattered social detail, not for any permanent charm of expression.

Elizabeth Singer, Mrs. Rowe (1674-1737)

Mr. Walter Singer, a dissenting minister of Frome, was early left a widower with three daughters. Two of these daughters showed while still young exceptionally good minds and a natural interest in study. One daughter, who died at nineteen, was devoted to medicine and collected books on that subject. Elizabeth preferred drawing and poetry. She began drawing when her fingers could hardly hold the pencil, and she squeezed out the juices of plants to make colors. Her father furnished her an excellent master, and she attained sufficient skill so that throughout her life her work was highly prized by her friends. She also loved music "to excess." But poetry was her chief delight. She began writing at twelve, and by the time she was twenty-two she had on hand a store of verse so pleasing to her friends that they insisted on its publication, and there accordingly appeared a thin little volume in 1696 under the title Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Philomela. The "Preface to the Reader," by one Elizabeth Johnson, is another of many contemporary indications of feminine irritation at the limitations imposed upon them. Miss Johnson allows "Mankind the Brutal Advantages of Strength," but when they "wou'd Monopolize Sence too, when neither that, nor Learning, nor so much as Wit" is granted the women, they are forced to protest against such "notorious Violations on the Liberties of Free-born English Women." "This makes the Meekest Worm amongst us all, ready to turn agen when we are thus trampled on; But alas! What can we do to Right our selves? stingless and harmless as we are, we can only Kiss the Foot that hurts us." But it sometimes pleases Heaven to succor a distressed people by sending them some bright genius, "an Epaminondas, a Timoleon, a Nassaw." "Nor is our Defenceless Sex forgotten—we have not only Banduca's and Zenobia's, but Sappho's, and Behn's, and Schurman's, and Orinda's, who have humbled the most haughty of our Antagonists, and made 'em do Homage to our Wit, as well as our Beauty." Miss Singer's consent to the publication of this volume was gained only by a promise of strict anonymity, and the "Philomela," then chosen as a pen-name through a naïve adaptation of "Singer," became her permanent appellation.

One interesting fact with regard to these early poems is the indication we have of a kind of poetical commerce maintained among the members of a group of persons similarly inclined to verse. Philomela writes a Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk which she sends to "The Athenians" and they respond with a poem beginning,

We yield! we yield! the Palm, bright Maid! be thine!

She sends a Poetical Question to the Athenians and gets a long answer. The Vanity of the World and The Wish are likewise addressed to the Athenians and have similar responses. In a Pindarick to the Athenian Society she brings as "Zealous Tribute," "The early products of a Female muse," praising especially their piety and heroic sentiments and the courage with which they have lashed the darling vices of the times.

A friendship so exalted and immense,

A female breast did ne'er before commence.

A little poem in humorous vein, To one that persuades me to leave the Muses, gives some account of her school-days. "I fairly bid the Boarding Schools farewell," "Old Governess farewell with all my heart," are lines indicative of her attitude.

Spite of her heart, Old Puss shall damn no more

Great Sedley's Plays, and never look 'em o're;

Affront my Novels, no, nor in a Rage,

Force Dryden's lofty Products from the Stage,

Whilst all the rest of the melodious crew,

With the whole System of Athenians too,

For Study's sake out of the Window flew.

But I, to Church, shall fill her Train no more,

And walk as if I sojurn'd by the hour.

In like vein she bids adieu to "dancing days," singing lessons, Japan work, and even her "esteemed Pencil," and vows to give herself to poetry. And true it is that the rest of her life is mainly of literary and pious significance. When young her beauty and charm had resulted in "a train of lovers," but no one of them, not even Mr. Prior, the poet, could lure her from her serene solitude—possibly because she was "destined by heaven for the possession of another gentleman." At any rate, she went smoothly on with her chosen literary life till she was thirty-six, when she married Mr. Thomas Rowe, thirteen years younger than herself, but of like tastes and himself an author. Their extraordinarily happy life together was brought to a close by his death in 1715, and, after this five years of happiness, she spent the twenty-seven years of her widowhood in a stricter solitude, a more absorbed religious communion, a completer devotion to literary pursuits, than before her marriage. Her essays, her poems, her letters, were the events of her life. She had early come to know the family of Lord Weymouth at Longleate. Mr. Thynne had taught her French and Italian; various members of the family and various family events were celebrated in her verse. She was on most intimate terms with the Countess of Hertford and corresponded with her for many years. Over a hundred of her letters to the Countess were published in The Works of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe and Mr. Thomas Rowe, and though they make dull and monotonous reading now were highly esteemed at the time. In fact, the modest and anonymous Philomela had great eighteenth-century vogue. She had the friendship of many in the great world, she was abundantly praised by poets and divines, and her works went through numerous editions. Her husband said that she combined the fire and passion of Aphra Behn with the chaste purity of Mrs. Katherine Philips. But Astræa's passion underwent some strange alchemy when it was transmuted into Philomela's religious ecstasy. Orinda's purity was fatal to the combination. Yet Mrs. Rowe's "divine transports" have—Mr. Watts admits it—sometimes a soft and passionate sound, even an amorous note, capable of misinterpretation, but evidently reminiscent of the Songs of Solomon, beloved of her youth. It was not an age for enthusiasms and ecstasies. That her "flights" were so popular may possibly be explained by the fact that through them all she was curiously prosaic and intellectually commonplace.