Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/122

 cxviii INTRODUCTION ���This sense of injustice, this self-doubt and unrest, are the fit background for Ardelia's one confessedly satirical poem, Ardelia's Answer to Ephelia. It is a clever piece of work, vigorous, racy, colloquial. The portraits of the London beau and belle show that in the beautiful and witty maid of honor there had lurked a "chiel" whose note-taking was minute, keen, and even contemptuous. Ardelia's Almeria is the London woman of fashion in 1690, but, by unmistaka- ble traits of family likeness, she betrays her kinship with heroines of a later date. She has not, to be sure, the bewildering fascination of Congreve's Millamant, nor the dazzling beauty of Pope's Belinda, but whatever in these ladies was vain, pert, flippant, and frivolous found its well- developed prototype in Almeria. She was not a whit behind Belinda, in devotion to flounces, furbelows, and feathered gowns, and in the ecstacy with which she regarded her toilet-table, and she excelled Addison's Leonora in her energetic pursuit of gewgaws and rare china. She had, furthermore, what these other fair dames had not, a carping, envious spirit, an eye keen to see all failings but her own, a tongue fluent in evil-minded gossip. Lady Winchilsea does not regard female foibles with amused tolerance. The severity of the portrait she draws does not belie her feeling. To her the Almerias of life were utterly distasteful, an insult to all true womanhood, and not to be laughed at, but scourged. �There are other slight pictures of women much in the spirit of this portrait of Almeria. A Pastoral Dialogue, presents two ladies, one young, vain, eager in pursuit of masculine admiration, the other old, vain, jealous, eager to recount past triumphs. The sketches of the artful coquette and the imperious wife in The Spleen read like studies for the Rape of the Lock, and A dam Pos'd would surely do as a text for Pope's " Most women have no characters at all." ��� �