Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/45

 INTRODUCTION xli ������Ardelia's personal poems do not bear the stamp of con- ventional eulogy. In an interchange of formal literary compliments she could be as verbose and vapid as the law governing such effusions seemed to demand. But poems written to people for whom she had a personal friendship are quite different in tone. They strike a modern reader as having a good deal of what Dr. Johnson would call "encomiastic fervor," but they likewise have the stamp of genuineness. These eulogies are Ardelia's deliberate esti- mates of the friends she praises. The total effect of her rather prolific and almost wearisomely minute personal poems is to introduce us to a company of sweet-spirited, quick- witted, beautiful, and virtuous women ; to a company of men patriotic, well educated, of high breeding, refined manners, and cultivated tastes. It is worth a moment's pause to note the marked contrast between the social life thus indicated and that presented by contemporary writers, such as Pope, Swift, or Prior. Certainly no Jeremy Collier would have been needed had all the aristocracy been such as Ardelia portrays. Either she had a gift for eliciting and seeing only the best in her friends, or she decisively rejected all who were not of the best; or, the more probable hypothesis, her pictures of Lord Thanet and Viscount Thynne and Sir William Twysden, of Arminda and Cleone, and Serena, and Ephelia, and Utresia, and the rest of the goodly squires and dames, as truthfully represent the times as Pope's Chloes and Atossas and Sapphos, his Bufos and Bubos and Lord Fannys. Ardelia merely brings into the light a typical group of the best portion of the English aristocracy of her day. �Life at Eastwell was further varied by visits to different watering-places, and by winters in London. Ardelia's town- house was in Cleveland Row, a short street adjacent to St. James's palace. Charles Jervas, the artist who painted a ��� �