Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/64

 Ix INTRODUCTION ���lady, the great scholar that nobody can understand." Her lover tells her JEsop's fable of the nightingale that tried to imitate a linnet, and adds : �From that day forth she chang'd her note, She spoil'd her voice, she strain'd her throat ; She did as learned women do, �Till everything �That heard her sing Would run away from her as I from you. �Wright's play was revived at Lincoln's Inn Fields in January, 1721, in order to anticipate Gibber's Refusal, like- wise an adaptation of the Femmes Savantes, which appeared at Drury Lane the next month. In the twenty-eight years between Wright's first production of The Female Virtuosos and Gibber's The Refusal, the learned woman is a not infre- quent comic character, and she is often given pungency by traits drawn from some well-known original. Mrs. Manley in The Lost Lover (1696) even ventured to name her "affected poetess," Orinda, the pseudonym under which Mrs. Catherine Phillips had subdued the world. Female Wits: or the Triumvirate of Poets at Rehearsal, by W. M. (1697) made prompt use of three ladies who had recently made their lite- rary debut. Calista was Catherine Trotter, then but eighteen years of age, and the author of but a single poor tragedy, Agnes de Castro. She was treated more lightly than the others, and was merely " bantered for pretending to under- stand Greek and to set herself up for a critic." The hero- ine, Marsilia, was Mrs. Manley, whose tragedy, The Royal Mischief, had appeared in 1696 and is the drama sup- posed to be in rehearsal by the players. Mrs. Pix, whose portly figure, good nature, and love for wine were well known, appeared as Mrs. Wellfed, "a fat female author, a good, sociable, well-natured companion that will not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers in a hand." ��� �