# The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
Lady Winchilsea was born in 1661 and died in 1720. Her poems were written after 1685. During the period from 1685 to 1720 she takes rank as a minor writer in all the popular literary forms except comedy. Love songs, sacred songs, pindarics, satires, epistles, fables, translations, tragedies, verse criticism, and one prose critical essay, come within the compass of her works. Her poems are frequently commonplace in substance and even more frequently crude in form. Only now and then does she reach an excellence that would make them of importance apart from their place in literary history. Yet, taken as a whole, her work proves to be of unusual interest. This is due, in part, to the social environment and the literary associations of which the poems give so detailed and clever a picture, and in part to Lady Winchilsea's own personality, as revealed in her work. But the chief elements of interest arise from the fact that she was a heretic in her own day, a protestant, both consciously and unconsciously, against the religious, social, and literary canons then in vogue; and from the further fact that some of her heresies became the orthodox faith of later generations. Her education and her literary activities fall entirely within the compass of the classical period, but her poems show romantic tastes unparalleled in her own day, and not afterward so highly developed before Cowper. She was hardly strong enough to be counted one of the influences in bringing about changes in taste, but she distinctly foreshadows such changes, and it is on her delicate originality and independence of judgment that her claim to literary recognition must rest.
I
SKETCH OF LADY WINCHILSEA'S LIFE
Anne Kingsmill was descended from a very ancient Hampshire family. AncestryThis family, whose original name was Castelayne, resided at Basingstoke from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. One of its members, for a personal service done to King John, had the grant of the Royal Mill at Basingstoke, and he took thereafter the name of Kingsmuln. Early in the reign of Edward I. the mill was alienated by Hugh de Kingsmuln, but the name was retained. During succeeding generations the family held a position of importance in Hants. It was at the house of Richard Kyngesmylle, bailiff of Basingstoke, that Catherine of Aragon and her suite were entertained for a night on her way to be married to Prince Arthur. Richard's son, Sir John Kingsmill, was judge of the common pleas, and one of the feoffees in the will of Henry VII. His son, Sir John Kingsmill, was high sheriff of Hants and purchased from the crown various manors, among them that of Sydmonton, with which this branch of the family is afterward associated. Of the seventeen children of this Sir John several were of high distinction. Thomas was professor of Hebrew at Oxford; Richard was attorney at the court of wards under Elizabeth; Sir George, judge of the common pleas, married a direct descendant of Edward I. by Eleanor his wife. One daughter married Sir James Pilkington, Bishop of Durham, and another married Richard Cooper, ancestor to the first Earl of Shaftesbury. The Constance Kingsmill who married the son of Sir Thomas Lucy, the supposed original of Shakespeare's "Justice Shallow," was probably a niece of this Sir John. A cousin, William Kingsmill, was the last prior of St. Swithun's Priory, Win​chester, and the first dean of Winchester Cathedral.His initials, "W. K.," and the Kingsmill arms, are carved on the oak stalls of the choir. Anne's great grandfather, who was high sheriff under James I. and Elizabeth, was esteemed "the wisest gentleman of his country." Her father, Sir William Kingsmill, married Anne Haselwood, one of the nine children of Sir Anthony Haselwood and Elizabeth Wilmer, of Maidwell, Northamptonshire. Anne Haselwood's brother, Sir William Haselwood, succeeded his father in 1660. His estate that year was rated at £3,000 per annum. His daughter Elizabeth, "whose excellent character would fill a volume," became in 1685 the third wife of Viscount Hatton of Kirby. Another daughter, Penelope, was the first wife of Sir Henry Seymour, alias Portman, of OrchardPortman, in Somersetshire. Anne Haselwood's sisters, Catherine and Elizabeth, married, respectively, Sir Thomas Cave and Sir William Langham. It will thus be seen that through both father and mother Anne Kingsmill was related to families of high repute.
Sir William Kingsmill and his wife Anne had three children, William, Bridget, and Anne. Sir William died when Anne, who was born in April, 1661, was The Familybut five months old. In his will, after solemnly "bequeathing his soul to his Saviour Jesus Christ through whose merits he hopes to join the Saints and Angels, and his body to the dust whence it came," he shows his confidence in his "Ladie and loving wife" by making her his sole executrix during the minority of his son, William, then a child of two or three years, to whom the estates were bequeathed. Provision was likewise made for his daughters, a sum of £2000 being set aside to be invested for Bridget and paid to her with all the interest accruing therefrom on her twenty-first birthday or on her marriage. A sum of £1500 was similarly set apart as Anne's portion. The ​authority vested in the wife was to remain in force during her widowhood or her after-marriage "to any man whatsoever if so it should come to pass according to her good will and pleasure." That it did so come to pass, and that with almost indecorous promptitude, is shown by the marriage license issued in October, 1662, to "Sir Thomas Ogle, Kt., of Wickin, in Barewell, Co. Suffolk, Bach$^r$, 24, and Dame Anne Kingsmill of Sydmonton, Co. South$^{ton}$, widow, above 30." The only child of this second marriage was Dorothy Ogle, born in 1663. In 1664 the mother died, leaving four children under seven years of age. In her will she says: "Out of the assurance I have of the prudent love and care of my dear husband, Sir Thomas Ogle, I doe wholly give and bequeath to him all my possessions, and I doe hereby wholly give, assign, remit and bequeath the education and government of all my children unto the said Sir Thomas Ogle, to be brought up in the fear of God and good nurture according to their quality, as he in his discretion shall think fit." In what way the young widower fulfilled this momentous trust must, unfortunately, be left largely to the imagination. Beyond the fact that he became Major of H. M. Holland Regiment in 1665, we have no record of him except that he died in 1671. His daughter Dorothy was left as the ward of Sir Richard Campion (or Champion), but there is no statement as to the disposition made of the other children. It would perhaps be most natural to suppose that they would go to Sir William Haselwood, their mother's brother, and their intimacy with his daughter Elizabeth would lend color to that supposition. But wherever they were, Anne and Bridget, if we may judge by a few letters preserved among the Hatton MSS. in the British Museum, received a more thorough education than Dorothy. Bridget's letters are smooth, formal, high-bred and tolerably correct, while Dorothy's orthography and ​sentence structure follow no law more imperative than her immediate whim. But whether the sisters were educated together or not, there was always a close bond between Anne and Dorothy. In a poem written to Dorothy from Kirby in 1688 Anne dwells with eager affection on the "lost pleasures" of their former companionship, and demands that time shall pay back the days and hours of their separation. Their "soft endearing life" together makes her think of Heaven as the place when they shall learn new mysteries of love. "Teresa," as Dorothy is poetically called, also appears in the Dialogue between Teresa and Ardelia, as the wisest and most loving counsellor of the unhappy Ardelia. Dorothy was maid of honor to the Princess of Denmark, and died unmarried at the age of twentynine. The original draft of her will is among the Hatton manuscripts and is worth quoting in full:
In the name of God Amen I Dorothy Ogle of Maidwell in ye County of Northton, spinster for the settling of my temporall estate Doe make this my last will & testament in manner following first I give & bequeathe to ye Right Hon$^{ble}$ the Lord Viscount Hatton his Ladyes picture then I give unto ye Lady Hatton my bible and common prayer booke then I give to my cozen M$^{rs}$ Elizabeth Hatton my tea table dishes and gilt spoones then I give to my sister Bridget Kingsmill my bed then I give to my sister ffinch my cabinet and 5 yards of new-point. then I give unto my serv$^t$ Mary Rice all the residue of my books, my watch & all my wairing Apparell [three words undecipherable] dresing glasse & Boxes and all the rest & residue of my Goods, Chattells & personall estate what soever I give and bequeath to the aforesaid Lady Viscountess Hatton who I doe hereby ordaine & make the sole executrix of this my last will and testament In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand & seale this eight day of Aug$^t$ 1692.
Sealed and published by ye above named
​xxii INTRODUCTION ���Dorothy Ogle to be her last will and testament in ye presence of us; and by us subscribed in ye presence of ye testator. Jere Bellyrout �John Hatton my mind and desire �his mark is that my cozen M rs �Will A Dawson Portman have my Shag- �green tooth-pick case in remembrance of me. �Of "sister bidy," as Dorothy called her, we know practically nothing except that she died unmarried in 1719-20. Wil- liam was knighted and married as soon as he attained his majority. His relation to his sisters does not seem to have �been close. In a codicil to his will he left Anne and � �Bridget 100 each, but his great ambition was to bequeath his estates so that they would remain under the Kingsmill name. He died in 1698 leaving a son of four who lived to the age of eighty-one unmarried. The estate, which was a large one, was apparently managed by Anne's husband, in whose note-book are many records of accounts paid for " my nephew Kingsmill," even the house servants receiving their wages through Mr. Finch. At the death of this nephew, the last male heir, the estates devolved upon a granddaughter whose husband took the name of Kingsmill. His nephew, the distinguished Admiral Sir Robert Kingsmill, a friend of Nelson, succeeded to the estates in 1805. �In 1683 we find Anne Kingsmill as one of the six maids of honor of Mary of Modena. G-regario Leti, historio- As Maid of grapher to Charles II., gives the list of the Honor ladies who made up the household of the �duchess in that year. First, there was Penelope O'Brien, Countess of Peterborough, who spoke French well, drew a salary of 1600 crowns, and had been with the duchess since her marriage. A more exciting personality was Susanna Armine, the famous Lady Belasyse, who, coming to court as a very young widow in 1670, had so attracted James by her ��� � ​wit, gayety, and remarkable powers of mind that he had "honorably wooed her for his wife." Of Lady Belasyse Mary of Modena never felt the slightest jealousy. It was Catharine Sedley, the maid of honor drawing the highest salary, intrepid, brilliant, conscious of her power over James, and unscrupulous in her use of it, who roused all the fierce antagonism in the nature of the Italian wife, and brought discord into the court circle. Of the other maids of honor Anne Killigrew was the most famous. She died of smallpox in her twenty-fifth year. But she had already shown superior ability in both poetry and painting. She was a pupil of Lely and her royal master and mistress sat to her for their portraits. If we may trust Dryden's Ode to Mistress Anne Killigrew, her pencil was also skilled in the representation of landscapes. Dryden was her master in poetry, and she was not a pupil of whom he needed to be ashamed. The thin volume of her published verse shows a vigor and a bitterness not to be looked for in a maid of honor. There is no hint of interest in nature, no tenderness, no lightness, almost no beauty or grace. The poems are marked instead by a crude virility. They are apparently genuine in their Carlylean scorn of fools, and of men who will expose themselves to hostile arms, or give themselves to "toylsome study" "all for the praise of Fools." "O famisht soul," she exclaims, "which such thin food can feed." She hates war, but she shows admiration for strength and daring, and she scorns weakness. There is in her poems no contemplative religious spirit, but there is a stern morality, and an emphatic recognition of reason as man's supreme guide. There would seem to be valid reasons in the law of affinities for a warm friendship between the two Annes. They were both, Miss Strickland says, "much beloved by her [Mary of Modena], were ladies of irreproachable virtue, members of the Church of ​England, and alike distinguished for moral worth and literary attainments." But if such a friendship did exist there is no hint of it in the poetry of either. Their minds were stretched to a contemplation of the progress of man through the "Inextricable Mazes of Life to his probable final Ruine," and they could not turn the uncertain and difficult stream of their verse into merely domestic or friendly channels. Both were, however, ardently devoted to Mary Beatrice, and it is not strange that the young, unhappy duchess, "so innocently bred," so religiously inclined, found in them most congenial companionship. The two Annes vied with each other in their scorn of vice and frivolity, and their association with their blameless mistress creates at once in the midst of the stifling court life of Charles II.'s day a little oasis of moral purity, and of spiritual and intellectual aspiration. To the court in general, Miss Strickland adds, Anne Kingsmill was well-known as the beautiful and witty maid of honor.
In her youthful days Anne had looked forward to life and recognition at court as "an earthly paradise," but her disappointment there had been intense. Marriage to Mr. FinchAlmost her only unquestioned source of happiness, aside from her love for her royal mistress, was her acquaintance with Mr. Heneage Finch. Ardelia had early declared hostility to love, "however painted o'er and seeming soft" his addresses might be, but she was at last forced to admit that Mr. Finch's constant passion had found the way "to win a stubborn and ungrateful heart." Mr. Finch was at that time a commoner with but a remote chance of an earldom, but as the oldest living son of Lord Winchilsea, and the uncle of Charles, the heir to the title, he was treated with consideration in court circles. He had been bred to arms, and was at this time captain of the halbardiers of the Duke of York, and likewise gentleman of the ​bedchamber. But though brought up to arms and forced by circumstances into public life, not Anne Kingsmill herself had a more genuine love for studious retirement than possessed the mind of this captain and courtier. Doubtless no dignity of these days was more prized by him than the D. C. L. bestowed upon him by Oxford when he went thither with James, May 22, 1683.
How long Anne's stubborn heart resisted Mr. Finch's constancy cannot be definitely told, but the marriage license reads as follows:
14 May, 1684. Appeared personally Collonell Heneage Finch of Eastwell in ye County of Kent, Batchelor, aged ab. 27 years, and alleadged that he intends to marry with Madam Anne Kingsmill of ye Parish of St. Martins in ye fields in ye county of Midd'l a spinster aged ab. 18 years at her own disposal he not knowing any lawful let or impediment to hinder ye said intended marriage of ye truth of which he made oath and prayed a Lycence for them to be married in the Chapple of St. James in ye parish of St. Martin in ye ffields after.
The "spinster ab. 18 years" is a delicious bit of coquetry, a charming subjugation of the independent maid of honor to the prejudices of her day. She was certainly twenty-two. A relentless cordon of dates makes escape impossible. But who can censure the smooth little "about" which let Anne into the paradise of eighteen, if he but recalls the fact that in her day and circle, from fourteen to eighteen were the marriageable ages, that to be twenty-one was to rank as "ancient," while to be twenty-three was to be off the stage? Anne's mother had indulged in a like evasive phrase, when, in her second wedding license, she put herself on record as "above thirty." The marriage probably took place on the following day, a day commemorated thirty-nine years later in Lord Winchilsea's private journal by the simple entry, "May 15, 1684. Most blessed day." And though succeeding years held much in the way ​of deprivation and anxiety and grief, this marriage was the beginning of Anne Finch's real and permanent happiness.
Miss Strickland speaks of Mrs. Finch as "a favorite Maid of Honour of the Queen." Domestic HappinessThis is, however, a mistake. On the occasion of Anne's marriage she left the service of Mary of Modena. But Mr. Finch was still in the retinue of the Duke of York, and Mr. and Mrs. Finch therefore lived in Westminster. It was the preference of both that they should order their lives in as simple and retired a fashion as court demands would permit. Ardelia's poetic aspirations had been no secret to Mr. Finch in her maid of honor days, and now in the independency and privacy of their own home he not only indulged her verse, but even now and then "requir'd her rhymes." When he went away for the day he liked to have a poem waiting for him at night, and he enjoyed versified letters. Ardelia had come into a new freedom. She and her husband were most unfashionably happy together. She was not ashamed to declare that all her hopes and joys were bound in him. Occasional brief separations caused genuine grief to both of them. When Mrs. Finch was at Tunbridge Wells for the waters in the summer of 1685, her husband's loneliness made him urge her to shorten her stay. Only the first stanza of her answer is decipherable in the manuscript, but that in its simplicity and directness of statement shows something of the feeling between them:
At least no such compromising request had been received at the sacred Mount "since Grizzel's Days," and it would have gone hard with Ardelia's poem had she not luckily found in her own breast so many tender memories that the aid of the Nine was superfluous. Domestic felicity of this idyllic sort was certainly not in harmony with the prevailing court standards. This age had defined courtship as a "witty prologue to a dull play;" marriage was but "an ecclesiastical mouse-trap," and all marriage was said "to end in repentance;" while the accepted similes for a wife were "a clog," "a tether-stake," "a yoke," "a galling load." In such a state of public opinion a home-life so unaffectedly good, so frankly happy, as that of this court-bred lady and gentleman was of itself a mark of distinction.
With the accession to the throne of James in February, 1685, Mr. Finch became more than ever occupied with public affairs. He was colonel in the army; he was groom of the bedchamber to the king; he was three years deputy lieutenant for the county of Kent; and he sat one year as member of parliament for Hythe. During this period Mr. and Mrs. Finch lived in London with but occasional short visits in other parts of England. A brief stay in Somersetshire in 1688 (probably in the summer) had, as its outcome, the following statement made by Lord Winchilsea August 12, 1722:
This "statement" shows the eagerness with which Mr. and Mrs. Finch followed up whatever pertained to the fame or fortunes of the Stuarts. The revolution was therefore to them a momentous and lamentable event as a result of which the course of their lives was suddenly and violently changed. So closely, indeed had they identified themselves with the Stuart interests that Mr. Finch found it impossible to take the vows of allegiance to the new monarch.
The first two or three years after the revolution, accordingly, were trying ones. During these years we find Anne in various places of temporary refuge, but with no fixed home. In December, 1688, immediately after the flight of James, she went to Kirby and spent some time with her cousin Elizabeth, the Viscountess Hatton. In July, 1689, she was at Eastwell on a visit. At some date near this she was at Godmersham, where she wrote Aristomenes. Her retirement to Wye college belongs somewhere in this period. The succor offered by Lady Thanet to Ardelia in her hour of sorest need may indicate that for a time Hothfield was her refuge. At any rate there was quite a prolonged period during which Mr. and Mrs. Finch felt great anxiety concerning their "much-diminished bread" and their possible future place of abode. Just when they were finally domiciled at Eastwell is a little uncertain. Ardelia says in her Preface that their removal into the solitude and security of the country was due to the "generous kindness of one who possessed the most delightful seat in it," but she does not say whether this was her husband's father or nephew. Heneage, the second earl, died in September, 1689, so the invitation may have come from him, and the poem of July, 1689, may mark the beginning of the permanent Eastwell sojourn. But this is unlikely. ​INTRODUCTION xxix ������All the further references to the earl in this preface seem consistent with her later very warm friendship for the young earl, Charles, and. inconsistent with other references to her husband's father. Moreover, a poem to Lady Worsley, written after 1690, speaks as if Anne were still in some place of retirement with the future not yet determined upon. It was almost certainly Charles, the third earl, who invited them to make their home at Eastwell. �For Anne and her husband the change was complete. There were practically no ties that bound the family to the new court, for although the second earl, in spite of the long and devoted services of his house to the Stuart cause, had at last declared in favor of William and Mary, and at the revolution had been counted of so much importance that his public offices had been renewed, his early death had broken the only possible link between his family and the reigning powers. Charles was too young for statecraft, while Heneage Finch, Anne's husband, as a non-juror, could have no part in public affairs. This entire severance from court activities could not, however, have been a matter of un- mixed grief to Ardelia and her husband. To be together on this beautiful estate would, on the contrary, have been cause for unmixed joy had it not been for the fate of their royal master and mistress. Their loyalty to the Stuarts was no ephemeral passion, and nearly all the poems of this period are dominated by a melancholy born of the disasters of that unhappy house. Ardelia writes concerning the composition of Aristomenes: �I must acknowledge, yt the giving some interruptions to those melancholy thoughts, which possesst me, not only for my own, but much more for the misfortunes of those to whom I owe all imagin- able duty, and gratitude, was so great a benefit, that I have reason to be satisfied with the undertaking, be the performance never so inconsiderable. And, indeed, an absolute solitude (which often was my lott) under such dejection of mind, could not have been ��� � ​xxx INTRODUCTION ���supported, had I indulged myself (as was too natural to me) only in the contemplation of present and real afflictions, which I hope will plead my excuse, for turning them for relief, upon such as were imaginary, and relating to persons no more in being. �These words fairly describe the state of mind in which many of the early poems were composed. The Petition for an Absolute Retreat, A Fragment, and Lines to Lady Worsley recount Ardelia's own unhappiness. The Change, which for its gentleness and dignity, for its pathetic sweet- ness, is one of her most charming poems, is a little allegory of the selfishness and insincerity of courtiers. The obscured sun no longer followed by the flowers it had brought into being, the dried-up river deserted by the fish it had nour- ished, the ruined mansion forsaken by the guests it had cherished, are evidently but successive pictures of the dis- crowned king. The Losse commemorates the breaking of some close personal tie. Could the Urania of the poem be possibly Mary of Modena herself ? �Urania is no more, to me she is no more, �All these combined can ne'er that loss deplore. �But whoever the heroine, the genuineness of the grief cannot be questioned, a genuineness not lessened by the Shelley-like lament that grief itself is mortal. The verses On the Death of King James bring to an end the series of poems especially marked by the bitterness of the revolution. It is a long, heavy poem, in parts incomplete and crude, but it is of distinct value as showing James II. and Mary of Modena from the point of view of one of their own house- hold. �This last poem was not written till 1701, and in spite of the indignant sorrow and rebuke, the passionate loyalty, that flamed up anew in its many stanzas, the twelve years had already brought their gift of healing, and Ardelia had found at beautiful East well a more serene and deeply satisfying ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xxxi ������life than could have opened before her had the highest court honors been hers. �It is difficult to think of the present splendid mansion at Eastwell Park as connected in any intimate way with Arde- Eastwell ^ a - The eighteenth century house was built by �The Mansion the Italian architect, Bonomi, under the direc- tion of George Finch Hatton, the eighth Earl of Winchilsea. And that house has been remodeled and enlarged on so magnificent a scale by the present owner, Lord Gerard, as hardly to suggest the house of a century ago. Yet the house to which Mr. and Mrs. Finch went was nevertheless of excep- tional interest. It dated, in its seventeenth century form, from 1589, in which year Sir Moyle Finch obtained permis- sion from Queen Elizabeth to inclose one thousand acres and to embattle his house. The original building was of the sixteenth century, having been built by Sir Thomas Moyle in about 1544, and having come into the Finch family through the marriage of Thomas Finch, Esq., and Catherine Moyle. The wife of Sir Moyle Finch, their son, was the rich heiress of Sir Thomas Heneage. She was a woman, glad, it is true, to be assured of an appropriate local habitation, but more ambitious of a name. Nine years after the death of her husband her energetic use of the resources at her com- mand was crowned by the title of Viscountess Maidstone, and, five years later, in 1628, by that of Countess of Win- chilsea, both titles with reversion to heirs male. So that the house to which Anne came in 1690 was of interest to her not only as a fine English mansion a century old, with por- tions of it boasting an additional half century as well, but it must have had a stronger personal attraction as the home of her husband's family since the days of Catherine Moyle and Elizabeth Heneage, the heiresses to whom they owed rank and fortune. �Of Ardelia's associations with the estate itself we may ��� � ​xxxii INTRODUCTION ���speak more confidently. Yet even here reservations must be made. We must free ourselves, for instance, from the glamor of certain historical associations that date back only to the days when H. R. H. the Duke of Edinburgh, made Eastwell his home, when members of the royal family planted trees that still bear their names, when Edward VII. , then Prince of Wales, drank tea on the balcony of the beauti- ful winter-garden. We must banish, too, from our mental picture of Ardelia's home most of the luxuries, perhaps most of the conveniences of the modern estate. The electric light plant and the gas plant must give way to candles. For the present elaborate system of water-works we must substitute Mr. Finch's " darling spring " whence water was brought to the house in a cart " driven by one of the underkeepers in a green coat with a hazelbough for a whip." For the modern splendor of equipment and service we must figure to our- selves very simple domestic arrangements. The completion of the house, the building in of wide glass windows, the plotting of gardens, the fair ordering of the trees, terraces, and lawns adjacent to the house were all improvements not accomplished till ten or twelve years after Ardelia's arrival at Eastwell. �But in spite of all the enlargements and modifications and improvements made from 1700 to 1900, there are yet �large portions of the estate that must be today The Park �as they were when Ardelia first went to East- well. The following notes, taken, in substance, from the Eastwell Blue Book of the present day, give the very details urged in enthusiastic praise by earlier topographical writers : �Near the church of Boughton Aluph is the Pilgrim's Road, marked by yew trees supposed, to have been planted by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury to show^other pilgrims the way. Near Timber Gate Lodge is a grand avenue of beeches with large stretches of fern. In one place are twelve yew trees near together wierd in shape, colossal in proportion, hoary in antiquity. If ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xxxiii ������they could speak they would probably tell us of forest chases in the time of Alfred the Great, if not of Egbert, the first king of Eng- land, who ascended the throne in 827 We pass through �hills, slopes, undulations, and levels, which, with their ancient timber and high fern, form the very ideal of an ancestral park of the ancient noblesse. Here and there through the Park are stumps of trees that were flourishing before Duke William of Normandy �became William I. of England The ride through the woods �on a sultry day is most delightful ; the complete shelter and obscured sky, the brown carpet of dried beech -leaves and beech-husks, the startling of the deer, the voices of nature, the absence of any sight or sound to indicate that one is in a country of human beings combining to add a charm of repose and of poetic seclusion. The church of St. Cosmos and the embattled tower and beacon turret of the church are very ancient. In this churchyard is a yew, old in the time of William the Conqueror. This church stands in a lovely spot surrounded by greenery where no sound �reaches it but the voices of birds and occasional animals At �Challocks Church bottom formerly stood the straight oak which, because of its shape and colossal proportions, was worth more than 100 for the timber there was in it. A former Lord Winchilsea �refused that sum for it The Star Walk is still traceable but �much overgrown Mt. Pleasant is a circular eminence sur- rounded by ancient yew trees standing at intervals as solitary sen- tinels. From this point the view is remarkable. At our back is the wooded park with its undulations, its mansion, gardens and lake, with the tower of Eastwell church peeping up through the trees. On our left the horizon line is formed by Wye church and Wye Downs. Spread out before us are villages, parks, county seats, hop gardens, fruit gardens, orchards, cornfields, woods, plantations and meadows. In the distance we descry the coast town of Hy the, and on a clear day we may see the English channel with its passing shipping. �The majesty and dream-like loveliness of this park could not have been less in the seventeenth century. Lady Win- chilsea says of it: �And now whenever I contemplate the several beautys of this Park, allow'd to be (if not of the Universal yett) of our British World infinitely the finest, ��� � ​xxxiv INTRODUCTION ���A pleasing wonder through my fancy roves, Smooth as her lawns, and lofty as her Groves. Boundless my Genius seems, when my free sight, Finds only distant skys to stop her flight. Like mighty Denhams, then, methinks my hand, Might bid the Landskip, in strong numbers stand, Fix all its charms, with a Poetick skill, And raise its Fame above his Cooper's Hill. �This, I confess, is what in itts self itt deserves, but the unhappy difference is, that he by being a real Poet, cou'd make that place (as he sais) a Parnassus to him ; whilst I that behold a real Par- nassus here, in that lovely Hill, which in this Park bears that name, find in myself so little of the Poet, that I am still restrained from attempting a description of itt in verse, tho' the agreeableness of the subject has often prompted me most strongly to itt. �The central figure in the family circle when Mr. and Mrs. Finch went to Eastwell was, of course, Charles, the The Family y oun g ear l) then eighteen or nineteen years of at Eastwell a g 6i His s i s ter Mariamne was three years older, while his mother, Elizabeth Wyndham, a widow from his birth, was still a young woman. Charles was the grand- son of the second earl by his second wife, Mary Seymour, of whose eleven children five, at least, were still living. Of these, Frances was the wife of Viscount Thynne of Long- leat. Leopold was warden of All-Soul's College, Oxford. The sons possibly still at Eastwell were Lashley and Henry, young men between twenty-two and eighteen years of age. Two daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth, between ten and fifteen, were children of the third wife. Elizabeth Ayres, the fourth wife, was still living, and though technically the grandmother of the earl, was a young woman of twenty- eight, with a son John, of seven, who became the fifth earl, and a little daughter, Anne, of two. It is possible that not all these persons lived at Eastwell. But it was at any rate a large, a young, and a curiously complex family circle into ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xxxv ���which Heneage and Anne Finch came after the wreck of their fortunes in 1688. �That Anne was speedily at home with her husband's kin is apparent from various bits of playful verse commemorating domestic happenings, the best of these being the charmingly light and deft Lines on a Punch Bowl, addressed to her brother Lashley. But her meed of serious verse was natu- rally reserved for Charles. He was the earl; he was her generous and hospitable host; he was young, gay, hand- some; she approved of his management of Eastwell; he approved of her poetry. The ties were certainly strong. Fortunately Charles was not only knowing in all the rules of poetry, and at his pleasure capable of putting them in prac- tice, but he was also indulgent to the gentle craft of poesy when practiced by others. It was, indeed, his lordship's commendation of some lines of hers that led Ardelia to her final joyous renunciation of the vows so often and so straitly made to forego the unfeminine seductions of the pen. In the Prologue to Aristomenes we have a very pleasant picture of the shy Ardelia and the poetically inclined young earl by the good winter's fire in the drawing- room at Eastwell, while she, with outward dash and fun, but with hardly concealed inward trepidation, presents to this much-dreaded critic who had the rules of Horace at his tongue's end her "wholly tragicall" play. �The social joys of Eastwell were not, however, limited to the family. Ardelia, who says of herself, �Lad I who to my heart just bounds had sett, �Winchilsea's And in my friendship scorn'd to be coquette �Friendships Qr seem indulgent to each new Adresse, �really did, in spite of this reserve, walk in the footsteps of the Matchless Orinda in her capacity for devoted attach- ments, and were it not for the disguise of fanciful names; we should be introduced through her poems to a wide circle. ��� � ​xxxvi INTRODUCTION ���But though certain Oranias and Uranias remain unidentified, in many cases the disguise is penetrable, and sometimes the real names are used. �One group of poems shows the close relationship always maintained between Ardelia and the family of Lord Thanet, of Hothfield. Catherine Cavendish was four years younger than herself, but she was married to Lord Thanet in 1684, only a few months after the marriage of Anne Kingsmill and Mr. Finch. Inasmuch as all the poems addressed to Arminda refer to her as "my Lady Thanet," they must all date after 1684. The Inquiry After Peace, a poem inserted in a letter to Lady Thanet, and the Petition for an Absolute Retreat show that in hours of foreboding or of actual dis- aster, Ardelia's instinctive refuge was "the great Arminda." �What Nature, or refining Art, All that Fortune cou'd impart, Heaven did to Arminda send ; Then gave her for Ardelia's Friend. �The good Lord Thanet evidently agreed with Ardelia's estimate of his young wife. He outlived her for many years, but had carved on his tombstone as the most notable fact in his career that he had been married to Catherine Cavendish, and that he " believed no woman on earth would have made him so happy as she did ; " so Mr. and Mrs. Finch were not alone in their unfashionable domestic felicity. The daugh- ter, Catherine Tufton, chose Ardelia as the recipient of "the first letter that ever she writt," and she is thereupon cele- brated as the high-born Serena, fair and young. Of more interest is the probable relation between Ardelia and the second daughter, Anne Tufton, who was married in 1708-9, when she was but fifteen or sixteen, to the Earl of Salisbury. Is she then the "Salisbury" praised in the Nocturnal Rev- erie? Leigh Hunt, in Men, Women, and Books, says posi- tively, but without giving his authority, that the " Salisbury" ��� � ​of the poem is Frances Bennett, the wife of the fourth Earl of Salisbury; while Jane Williams in Literary Women of England, says, with equal positiveness and equal absence of a citation of authority, that this "Salisbury" is the Lady Anne Tufton. Wordsworth suggested that the lines in question marred the poem and should be omitted. Such a course would certainly save controversy. With no actual proof at hand, only the probabilities of the case can be stated, and these are all in favor of Anne Tufton. The comparatively late date of the poem is indicated by the fact that it appears in neither manuscript. The latest possible date for it would be 1713, the date of its publication, and the earliest possible date, if Anne Tufton is the "Salisbury," would be 1709. In these years the young countess would be between sixteen and twenty, with Lady Winchilsea twenty-two years older, a disparity of age that might tell against a close friendship between the two countesses, but would certainly be no bar to an adroit compliment from the older lady to the daughter of her dearest friend. And there is no record of any friendship with Frances Bennett.
The Thynnes of Longleat
Another family closely connected with the Finches was that of the Thynnes of Longleat. Ardelia visited often at this noble estate, and the mansion, and especially the gardens, the most splendid and costly example of the formal garden at that time in England, never failed to arouse her enthusiasm. The Thynne family, also, both collectively and individually, received their meed of eulogistic verse. The poems run along from 1690 to 1714, and show a steadfast and intimate friendship. The death of young James Thynne is made the occasion for an enumeration of the renowned ancestors of the family. Of these distinguished persons none attracted Ardelia more than "that matchless Female," the Lady Packington, who was supposed by many to be the author of The Whole Duty of Man, and who ​xxxviii INTRODUCTION ���of each Sex the two best Gifts enjoy'd, The Skill to write, the Modesty to hide. �Grace Stroud, the wife of Henry Thynne, is the Cleo'ne of the poems. Her husband is Theanor, and is always spoken of with a certain awe because of his knowledge of the fine arts. As a judge of tapestry, painting, and poetry his opin- ions seemed beyond contradiction. Ardelia must have had more than one thrill of gratified pride as she found her own poems praised from time to time by so competent a critic. When, seven years after his death, she sent her volume of poems to his daughter, the young Countess of Hertford, she rests her modest plea on the father's favor rather than on her own merits. It is interesting to see Lady Hertford, the friend in later years of Thomson, Savage, and Shenstone, begin thus early her role as patroness of letters. �Frances, the daughter of Viscount Weymouth, married Sir Robert Worsley in 1690. Lady Worsley is the " Utresia " who had " so obligingly desired Ardelia to correspond with her by Letter." Ardelia's response to the request of this petted child of fortune, beautiful in her fresh and smiling bloom, universally beloved, encompassed with present joys and rich in hope, is couched in complimentary terms that would cer- tainly stimulate Lady Worsley 's side of the correspondence. But though extravagant, the praise Ardelia gives is evidently from her heart. She speaks only what she feels. A little hint of the permanence of this friendship is found in a letter from Lady Marrow to Lady Kay, quoted on page xliv. In Ardelia's Answer to Ephelia the reference to "your large Pallace" as their "place of meeting, love and liberty," would seem definitely to affix the " Ephelia" to some one of the Longleat ladies. The date of the poem, which is about 1690-1, would still further confine the allusion to the Vis- countess Weymouth or to the Lady Worsley, and Anne's in- timacy with the latter would make her the more probable one. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xxxix ���In that case the "Ephelia" of the little poem on Friendship is doubtless also Lady Worsley. That she should be " Utre- sia," in one poem and "Ephelia" in another is no more sur- prising than that Mr. Finch should figure as both " Daph- nis " and " Flavio." Lady Worsley's daughter is celebrated in some gay little verses in honor of the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth Herbert, which must have taken place about 1709, when the bride and groom were respectively fourteen and seventeen. Cupid, having lost Elizabeth Herbert, is comforted by the thought that he may still find a suitable mate in the young Worsley, who was then fifteen, and who was married the next year to Lord Cartaret. �One of the prominent figures at Longleat at this time was Elizabeth Singer, afterward Mrs. Howe, whose pen-name was Philomela. In 1694, when a young lady of twenty, she was on intimate terms with the family, and Mr. Henry Thynne taught her Latin and Italian. A collection of her poems was published in 1696 and was much admired. The friendship between Elizabeth Singer and Lady Hertford was warm and was life-long. One would expect from the circum- stances that Ardelia and Philomela would have found much in common, but their extant letters and poems do not reveal any especial friendship. Ardelia refers once in The Miser and the Poet to the poems of Philomela, and a letter from Mrs. Rowe to Lady Hertford, in 1720, the year of Lady Winchilsea's death, written to condole with Lady Hertford �for the death of "My Lady ," may refer to Lady �Winchilsea. The letter closes: " 'Tis impertinent to reason, and against the dictates of nature, or else you might satisfy yourself with the extraordinary character she left behind her and her rest from the misfortunes of life." But this letter is indecisive, and there are no further indications of any ac- quaintance between the two poetesses. �There was also resident at Longleat the saintly Bishop ��� � ​xl INTRODUCTION ���Ken, the author of several widely-known hymns, as " Awake My Soul" and " Glory to Thee, My God, This Night." He was one of the nonjuring bishops, and at this time living in retirement under the protection of Viscount Thynne. Ardelia was much impressed by the beauty and consistency of Bishop Ken's life. She even goes so far as to say, in her poem on the hurricane of 1703, that the bishop's man- sion at Wells would never have been so scourged by the wild winds had Bishop Ken not been supplanted by Bishop Kidder. On the whole, we may safely say that Longleat was the source to Ardelia of much personal happiness, and of much in the way of poetical guidance and inspiration. �Ardelia's long, dignified, and rather heavy poem on the death of Sir William Twysden, shows how intimately she �knew him and how genuinely she admired him. �The Twysdens were also her husband's relatives, for Sir William was the great-grandson of the famous Elizabeth Heneage, the first Countess of Winchilsea. When Anne visited at the Twysden estate it must have been with an envious pleasure that she gazed upon certain heir- looms there. Sir William owned the picture of the first Lady Winchilsea and "the blew case of gold in which it is," and also a dozen of silver plates that had been given by the said Lady Winchilsea as a legacy to Sir William's grand- mother, "having the said Ladies armes on the one side and coronet of an Earle over them, and on the backside a Coro- net and over against it A. T.," the initials of the grandmother, Anne Twysden. There was also "a gold booke " and "a gold bole and cover to it belonging," which had apparently come from the same source. Sir William was learned in history, genealogies and heraldry. He was, according to Ardelia, a clear-sighted and moderate patriot; an author himself of no mean rank; and a gentleman of fine taste, high breeding, and affable manners. ������ � ​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 ��� � ​zlii INTRODUCTION ���portrait of Pope, and whose house was often Pope's head- quarters in London, lived but a short distance away, in Cleveland Court. Lady Winchilsea knew Jervas, and admired his work, especially the portrait of her friend, the lovely Mrs. Chetwynd. It was at the house of Jervas that Pope was staying when Lady Winchilsea invited him to the famous dinner which was followed by the dramatic recital destined to play so interesting a part in the relations between Pope and Ardelia. �Visits to the more noted watering-places were not infre- quent. We have seen the depression of spirit engendered by the public and private disasters incident on the revolution. But Ardelia's peace of mind was assailed by another and even more insidious foe. That "anxious Rebell," her heart, was reinforced by another enemy within the gates. She was, in fact, an unfortunate victim of the Spleen, a fashionable eighteenth century distemper, the protean woes of which had early cradled her into song. Many were her ineffectual attempts to find relief through visits to various health resorts. Of these Tunbridge Wells with its "quick spring of spirit- eous water " was the most fashionable, and its fame as a cure for the Spleen was long-lived. We find Lady Winchilsea here once in 1685 and again in 1706. �A less noted resort, but one much frequented by the gentry and lauded by medical men was, at Astrop, a small vil- lage near London. A "Learned Physician" in 1668 gave four pages to an encomium of the well dedicated to St. Rum- bald, a child which spake as soon as he was born. This well, says the Learned Physician, "openeth, astringeth, and consolidateth egregiously." It takes away " ecrementitious Humidities of the Brain .... opens the obstructions of the Liver and Spleen, cures the Flatus Hypochondriacus, and the Palpitation and Trembling of the Heart proceeding from thence It fastens the Teeth though ready to drop ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xliii ���out It comforts the Nerves, helps the Gout �strengthens broken Bones takes away the swelling �and pains of the Spleen .... and cures Aches and Cramps in any part of the body whatsoever." But even this concen- trated apothecary's shop proved unavailing in Lady Winchil- sea's case. Neither Tunbridge nor Astrop gave her the branch of healing spleenwort with which Pope's Umbriel safely penetrated to the cave of the gloomy goddess. Her poem on The Spleen is of the first-hand, naturalistic order. It has none of the glittering generalities born of vague knowl- edge. So full and accurate is its account of symptoms that it achieved prompt professional recognition. Dr. Stukeley published it in his treatise on the spleen, for the purpose, as he said, of helping out his own description. Lady Win- chilsea admits that the spleen is often counterfeited, but maintains that the real disease is of the gravest sort. The sufferer is afflicted by insomnia or by boding dreams and terrifying visions. There are successive moods of stupid discontent, wild anger, panic fear. Spleen blights the ablest minds with self-doubt. It enters the realm of religion and perplexes men with endless, foolish scruples. It fills the heart with fancied griefs. It creates an abnormal love of solitude. Various early poems, as On Grief, To Sleep, To Melancholy, express in other terms the extreme depression of spirits against which the sufferer from the spleen had to contend. Ardelia addresses Melancholy as her " old invet'- rate foe," who in spite of mirth, music, poetry and friendship, in spite even of " the Indian leaf and parch'd eastern Berry" still holds his throne in her darkened heart. In despairing surrender she exclaims: �To thee, great Monarch, I submitt, �Thy Sables and thy Cypress bring, �I own thy Pow'r, I own thee King, �Thy title in my heart is writt, �And till that breaks I ne'er shall freedom gett. ��� � ​xliv INTRODUCTION ���It is probable, however, that as the years went by her health improved. Her spirits certainly did. When she was at Tunbridge in 1706 she was sufficiently at leisure from her- self to examine into the love-making then so popular a pas- time at the Wells and to write it up with fine scorn. And she threw a playful jibe at the doctors who thought to cure the spleen with a formula. Further proof of this increased gayety of spirit is in a letter, written August 1708, from Lady Morrow to her daughter, Lady Kay: �Friday last I went to town From the Vice Chamberlain �I went to see Mrs. Finch, she ill of the spleen. Lady Worsley has painted a pretty fire-screen and presented her with; and notwith- standing her ill-natured distemper, she was very diverting Mrs. Finch I mean. �It is not certain that Ardelia ever discovered Green's famous remedy for the spleen, �Throw but a stone, the Giant dies, �but it is more than probable that the simple life at East- well, the long, entrancing walks in the park, and the peace growing out of congenial companionships and congenial occupations were better cures than Tunbridge or Astrop. �No record of Ardelia' s life at East well would be satisfac- tory without as full an account as possible of the "one from whom she was inseparable." In her description of her ideal retreat from the world the one person needed to make its charms complete was �A Partner, suited to my Mind, �Solitary, pleas'd and kind ; �Who, partially, may something see �Preferred to all the World, in me ; �Slighting, by my humble Side, �Fame and Splendour, Wealth and Pride. �Inasmuch as this was a description after the event, the lines may be counted a fairly accurate, though they are not ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xlv ���an adequate, picture of Heneage Finch in this East well life. In a poetical appeal to Dafnis written about 1700, in which Ardelia urges him to leave his usual occupations for a walk in the fields, we have incidentally a summary of the interests of this retired courtier and soldier. He follows with steady attention all the details of the campaigns in behalf of his old Master James, and the work of Vauban, Lewis's chief engineer, is minutely studied. But there are other and more peaceful interests. Mr. Finch is attracted by geographical re- search and is absorbed in the work of Nicolas and Guillaume Sanson, the French geographers. He busies himself with mathematical drawing. He particularly enjoys doing illu- minations on vellum. Against the tyranny of these pursuits Ardelia makes playful protest. The partner entirely suited to her mind should discover that reading even the softest poetry about nature could not vie with seeing nature itself, that the best "carmine and imported blew" cannot compete with the bright colors of the corn-flower and the poppy, that faery circles on the green are of more worth than the truest line compasses can draw, and that all Sanson' s facts about the universe are as naught before the joy of one perfect English day spent among the fields and groves. So eager a delight in outdoor life must have been infectious, and we can hardly imagine Dafnis insensible to Ardelia's pleadings. His interest in Eastwell, however, took another and more learned direction, that of antiquarian research. He was an enthusiastic believer, for instance, in the legend that Richard Plantagenet had served as a brick-layer at Eastwell when the house of Sir Moyle Finch was built ; that Sir Moyle, on discovering the royal workman, had granted him his wish for a palace of one room built in a field ; and that an ancient unmarked tomb in Eastwell Church covered the remains of the hapless Richard. It was through Mr. Finch that the legend first saw light. Dr. Brett related the story in a let- ��� � ​xlvi INTRODUCTION ���ter published in Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (1732), saying that he had his information from Heneage, Earl of Win- chilsea, whom he visited at Eastwell Park in 1720. An anony- mous tract, entitled The Parallel, and published in London, 1744, tells the story of Kichard, and closes with these words: �This house of Eastwell Place came afterwards into possession of the eldest Branch of the noble Family of Finch, and it is to the laudable curiosity of the late Heneage, Earl of Winchilsea, a Noble- man whose virtues threw a Shade on the age in which he lived, that we owe the several particulars I have given the Reader. They were frequently the topic of that good man's Conversation, who would sometimes show that Spot in his Park, upon which the House of old Richard stood, and which had been pulled down by the Earl's Father. " But I," said the most worthy Lord, " had it reached my Time, would sooner have pulled down that," pointing to his own House. As a testimony to the Truth of this remarkable History he was wont to produce the following Entry in the Register of the Parish Church at Eastwell : "Anno Domini 1555 Richard Plantagenet was buried the 22nd December, Anno ut supra." �Mr. Finch's antiquarian tastes and learning received early and frequent recognition. Harris, in his History of Kent, records the accidental discovery, in 1703, of a small urn of reddish earth and of the skeleton of a child, in a cutting along the wagon- way near Wye. In 1713 he writes of it : �The Report of this Discovery brought the Right Honourable Colonel Heneage Finch (now Earl of Winchilsea) whose inquisitive genius inclines him to a curious search after Antiquities, and of which he hath a nice Relish and is an excellent Judge, to come out and examine this place more narrowly which was done the same year. �The results of this investigation were all left in the hands of Lord Winchilsea. Dr. Stukeley says that during the nine years he lived in London (1717-1726) he had "the greatest intimacy with Thomas, L d Pembroke, Heneage Earl of Winchelsea, Sir Isaac Newton in short with the whole sett ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xlvii ���of learned men and Vertuoso's w h at that time abounded," and his memoirs contain numerous references to Lord Win- chilsea's antiquarian zeal and learning. �Lord Winchilsea's closest associates, besides his chaplain, Mr. Creyk, were Lord Hertford and Dr. Stukeley. They styled themselves Druids and had fanciful names, Dr. Stukeley being Chyndonax ; Lord Hertford, Segonax ; and Lord Winchilsea, Cyngetorix. Their special search was for Duro- lenum, and Lord Winchilsea enthusiastically declared that if he should be so happy as to succeed in the search he would have " O brave Cyngetorix " engraved on his tomb- stone. �Another form of antiquarian research carried on in the main by Charles, and one perhaps more in accord with Ardelia's taste, was the hunt for old books and manuscripts. In an account of Thomas Britton, the famous musical small- coal man, we have a very pleasant picture in which the Earl of Winchilsea is one of the figures : �About the beginning of this century, a passion for collecting old books and manuscripts reigned among the nobility. The chief of those who sought after them were the Duke of Devonshire, Edward, Earl of Oxford, and the Earls of Pembroke, Sunderland and Winchilsea. These persons in the winter season, on Satur- days, the Parliament not sitting on that day, were used to resort to the city, and, dividing themselves, took several routes, some to Little Britain, some to Moorfields, and others to different parts of the town, inhabited by book-sellers; there they would enquire into the several shops as they passed along for old books and man- uscripts; and sometime before noon would assemble at the shop of Christopher Bateman, a book-seller, at the corner of Ave-Maria- lane in Paternoster- row; and here they were frequently met by Bagford, and other persons engaged in the same pursuits, and a conversation always commenced on the subject of their inquiries. �And presently along would come Thomas Britton in his blue linen frock and with his sack of small coal on his back, and join them. ��� � ​xlviii INTRODUCTION ���Most of the antiquarian research of which we find definite record occurred in the years 1720-1726, or after Lady Win- chilsea's death, but inasmuch as Lord Winchilsea was elected president of the Society of Antiquaries as early as 1717, and was recognized as early as 1703 as the natural judge and custodian of antiquarian treasures found in that region, we cannot escape the conclusion that Roman roads, Roman ruins, mortuary urns, ancient brasses and coins, and worm- eaten manuscripts loomed large among the interests of this Eastwell life. �From Lord Winchilsea' s antiquarian labors and letters we get more than a hint of his character. He shows him- self capable of strong enthusiasms, and he is prompt, ener- getic, and optimistic in carrying them out. He is, withal, gay in spirit, and with a sense of humor that turns even his failures into fun. He lives an easy, genial, unambitious life. His interests are varied and dilletante. If Durolenum remains elusive, why there are still manuscripts to be illumi- nated. If the "blew and carmine" fail, the rabbit burrows still hold out possibilities in the way of urns and rings and bones. He has no occupation so strenuous or important as to interrupt the peaceful tenor of his days. �But antiquarian research was far from being his only interest. From a leather-bound, silver-clasped duodecimo copy of Rider's Almanac, on the blank pages of which Lord Winchilsea recorded important domestic incidents, we gain many suggestive hints concerning life at Eastwell. The Almanac is for 1723, but the events recorded are not merely of that year. He apparently made the little book a repository for any family dates or happenings that seemed interesting to him. The dates from 1713 to 1719 have chiefly to do with "my several Try alls in Chan- cery," and there are dates of important deeds of sale, showing that after the death of Charles there were many ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xlix ���imperative demands on the time and thought of the new earl in the way of business management. The dates of births, marriages, and deaths in the families of various friends are also carefully noted. He sets down the day he was weighed and the " 16 stone and 12 Ibs." registered by the scales. We find that a "horse-hair peruque" costs 2, 10s. Among scattered financial transactions is a list of fees headed, "Given away at Marlborough House, Aug. 18, 1723." These fees range from a guinea each to seven of the more important servants down to 2s 6d for the " Kitchin-Boy ;" and aggregate 14 6s. 6d. An interesting list of " Books which I have Subscribed for" certainly shows, in spite of the incor- rect citation of titles, some learning and a catholic taste, for it includes such volumes as "Carmina Quadragesimila;" "Recuille des Piers antique graves;" "Monfaucons Supplim, 5 vol.;" "King of Sweden's Travels;" "Cardinal Wolsey's Life;" "Querels Testament;" "Sr. Ra. Winnwood's Let- ters;" "Rev. Lewis' Isle of Thanet;" "Mr. BrevaVs Book;" and "Dr. Barwictfs Life." If any room in the present house can be definitely associated with Ardelia it must be the stately library, where are doubtless still many of the books selected by Anne Finch and her husband, and perhaps also some of those illuminated by him. �Along with notes on books are jottings of another sort, as a record of the "large ripe scarlet strawberry s from Brook Gar- den," presented to Mr. Finch, October 8 ; or the account of "a Buck which, having been almost killed by another Buck in the Park, had been gott by the Keeper into the Green Garden" where "from being a very lean Buck after his recovery he grew so fatt that he cutt as deep as the length of this mark on the Haunches, viz. two inches and a half." �Through the pleasant intimacy of this little book we gain confirmations of the attractive impression already made by Mr. Finch through his wife's poems and his own letters, an ��� � ​1 INTRODUCTION ���impression further confirmed by G. Vertue's print of his lordship, which shows a portly man with straight nose, dark eyes, a white, curled wig, and a very kindly expression. �Lord Winchilsea died in 1726. A Latin eulogy of him is quoted in The Gentleman's Magazine for October, 1783. It is entitled "In Obitum Proenobilis Viri, HENEAGII FINCH, Comitis de Winchilsea, Epicedium et Apotheosi, Prid. Cal. Oct. 1726." But this tribute is less satisfying than the fol- lowing brief note from Lord Hertford to Dr. Stukeley : �The concern you express for the loss of Lord Winchelsea can- not but be pleasing to me; for I should be very sorry that you, for whom he had a just value, should not have grieved with the rest of his friends; and I think I may call the whole world so, for sure he had no enemy nor was he one to anybody. �The final impression made by these scattered facts con- cerning Lord Winchilsea is that he was as well fitted by temperament and tastes to find permanent joy in the retire- ment at Eastwell as was Ardelia herself. If she loved nature and poetry with emphasis on the nature, and he loved nature and antiquities with emphasis on the antiquities, that was only enough of a difference to give needed variety. They were both simple and unambitious in their desires. They were loyal to their friends. Their minds were alert and their interests always along scholarly or poetical lines. They very nearly made real Wordsworth's maxim of plain living and high thinking. �Lady Winchilsea died six years before her �Lady Win- * �chilsea's husband. Her death is thus recorded in �Death "Mawson's Obits." �On Friday, 5 th of August, 1720, dyed at her own house in Cleveland Row the Right Hon ble Anne Countess of Winchilsea, and was on Tuesday following privately Interred according to her desire at Eastwell in Kent, the ancient seat of that noble family. She was Dau'r of S r W m Kingsmill of Sidmonton, a very ancient family in Hampshire. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION li ���The facts in this notice and in parts its phraseology are identical with a brief statement in Lord Winchilsea's journal, from which I have already freely quoted. The authorship of the little sketch is left doubtful, but the fact that Lord Winchilsea preserved it shows that it was sat- isfactory to him. There is, perhaps, no more fitting way to close this outline of Ardelia's life than by quoting the exact words recorded in her husband's private journal: �My Dear Wife's just character finely drawn by and pub- lished in the publick prints after her Decease. �On Friday the fifth instant died at her own house in Cleaveland Row the R* Honourable Anne Countess of Winchilsea and was on Tuesday following (privately according to her own desire) carried down to Eastwell in Kent, the ancient seat of that noble Family, and Interred there. She was a Daughter of S r W m Kingsmill of Sidmonton, a very ancient Family in Hampshire, and had been Maid of Honour to her late Majesty Queen Mary when Dutchess of York, till married to the Hon ble Coll. Heneage Finch who on the death of his Nephew the late Earl of Winchelsea succeeded to that Hon- our: To draw her Ldysp's just character requires a masterly pen like her own. We shall only presume to say she was the most faithfull servant to her Royall Mistresse, the best wife to her noble Lord, and in every other relation public and private so illustrious an example of all moral and divine virtues: in one word a Person of such extraordinary endowments both of Body and Mind that the Court of England never bred a more accomplished Lady nor the Church of England a better Christian. ���II �THE PBOGBESS OF LADY WINCHILSEA'S FAME �The relation between Ardelia and contemporary poets is a matter of considerable interest. She early received an �enthusiastic welcome into the guild from sub- Early Tributes < �ordinate craftsmen. In a package or manu- script poems in the possession of the Duke of Marlborough ��� � ​Hi INTRODUCTION ���at Blenheim is An Ode on Love, inscribed to the Honoura- ble Mrs. Finch. It is four and one-half pages long, and is apparently one of the earliest tributes to her work. Another example of "private homage from an unknown muse" is from the very modest pen of honest Will Shippen, a par- liamentary Jacobite and a poet on his own account. He bases his admiration of her "wondrous sweetness" and " manly strength " on the poems that appeared in Gildon's Miscellany in 1701, and on All is Vanity, which, though not published till 1713, was written before the death of Dryden in 1700. Shippen may have known all these poems in manuscript, but it seems probable that his eulogy was called forth by Mrs. Finch's first appearance in print in 1701. �A congratulatory poem from Mrs. Randolph and an even more congratulatory response from Mrs. Finch would, if interpreted as seriously as they were written, enthrone both ladies high in poetic realms. The description of Mrs. Finch as the Elisha on whom fell the mantle of Cowley, the recog- nition of her as the rightful heir of Orinda's fame, carried praise to dizzy heights. But the conventional extravagance of eulogy is so vague that we cannot determine just which poem Mrs. Finch had sent for Mrs. Randolph's inspection. The only one referred to is The Pastoral published by Gil- don. Of Mrs. Randolph's other work I find no trace except a commonplace poem, On the much lamented death of the Incomparable Lady, the Honorable Lady Oxenden. A Pindarique Ode. This Ode is preserved in a curious old scrap- book in the British Museum, a volume made up of clippings of verse by women, from newspapers, annuals, books, and with a few manuscript items. None of these early poems calls Mrs. Finch "Ardelia." This pen-name was not made public, it seems, till her fame was somewhat established. �In Prior's Miscellaneous Works published in 1740, is a little poem called Lines to Prior by a Lady Unknown. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION liii ���This poem, no trace of which is to be found elsewhere, is ascribed by Mr. Adrian Drift, Prior's executor, to Anne, Coun- tess of Winchilsea. There is no evidence that Lady Winchilsea knew Prior, nor can the slight personal allusions in this poem be taken as indicating any first- hand knowledge of the poet. Such knowledge might easily have come, however, with sufficient minuteness and direct- ness from Longleat through Elizabeth Singer, to whom Prior, in the intervals of his attendance on the king as gen- tleman of the bed-chamber, was paying vain addresses. The poem must be an early one, its spirit and phraseology having little likeness to any of Lady Winchilsea's work except her first drama. Certainly the hysterical emotion with which the lady speaks of herself as "A Virgin-heart fraught with secret wishes," "a love-sick maid whose passion is raised to excess by the swelling numbers of the poet," is quite out of keeping with the usual dignified and delicate reticence of Lady Winchilsea's personal allusions. The lines are an acknowledgment of poetical indebtedness to Prior, a point to be more fully discussed in connection with Ardelia's songs. �Nicholas Howe's estimate of Lady Winchilsea's poems is recorded in An Epistle to Flavia. On the sight of two Pindaric Odes on the Spleen and Vanity. Written by a Lady, her Friend. This dates before any published work of hers, for it is evident that the poems had been transmitted to Rowe through some trusted intermediary with many cautions as to secrecy. Howe's praise is unqualified. Ardelia is a "divine nymph" whose inspiration comes from heaven. She alone has not bowed the knee to false gods of wit, she is the only rival of Pin- dar short of the celestial choirs. Rowe approved of Arde- lia's caution in keeping her poems from the public eye, but lines such as his would not have made her averse to the ��� � ​liv INTRODUCTION ���proposals of Gildon in 1701. Later Rowe sent down to Eastwell copies of his Imitations of Horace's Odes. In 1713 Ardelia wrote a prologue to be spoken by Mrs. Oldfield, at the presentation of Howe's tragedy, Jane Shore. These facts would seem to indicate a literary friendship of consid- erable strength. A personal acquaintance is highly probable, but of that I find no direct proof. �Swift's Letters and Journal to Stella show that by 1710 he was on familiar terms with Charles, the third Earl of Winchilsea, who, in spite of his Jacobite ances- tors, had so far submitted to the revolution government as to deserve and receive valuable public appoint- ments from William, and later from Anne. Swift says of �/ �him, "Being very poor he complied too much with the gov- ernment he hated ; " but that the two men were on especially good terms is apparent from the words in which Swift informs Stella of the death of the handsome young earl: " Poor Lord Winchilsea is dead, to my great grief. He was an worthy, honest gentleman, and particular friend of mine; and what is yet worse, my old acquaintance, Mrs. Finch, is now Countess of Winchilsea, the title being fallen to her husband but without much estate." Swift's intimacy with Lord Winchilsea and also with Lady Worsley, one of Anne Finch's closest friends, would certainly imply that Swift had frequent opportunities of meeting the lady of whom he speaks thus cavalierly. To offset this note to Stella we may turn to Swift's poem, Apollo Outwitted, to Mrs. Finch under the name of Ardelia. This was published in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse in 1711, but would seem to have been written some years earlier. It very possibly belongs to the September-October, 1708, spent by Swift in Kent. Ardelia is represented as having adroitly won from Apollo the gift of song but without having granted his suit. In revenge the god exclaims that, though he cannot revoke his gift, he will ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Iv ���afflict the prudish lady with pride and modesty so stubborn that her verse shall remain unknown: �And last my vengeance to complete, Mayst thou descend to take renown, �Prevailed on by the thing you hate, A Whig! and one that wears a gown! �The verses are, on the whole, playful and gallant and would indicate nothing but friendly relations. But the last lines show that, whatever concessions her nephew Charles felt to be the logical outcome of his necessities, Ardelia's allegiance to the old order was unfaltering and outspoken. It would not, indeed, be difficult to imagine after-dinner conversations in which the statements of that very positive defender of the Whigs, Dr. Swift, might have elicited not only those " flashes of Ardelia's eyes " before which Apollo was abashed, but even more emphatic retorts not contributory to final amity. The evidence is too scanty for an exact state- ment of the attitude of Swift toward Mrs. Pinch, but it would seem to be more friendly than that of Pope. �The actual relationship between Lady Winchilsea and two others of her fellow poets, Pope and Gay, is not easily Alexander Pope determined. In years she was much their and John Gay senior. When she first braved the publicity of Gildon's Miscellany in 1701 Pope was but a lad of thirteen, studying versification under his father's strict tutelage in Binfield, and Gay, a youth of sixteen, in the free grammar school of Barnstaple, was devoting himself to dramatic per- formances under his " rhyming pedagogue," R. Luck, A. M. But the next decade brought great changes. The young men had come to London and were on friendly terms in the same literary coterie. Gay was not yet widely known, but Pope's Pastorals, his Essay on Criticism, and his Rape of the Lock, had made him the most talked-of poet in England. Lady Winchilsea had also advanced. Not only had her ��� � ​Ivi INTRODUCTION ���work been accepted by Gildon, and received flattering tributes from Howe and Swift, not to mention minor bards, but her Spleen had attained to the dignity of a second edition, and she had the inner, supporting consciousness of a stately volume of verse practically ready for publication. Yet in comparison with Pope Ardelia was hardly even the " minor excelsitude " Mr. Gosse has so aptly called her. When her volume of verse appeared in 1713 it was Pope's criticism that she coveted and which she proceeded in a feminine fashion to obtain. Perhaps her husband's recent accession to the title gave her courage. At any rate she issued a bold invitation, which Pope accepted but which he commemorated in the following words in a letter to Gary 11, dated December 15, 1713 : �The fact is, I was invited to dinner to my Lady Winchilsea, and after dinner to hear a play read, at both which I sat in great dis- order with sickness at my head and stomach. �The situation has picturesque possibilities. Did Ardelia do the reading ? Did Pope adopt the suffering posture of the portrait by Kneller ? Evidently the trials inseparable from literary dictatorship began early with Pope, and Lady Winchilsea's dinner was one of the experiences that later occasioned the humorous complaints to Dr. Arbuthnot : �A dire dilemma! either way I'm sped, �If foes they write, if friends they read me dead. �Siezed and tied down to judge, how wretched I ! �Who can't be silent, and who will not lie ; �I sit with sad civility, I read �With honest anguish and an aching head. �Courthope conjectures that the play read to Pope was Aristomenes. But this play was already in print and Pope could have read it at his leisure. It is more probable that it was Love and Innocence, the play still in manuscript. In ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ivii ���either case the strain on Pope's stock of "sad civility" must have been considerable, and it may be set down to his credit that author and critic parted on good terms. They were certainly friends in 1714 when the first separate edition of the Rape of the Lock came out. To Ardelia's playful pro- test against the satiric lines on women, Pope responded in a highly eulogistic Impromptu in which, even if perchance the " sickness at his head and stomach " had proved too much for his gallantry at the memorable dinner, he made amends by acknowledging Ardelia the bright particular star among female wits. Her gay answer is written in an intimate, friendly, bantering tone such as she could not assume. It marks the moments when she was least self-conscious and restrained, when she was most at ease, most certain of pleas- ing. Another evidence of literary amity is that when the quarto edition of Pope's Works came out in 1717, one of the seven commendatory poems he saw fit to print was by Lady Winchilsea. This poem, doubtless with Pope's consent, appeared also in the publications of 1727 and 1732. Either Pope liked the lady, or he liked the lady's verses, or he liked to have a countess speak well of him, even if her admiration found but bald and prosaic expression. �There is, however, another side to the picture. There are certain serious lapses from this attitude of friendship. In the second Epistle, written about twelve years after Lady Winchilsea 's death, the lines, �Arcadia's Countess here in ermined pride, Is there, Pastora by a fountain side, �are said by Croker to refer to Lady Winchilsea. " She is," he adds, "here and elsewhere sneered at." The "else- where " in Croker's note, if it is not a mere guess, probably refers to the farce Three Hours after Marriage which is commented on in the next section. In this farce the satiric flings at Lady Winchilsea doubtless express more exactly the ��� � ​Iviii INTRODUCTION ���attitude of Pope and Gay toward her as a female wit, and toward female wits in general, than does the gallant eulogy of Pope's Impromptu. And that their attitude is but the attitude of their age, may be indicated by a brief statement of the position accorded the learned lady by contemporary comedy. �Mrs. Behn's Sir Patient Fancy (1678) gives us in Lady Knowell one of the earliest examples in the restoration The Learned period of the English female pedant. Lady Lady in Comedy Knowell is especially distinguished by her use of big words in the style of Mrs. Malaprop. " I have con- sented to marry him " she says, " in spite of your Exproba- tions;" "I saw your reclinations from my Addresses;" "There is much Volubility and Vicissitude in Mundane Affairs." Her devotion to the classics is of the most effusive sort. To Leander she exclaims, �Oh the delight of Books ! When I was their age I always employed my looser hours in reading if serious, 'twas Tacitus, Seneca, Plutarch's Morals, or some such useful Author ; if in an Humour gay, I was for Poetry, Virgil, Homer, or Tasso. �Yet this classical lady is represented as rivaling her frivolous daughter in the pursuit of amorous adventure. Mrs. Behn doubtless took the suggestion for this character from Molie"re's Femmes Savantes (1672), the acknowledged source of Wright's Female Virtuosos (1693). Wright's Lady Meanwell, Mrs. Lovewit, and Catchat, were meant to be English versions of the Philaminte, Armande and Be"lise of the French comedy. But though Molie"re's general plot structure is followed and the characters certainly find their originals in his play, yet the kind of learning the ladies have is based on Shadwell's Virtuoso (1676), rather than on the Femmes Savantes. They are scientific in their tastes. Lady Meanwell is also public-spirited, and she invents a "Mathe- matical Engin" to keep the streets of London dry and clean. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION lix ���"'Tis but setting up Timber Posts round about the City, and then fixing a pair of Bellows on every one of 'em to blow the clouds away." Mrs. Love wit has made an exact collection of all the plays that ever came out, and she has devised a limbeck where all the quintessence of wit that is in them is to be extracted and sold by drops to the poets of this age. Catchat is teaching a flea to sing by note and expects soon to have the little creature ready for the opera. Sir Maurice Meanwell embodies the protest against these learned ladies. �Lady M. How now, Sir Maurice, is the merry God Dancing a Jigg within the inclosure of your Brains ? You forget yourself strangely, methinks. �Sir Maur. 'Tis to you, Sister, I speak, what a Devil have you to do with Jingling and Poetry. (To Catchat.) �Catch. Lord, Sister, what a strange compound your Husband is of Vulgar and clownish atoms ? �Sir Maur. A pretty thing indeed, to see those long spectacles of yours, set on the top of my house, for you to peep, and tell how many Hackney Coaches are going in the Moon. �Lovew. Oh the illiterate Brute ! thus to affront a telescope. [Aside.] �Sir Maur. I am no Scholar, not I, and I thank my Stars for it, but with your leave, so much common sense has taught me, that all the Study and Philosophy of a wife, should be to please her Hus- band, instruct her Children, have a Vigilant Eye over Domestick Affairs, keep a good order in her Family, and stand as a Living Pattern of Virtue, and Discretion to all about her. �Lady M. Sir Maurice like another Solon, is now setting up for a lawgiver, Poor Soul ! �Sir Maur. The Women of Old did not read so much, but lived better; Housewifery was all the Knowledge they aspired to ; now- adays Wives must Write forsooth, and pretend to Wit, with a Pox. �Catch. 'Tis the partial, and foolish Opinion of Men, Brother, and not our Fault has made it ridiculous nowadays; for a Woman to pretend to Wit, she was born to it, and can shew it well enough, when occasion serves. �Vanbrugh's JEsop (1697) gives us Hortentia, "the wise ��� � ​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." ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixi ���The Comparison between the Two Stages (1702), attributed to Gildon, is also severe on the female wits of his day, with especial reference to Mrs. Manley. A dialogue between Ram- bler, Sullen, and the Critick illustrates the attitude toward women playwrights. Rambler brings forward Mrs. Manley's The Lost Lover for comment, but the Critick is roused to fury by the mere mention of a play by a lady and exclaims: �I hate these Petticoat-Authors ; 'tis false Grammar, there's no Feminine for the Latin word, 'tis entirely of the Masculine Gender, and the language won't bear such a thing as a she-author. �Sullen insists that " 'twas a Lady carry'd the Prize of Poetry in France t'other day," and that "there have been some of that sex in England who have done admirably," and Rambler proposes a toast to " the Fair Author of the Fatal Friendship," but the Critick is not so easily to be appeased. �Mrs. Centlivre's Basset-Table (1705) gives disagreeable prominence to a learned young lady, but Mrs. Centlivre, herself a writer of plays, adroitly places her heroine in the scientific rather than the literary realm. Her Valeria is a younger sister of Wright's Lady Meanwell in that she pro- fesses to find a microscope more interesting than a man. The physical peculiarities of flesh-flies and tapeworms rouse her to an ecstacy of admiration. In her search for knowledge she calmly dissects her pretty dove, and is with difficulty restrained from dissecting her lover's Italian greyhound. She prefers the "immense pleasures of dear, dear Philoso- phy " to converse with beings so unenlightened and irrational as would-be suitors, and it is not strange that they declare her " fitter for Moorfields than Matrimony." The lady who represents "common sense" in the play urges that " Philosophy suits the Female Sex as Jack-boots would do," but Valeria defends even the Jack-boots. The character of Valeria doubtless gained in raciness from the various references to the famous Mary Astell, whose Serious Proposal to the ��� � ​Ixii INTRODUCTION ���Ladies appeared in two parts in 1694 and 1697. In 1705 the third edition of her Reflections on Marriage was accom- panied by a new Preface, a plea for women not equaled before Mary Wolstoncraf t. Mary Astell's proposed " college for the education and improvement of the female sex" was for years a theme provocative of coarse raillery, and Mrs. Centlivre was not above throwing a stone or two at so well marked a target. Her Common Sense Lady says sarcastic- ally to Valeria: �Well, Cousin, might I advise, you should bestow your fortune on founding a College for the study of Philosophy where none but women should be admitted; and to immortalize your name they should be called Valerians, ha, ha, ha! �Charles Johnson's "female philosopher," Florida (Gen- erous Husband, 1711), Gibber's " female philosophic saint," Sophronia, and her young step-mother, the learned " trans- lator of the passion of Byblis" (The Refusal, 1721), have less direct personal reference ; though the education of Cibber's ladies, who ostentatiously read Latin and quote Latin and who can talk Latin by the hour with Lady Wrangle's uncle, the bishop, their instructor, doubtless refers to Mary Astell, who, as was well known, had been early inducted into the classics by her uncle, a clergyman. �In this comic procession of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Minervas Lady Winchilsea was given a bitter pre- Three Hours eminence by satirists so clever and unscrupu- after Marriage lous ag p ope and Q av Qn January 16, 1717, �there appeared on the stage of Drury Lane a farce entitled Three Hours after Marriage. It ran feebly seven nights and was then hissed off the stage. It was published under Gay's name, but was known to be the joint work of Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay. The character of Phosbe Clinket is attributed to Gay by Mr. Austin Dobson in his article on Gay in the Dictionary of National Biography, and is there ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixiii ���said to be a satire on Lady Winchilsea. Evidently the authority for these statements is Baker's Biograpliica Dra- matica. In Baker's analysis of the farce occurs this passage : �Phoebe Clinket was said to be intended for the Countess of Winchilsea, who was so much affected with the itch of versifying that she had implements of writing in every room in the house that she frequented. She was also reported to have given offence to one of the triumvirate by saying that Gay's Trivia showed that he was more proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one. �Baker's account did not appear till 1764, forty-seven years after the play, and was based on rather vague rumor. More exact information as to the apportionment of work among the triumvirate is to be found in a farce called The Confederates, in which the trio were savagely attacked by John Durant Breval under the pseudonym of "Joseph Gay." The Confederates appeared almost immediately after the Three Hours after Marriage and doubtless embodies the general opinion at that time as to the authorship of different parts of the play. The first scene of The Confederates is in a room in the Rose -Tavern near the Play-House. Arbuth- not listens at the door while Pope soliloquizes as follows: �Thus in the Zenith of my Vogue I Reign And bless th' Abundance of my fertile Vein; My pointed Satire aim alike at All, (Foe to Mankind) and scatter round my Gall: With poyson'd Quill, I keep the world in Awe. And from My Self my own THEESITES draw. This very Night, with Modern Strokes of Wit, I charm the Boxes, and divert the Pit ; Safe from the Cudgel, stand secure of Praise ; Mine is the Credit, be the Danger Gay's. Arb. (coming forward). �Hold, Brother! thou forget'st the Scenes I made ; This Boast of thine, is but a Gasconade. �P. Know, Caledonian, Thine's a simple Part, �Scarce anything but some Quack-Terms of Art, ��� � ​Ixiv INTRODUCTION ���Hard Words, and Quibbles; but 'tis I that sting, And on the Stage th' Egyptian Lovers bring ; Miss Phoebe, Plotwell, Townley, all are Mine, And Sir Tremendous Fossile's only Thine. �The character of Fossile in the play was meant as a satire on Dr. Woodward, a well-known geologist, and it may easily be that Arbuthnot was the only one of the triumvirate suffi- ciently versed in scientific terms to reel off the jargon put into the mouth of this virtuoso. Sir Tremendous, a satirical portrait of John Dennis, must almost certainly be the work of Pope, who could hardly be expected to keep his hands off if his arch-enemy were thus to be exposed to a drubbing. Many strokes in the character of Plotwell are said to be levelled at Gibber, hence this character, too, may naturally be ascribed to Pope. Gay may have had some private grudge against Lady Winchilsea, as Baker says, and may have had a hand in the portrayal of Phoebe Clinket, but that this character was virtually Pope's is explicitly stated, not only by The Confederates, but also by the Complete Key by "E. Parker, Philomath," published a few months after the play. It is in this Key, too, that we find Lady Winchilsea given as the original of Phoebe. The Key reads as follows: �Phoebe Clinket. This character is a very silly Imitation of the Bays in the Rehearsal, but is design'd to Redicule the Countess of W n ea, who, Pope says, is so much given to writing of Verses that she keeps a Standish in every Room of the House, that she may immediately clap down her Thoughts, whether upon Pindaric, Heroic, Pastoral or Dramatical Subjects. This punning Char- acter was drawn by Pope. �So far as the plot is concerned Phoebe Clinket is an unimportant character in the farce. After the first act she comes in but twice, once to claim as her own the much- maligned invention whereby the two lovers, disguised as a mummy and a crocodile, gain access to their mistress; and again when a letter, which announces that her play, the off- ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixv ���spring of her brain, has been refused by the theater, is by a vulgar series of double meanings interpreted into an acknowledgment by her of a crime that should be laid at the door of Mrs. Townley, the immoral heroine of the farce. The character of Phoebe Clinket is drawn merely for the purpose of caricaturing a learned lady. A brief analysis of the first act will serve to show the points of general satire as well as the points to be interpreted as especially applying to Lady Winchilsea. �When Mrs. Clinket appears on the stage she has on an ink-stained dress, and pens are stuck in her hair. She is accompanied by her maid carrying strapped to her back a desk on which her mistress may write. The following con- versation shows the authoress in the throes of creation: �Maid. I had as good carry a raree-show about the street. Oh! how my back aches! �Clink. What are the labours of the back to those of the brain? Thou scandal to the muses, I have now lost a thought worth a folio, by thy impertinence. �Maid. Have I not got a crick in my back already, that will make me good for nothing, with lifting your great books? �Clink. Folio's call them and not great books, thou monster of impropriety. But have patience, and I will remember the three gallery-tickets I promised thee at my new Tragedy. �Maid. I shall never get my head-cloaths clear-starch'd at this rate. �Clink. Thou destroyer of learning, thou worse than a book- worm! Thou hast put me beyond all patience. Remember thou my lyric ode bound about a tallow-candle; thy wrapping up snuff in an epigram; nay, the unworthy usage of my Hymn to Apollo, filthy creature! read me the last lines I wrote upon the Deluge, and take care to pronounce them as I taught you. �Maid. Swell' d with a dropsy, sickly Nature lies, And melting in a diabetes, dies. �[Reads with an affected Tone.] �Clink. Still without cadence! �Maid. Swell' d with a dropsy ��� � ​Ixvi INTRODUCTION ���Clink. Hold! I conceive �The roaring seas o'er the tall woods have broke And Whales now perch upon the sturdy Oak. Roaring? Stay. Rumbling, roaring, rustling. No; raging seas. (Writing.) �The raging seas o'er the tall woods have broke Now, perch, thou whale, upon the sturdy oak. Sturdy oak? No; steady, strong, strapping, stiff stiff. No, stiff is too short. �(Fossile and Townley come forward.) What feast for fish ! Oh too luxurious treat ! When hungry dolphins feed on butcher's meat. Foss. Neice, why neice, neice! Oh, Melpomene, thou goddess of tragedy, suspend thy influence for a moment, and suffer my niece to give a rational answer. This lady is a friend of mine. �Clinic. Madam, excuse this absence of mind; my animal spirits had deserted the avenues of my senses, and retired to the recesses of the brain, to contemplate a beautiful idea. I could not force the vagrant creatures back again into their posts, to move those parts of the body that express civility. �Mistress Clinket's eagerness to get her play, the theme of which is The Universal Deluge; or The Story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, on the stage, leads her to invite Sir Tre- mendous and some of the players to a private reading of the tragedy in her own parlor. But in order to escape the prejudices sure to bias their judgments if the play is known to be by a woman, she introduces young Mr. Plotwell as the author, while she poses as a lady patroness of letters willing to encourage obscure merit by this preliminary reading at her tea-table. The indifference with which Mr. Plotwell submits his supposed play to the critics, allowing them to blot or insert at their pleasure; Phoebe's frantic defense of every mooted point; her unconcealed agony as the players and Sir Tremendous confide to her that the young gentleman knows nothing of poetry, that his play neither can take nor ought to take, make a very clever situation. The stage ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixvii ���directions in the tragedy give rise to a violent discussion. Clinket reads aloud: �The scene opens, and discovers the heavens cloudy. A prodi- gious shower of rain, at a distance appears the top of the moun- tain, Parnassus, all the fields beneath are overflowed, there are seen cattle and men swimming. The tops of the steeples rise above the flood, with men and women perching on their weather- cocks. �The bone of contention here is whether the use of weather- cocks must not be regarded as an anachronism ; and whether, indeed, according to the latest theories concerning the flood, the stones were not all dissolved, in which case the steeples themselves, being without foundations, could not support men and women. Plotwell carelessly abandons stones, steeples, weather-cocks, and all to the learning of the critics ; but Phcebe declares that this cavil is leveled at the whole drama, for the theory of dissolved stones would make the reparation of the human race by Deucalion and Pyrrha an impossibility. Portions of the opening passage of the tragedy are defended with spirit by Clinket as having the fire of Lee and the tenderness of Otway. But as the criticism grows in severity, she exclaims in angry protest: " Were the play mine, you should gash my flesh, mangle my face, anything, sooner than scratch my play." And when finally the diction, the metaphors, whole speeches, the fable, the characters are de- clared "monstrous," "abominable," "execrable," her agony overcomes her prudence, and crying out, "I'm butcher'd! I'm massacred!" she falls in a faint. But the crisis of her misery does not come until her uncle flings her papers into the fire, declaring that thus only can she be cured of the poetical itch. �Clink. Ah ! I am an undone woman. �Plotw. Has he burned any bank-bills, or a new Mechlin head- dress ? �Clink. My works! My works! ��� � ​Ixviii INTRODUCTION ���1st Play. Has he destroyed the writings of an estate, or your billet-doux? �Clink. A pindaric ode I five similes! and half an epilogue! �2nd Player. Has he thrown a new fan, or your pearl neck -lace into the flames ? �Clink. Worse, worse! The tags of the acts of a new Comedy! a Prologue sent by a person of quality! three copies of recom- mendatory verses ! and two Greek mottos ! �When the play is finally refused, Phoebe is unhappy but philosophical. She reflects on the egregious stuff that passes current on the stage, and comforts herself with the thought that she is but one of the famous daughters of Apollo to suffer because of the " wrong gout of the rabblement." And she felicitates herself that whatever may be said of her judg- ment and correctness, no one excels her in readiness and fertility. �Mrs. Clinket is a prude as well as a pedant. She calls herself a "platonic lady" in matters of love, and boasts that in her plays she does not allow "the libertinism of lip- embraces," for, though Aristotle never actually prohibited kissing on the stage, she is " unwilling to stand even on the brink of an indecorum." Phoebe is very religious and very severe on the corrupt plays so popular in London. She chooses the Deucalion and Pyrrha version of the "Universal Deluge" for her tragedy because she counts neither the stage nor the actors of her day "hallowed enough for sacred story." In her attitude toward her own plays Pho3be is a combination of pompous self-conceit and of extreme sensi- tiveness to criticism. Her ruling passion is her desire to get her plays before the public. For that she scorns delight and lives laborious days. �We learn from the Complete Key that some touches in this satiric portrait refer to Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, but that in general the Countess of Winchilsea is the one ridiculed. Yet the authors of the farce were careful not to ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixix ���make the application too minutely exact. In two important respects Phoebe Clinket does not even remotely suggest Lady Winchilsea. The supposed tragedy is, in its theme and in the substance and style of the quoted passages, entirely unlike any work of hers. It would better serve as a travesty of some passages in Dryden's heroic tragedies. And then, again, Ardelia was as averse to any public presentation of her plays as Phoebe Clinket was eager for it. The impas- sioned "Advertisement" to Love and Innocence, written years before the appearance of Pope's farce, is as genuine a personal appeal as was ever buried away in a manuscript. Even after the lapse of years, even if her plays had admirable dramatic qualities, one would hardly feel at liberty to put them on the stage in the face of such a protest. And every other indication in Ardelia's poems or prose writings emphasizes her spirit of self -depreciation, her morbid shrink- ing from any but the most intimate and friendly audience. Hence the satire is in this, its chief point, wide of the mark. Many minor points, however, could easily be made to apply. Lady Winchilsea's learning, her devotion to literary pur- suits, her fecundity in verse, her irritable shrinking from adverse criticism, her determined opposition to amatory themes, her preference for divine and moral songs, her detestation of the modern stage, are traits that tally with the burlesque portrait. The story of the " standish in every room," if not a malicious invention of Pope's, would of course be most wittily burlesqued by the desk strapped to the maid's back, and would be sufficient to locate the char- acter, but the story itself rests only on the doubtful authority of Pope. �But in so far as the character did suggest Lady Winchil- sea to hearers or readers, it was an intolerable affront. J5he was made not merely ridiculous, butodious. _ Swift's treat- menroTMary Astell as Madonella in the Toiler papers, and ��� � ​Ixx INTRODUCTION ���his vulgar account of the supposed foundation and disrup- tion of her college, were no more unjust and libelous than was Pope's treatment of Lady Winchilsea in this play. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Sappho in Pope's Epistle II. had really less right to complain. �There is probably a reference to this play in Gay's Wel- come from Greece. Among the illustrious ladies who crowd the quay to welcome Pope are "Winchilsea, still meditating song," while "afar off is frolic Bicknell," the actress who played Phoebe Clinket. The conjunction of names may be fortuitous, but it probably has covert reference to the play. �This play was, unhappily, one of the last important notices of Lady Winchilsea's work during her lifetime. But there Recognition were some minor indications of favorable recog- After 1725 nition. Steele and Fenton published some of her poems in their Miscellanies of 1714 and 1717; Harris in his History of Kent (1719) included her Fanscomb Barn, with a laudatory account of her writings ; and immediately after her death Dr. Stukeley republished her Spleen. Twenty- two years later, however, Pope, in the final edition of his works, omitted her previously published commendatory verses, because, says Mr. El win, they were "intrinsically worthless and the author's name no longer carried weight." This note probably represents the state of the case, and the revival of interest in Lady Winchilsea soon after Pope's death must be due to Birch's General Dictionary (1734-1741), which pub- Birch's General lished six of her poems, five of them being from Dictionary the manuscript in the possession of the Countess of Hertford, and added a brief life, giving the facts repeated in later biographical notices. During the next thirty years Lady Winchilsea's name appears with some frequency. �The purpose of John Duncomb's Feminead (1751) was to reveal to "lordly man" the glories of a sister-choir. In ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxi ���this chivalrous enterprise he counts himself but as the coadju- tor of his friend Richardson, whose "Pamela" and "Clarissa" John Duncomb's nac ^ proved him "the sex's champion and Feminead constant patron." Duncomb heads the list of �"lettered nymphs" with the chaste Orinda, but Ardelia, who is commended in a foot-note as a "lady of great wit and genius," makes a close second. It is her Spleen that rouses Mr. Duncomb's admiration. �Who can unmoved hear Winchilsea reveal Thy horrors, Spleen! which all, who paint, must feel. My praises would but wrong her sterling wit, Since Pope himself applauds what she has writ. �In 1752 George Ballard in his Memoirs of several Ladies who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the Baliard's learned languages, arts, and sciences, referred �Memoirs to Lady Winchilsea as "a lady of excellent �genius especially in poetry," and quoted her answer to Pope's Impromptu. �Gibber in the Lives of the Poets (1753) quotes Pope's Impromptu with the comment: "The answer which the Gibber's Lives countess makes to the above is rather more of the Poets exquisite than the lines of Mr. Pope ; he is foiled at his own weapons, and outdone in the elegance of compliment." Referring to the poems in Birch's Dic- tionary he says: �If all her poetical compositions are executed with as much spirit and elegance as these, the lovers of poetry have some reason to be sorry that her station was such as to exempt her from the necessity of more frequently exercising a genius so furnished by nature to have made a great figure in that divine art. �Of the "excellent picturesqueness " of her Spleen he speaks in the warmest terms, and affirms that this poem alone would give her a " very high station among the inspired tribe." ��� � ​Ixxii INTRODUCTION ���In 1755 there appeared a compilation entitled Poems by Eminent Ladies. It was designed, the preface tells us, as Eminent " a so lid compliment to the sex," and was put �Ladies forward as a convincing proof that " great abili- �ties are not confined to men, and that genius often glows with equal warmth and perhaps with more delicacy in the breast of a female." Twelve poems by Lady Winchilsea are quoted in this volume, and for the first time the selections are made, not from Birch's Dictionary but from the Mis- cellany Poems of 1713, nine of the twelve being fables. Wordsworth commented most unfavorably on the literary insight that could choose to represent Lady Winchilsea by these selections. �In Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors (1758) is the note which Wordsworth found so scanty and unsatisfactory when he was in search of information concerning Ardelia. �The Biographia Brittanica (1763), Gough's Anecdotes of British Topography (1768), Granger's Biographical Dictionary (1769), echo in brief and perfunctory fashion the critical dicta of their predecessors. �There is, then, through the century an unemphatic, uncritical, but persistent literary tradition that Lady Win- chilsea's claim to a niche in the Temple of Fame could not be entirely ignored. She was a countess, she wrote The Spleen, and Pope had praised her. These are the chief points on which eulogy was based. But we have also indi- cations of a recognition much more spontaneous and pleasing. In 1763 Anna Seward, a mature little lady of fifteen, was engaged in a serious literary correspondence well calculated to awaken parental fears lest she should become "that dreaded phenomenon, a learned lady." In the midst of counsel to a friend "the morning sun of whose youth is with difficulty escaping from the unwholesome mists of a foolish love affair," we come upon the following bit of criticism: ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxiii ������The last words of that sentence bring to my recollection a pleasing little poem, to which, in infancy, I have often listened with delight from the lips of my mother, who used frequently to repeat it as she sat at work. She had learnt it from a lady who was the friend of her youth. �Wholly without literary curiosity, as she never saw it printed, so she never asked after the author; consequently could give me no information on that subject. She had never taken the trouble of copying it; therefore was it mine as it was hers, by oral tradition, before I attained my tenth year. Its easy and tuneful numbers charmed; and, with a great deal of giddy vivacity on a thousand occasions, I had yet an inherent fondness for seeing the perspec- tives of opening life through the clare-oscure of a meditative fancy, particularly where the sombre tints were ultimately prevalent. �Behold this little orphan ode which I have searched for in vain through the pages of our poets. �Lady Winchilsea's Progress of Life is then quoted entire with many slight inaccuracies such as would result from oral transmission, but substantially identical with the form given in the volume of 1713. The "friend of Mrs. Seward's youth" must have been alive in Lady Winchilsea's day. It would be interesting to know who started the little poem on its oral way. It is at any rate a charming picture that we get of the gentlewoman at her needlework, perhaps like the lady of the ballad, letting "her silken seam fall till hertae" as she yields her spirit to the musical flow and pensive moral- izing of Ardelia's verse ; and of the child lured from her play by the charm of the words as they fall from her mother's lips. Another manuscript copy of this poem is to be found in a volume in the possession of Mr. George Finch- Hatton. If we may judge by verbal inaccuracies, this poem, too, had been orally transmitted to the writer. Such facts are evidences of an undercurrent of popularity, and popular- ity of the sort that would have been most pleasing to Ardelia. �Miss Seward's letter continues in a strain of elegant criticism. She endeavors to date the poem by internal ��� � ​Ixxiv INTRODUCTION ���evidence. She feels a lack of "polished accuracy;" she discovers one " inadmissible inversion ;" she is conscious of some failures in the matter of " verbal perspicuity." But she rejoices in the truth and pathetic sweetness of the poem, and she considers the stanzas after the fourth as " poetically faultless." Miss Seward's letter is the first instance of detailed criticism applied to Lady Winchilsea's verse. �This letter was published without comment in Walter Scott's edition of Miss Seward's Poetical Works. Scott's failure to find parentage for the orphan ode is noted by "J. H. R." in The Gentleman's Magazine (1812), and he felicitates himself on having found the author. In looking over a volume of old poems he chanced upon this one ascribed to "Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, who lived in the reign of Queen Anne." He then points out the most inter- esting of the variations resulting from oral transmission: �The second stanza is thus printed in Miss Seward's Works : �How pleasing the world's prospect lies; �How tempting to look through! Parnassus to the Poet's eyes, Nor Beauty, with her sweet surprise, �Can more inviting shew. �But in the volume I have mentioned, it is inserted in the fol- lowing manner: �How pleasing the world's prospect lies; �How tempting to look through! Not Canaan to the Prophet's eyes, Nor Pisgah, with her sweet surprise, Can more inviting shew. �Miss Seward's version certainly preserves more poetical oeauty, though perhaps the latter one is most correct. The Ode in general is very excellent, and is written in that style of chaste simplicity which was so peculiar to the Poets in the reign of Anne. �Was it the lady with the needlework, or the friend of her youth, or perhaps the swan of Lichfield herself, that thus ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxv ���substituted a bit of poetical paganism for Ardelia's hon- est Hebraisms? Scott, it seems, did not know Lady Southey's "Winchilsea. Southey knew her but slightly. �Specimens He includes her in his Specimens (1807) with the laconic comment: "Her poems were praised by Howe and by Pope; and they deserved praise." He publishes nothing of hers except portions of her Petition for an Absolute Retreat. Much more space is devoted to Anne Killigrew, to Mary Barber, to Constantia Grrierson, to Elizabeth Howe. But Wordsworth made amends for all omissions. �The modern interest in Lady Winchilsea's work and the transfer of emphasis from her poems on man to her hitherto William unnoticed poems on nature date from the pub- �Wordsworth lication of Wordsworth's Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815), in which occurred the well-known passage : �Now it is remarkable that, excepting the Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry intervening between the publication of the Para- dise Lost and the Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature, and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination. �In 1820 Wordsworth sent Lady Mary Lowther a unique present. It was a manuscript volume of extracts from the poems of Lady Winchilsea and kindred writers. Words- worth had made the selections and a "female friend" had transcribed them for him. In the accompanying Sonnet to Lady Mary Lowther he explained that he had "culled this store of lucid crystals from a Parnassian Cave seldom trod." This volume is probably the one referred to by Christopher North when he says, " We never had in our hands the poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, printed in 1713; but we well remember reading some of them in beautiful manu- ��� � ​Ixxvi INTRODUCTION ���script years ago at Rydal Mount." This book is probably still in existence somewhere, and the publication of it would be a most interesting addition to our stock of Words- worthiana. �That Wordsworth's interest in Lady Winchilsea's poems was genuine and permanent is evinced in his correspondence with the Rev. Alexander Dyce, whose Specimens of British Poetesses appeared in 1825. The volume made its way slowly and in time attracted the favorable attention of Wordsworth. He wrote from Rydal Mount, October 16, 1829, to Mr. Dyce as follows: �By accident, I learned lately that you had made a Book of Extracts, which I had long wished for opportunity and industry to execute myself. I am happy it has fallen into so much better hands. I allude to your Selections from the Poetry of English Ladies. I had only a glance at your work ; but I will take this opportunity of saying, that should a second edition be called for, I should be pleased with the honor of being consulted by you about it. There is one poetess to whose writings I am especially partial, the Countess of Winchelsea. I have perused her poems frequently, and should be happy to name such passages as I think most characteristic of her genius, and most fit to be selected. �Wordsworth's glance at the book must have been of the most casual sort, for he not only misquoted the title, but he is ignorant of the fact that Mr. Dyce's Selections included The Spleen, Life's Progress, The Atheist and the Acorn, and A Nocturnal Reverie by Lady Winchilsea, and that he quoted in her praise Wordsworth's own words in the Essay of 1815. But the next letter to Mr. Dyce shows that a copy of the Specimens had been sent Wordsworth, and that he had given it diligent attention. The letter is undated but bears the postmark 1830. After some preliminary discus- sion he writes: �I now come to Lady Winchelsea. First, however, let me say a few words on one or two other authoresses of your " Specimens." British poetesses make but a poor figure in the " Poems by Emi- ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxvii ���nent Ladies." But observing how injudicious that selection is in the case of Lady Winchelsea, and of Mrs. Aphra Behn (from whose attempts they are miserably copious) I have thought something better might have been chosen by more competent persons who had access to the volumes of the several writers �Could you tell me anything of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu more than is to be learned from Pope's letters and her own ? She seems to have been destined for something much higher and better than she became. A parallel between her character and genius and that of Lady Winchelsea, her contemporary (though somewhat prior to her) would be well worth drawing. �And now at last for the poems of Lady Winchelsea. I will transcribe a note from the blank leaf of my own edition written by me before I saw the scanty notice of her by Walpole. (By the by, that book has always disappointed me when I have consulted it on any particular occasion.) The note runs thus : 'The "Frag- ment," p. 13, seems to prove that she was attached to James II., as does p. 74, and that she suffered by the Revolution. The most celebrated of these poems, but far from the best is " The Spleen." "The Petition for an Absolute Retreat," and the "Nocturnal Reverie," are of much superior merit. See also for favorable specimens, p. 56; "On the Death of Mr. Thynne," p. 134 [Moral Song]; and p. 13, " Fragment." The Fable of ' Love, Death, and Reputation,' p. 160, is ingeniously told.' Thus far my own note. I will now be more particular. P. 4, ' Our Vanity,' etc., and p. 153 are noticeable as giving some account from herself of her authorship. See also p. 193, where she alludes to ' The Spleen.' She was unlucky in her models, Pindaric Odes, and French Fables. But see p. 49, ' The Blindness of Elymas,' for proof that she could write with powers of high order when her own individual character and personal feel- ings were not concerned. For less striking proofs of this power see p. 238, 'All is Vanity; ' omitting verses 5 and 6, and reading " clouds that are lost and gone," &c. There is merit in the two next stan- zas ; and the last stanza toward the close contains a fine reproof for the ostentation of Louis XIV., and one magnificent verse, �Spent the astonished hours, forgetful to adore. �But my paper is nearly out. As far as, ' For my garments,' p. 70, the poem is charming; it then falls off; revives at p. 72, 'Give me there,' p. 72 [1. 123], &c., reminds me of Dyer's 'Grongar Hill;' it revives p. 76, toward the bottom, and concludes with sentiments ��� � ​Ixxviii INTRODUCTION ���worthy of the writer, though not quite so happily expressed as other parts of the poem. See pp. 234, 250, ' Whilst in the Muses' path I stray; 'p. 183 [The Shepherd and the CaZra],'The Cautious Lovers,' p. 147, has little poetic merit, but is worth reading as characteristic of the author. P. 80, ' Deep lines of honour,' etc., to ' maturer age.' P. 84 [The Change], if shortened, would be striking; p. 67 [Enquiry after Peace], characteristic; p. 57, from 'Meanwhile ye living parent,' to the close, omitting 'Nor could we hope,' and the five following verses; p. Ill, last paragraph [Oh, might I live, etc.]; p. 136 [Life's Progress], that you have; pp. 136 [Hope], 134 [Moral Song]; p. 13, was Lady W. a R. Catholic? p. 267, 'And to the clouds proclaim thy fall;' p. 269, omit 'When scatter'd glow-worms,' and the next couplet. I have no more room. Pray, excuse this vile scrawl. �In Mr. Grosart's edition Wordsworth's letter of May 10, 1830, is put before the one just quoted. That letter has, to be sure, no specific date beside the postmark, 1830, but internal evidence seems to demand that it precede the one of May 10, for Wordsworth here, as will be seen, takes up the subject just where he left it in the undated letter. He writes : �My last was, for want of room, concluded so abruptly, that I avail myself of an opportunity of sending you a few additional words, free of postage, upon the same subject. �I observed that Lady Winchelsea was unfortunate in her models Pindarics and Fables; nor does it appear from her Aristomenes that she would have been more successful than her contemporaries, if she had cultivated tragedy. She had sensibility sufficient for the tender parts of dramatic writing, but in the stormy and tumult- uous she would probably have failed altogether. She seems to have made it a moral and religious duty to control her feelings lest they should mislead her. I have often applied two lines of �her drama (p. 355) to her affections: �Love's soft bands, �His gentle cords of hyacinths and roses, Wove in the dewy Spring when storms are silent. �By the by, in the next page [11. 64-5] are two impassioned lines spoken to a person fainting: �Then let me hug and press thee into life, And lend thee motion from my beating heart. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxix ���From the style and versification of this, so much her longest work, I conjecture that Lady Winchelsea had but a slender acquaintance with the drama of the earlier part of the preceding century. Yet her style in rhyme is often admirable, chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and that over-culture, which reminds one by its broad glare, its stiffness, and heavi- ness, of the double daisies of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the fields. Perhaps I am mis- taken, but I think there is a good deal of resemblance in her style and versification to that of Tickell, to whom Dr. Johnson justly assigns a high place among the minor poets, and of whom Goldsmith rightly observes, that there is a strain of ballad-thinking through all his poetry, and it is very attractive. �Mr. Dyce was much impressed by Wordsworth's minute and apt criticisms, and apparently suggested the advisability of his publishing Lady Winchilsea's poems. Wordsworth answered, in a letter from Lowther Castle, dated September 23, but without any year. The reference in the letter to a possible visit from Mr. Dyce about the " tenth December," throws doubt on even the month. Mr. Grosart suggests August, 1833. The portion of the letter referring to Lady Winchilsea thanks Mr. Dyce for his care in collecting and transmitting particulars concerning her, and concludes: �I expected to find at this place my friend, Lady Frederick Bentinck, through whom I intended to renew my request for mate- rials, if any exist, among the Finch family, whether manuscript poems, or anything else that would be interesting; but Lady F., unluckily, is not likely to be in Westmoreland. I shall, however, write to her. Without some additional materials, I think I should scarcely feel strong enough to venture upon any species of publi- cation connected with this very interesting woman, notwithstand- ing the kind things you say of the value of my critical remarks. �It is a far cry from this Three Hours after Marriage of Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot to Wordsworth's Essay and his Letters, but Ardelia's fame could well afford to wait a century for so pronounced a revolution in taste. Words- worth knew her poems minutely and sympathetically. He ��� � ​Ixxx INTRODUCTION ���dwelt upon specific excellences and defects. He was impressed by her high qualities as a poet. He sought to make her known. He contemplated editing her works him- self. With Wordsworth begins the modern appreciation of Ardelia, and most critics of her verse after 1815 quote the Nocturnal Reverie and Wordsworth's comment. Only the more significant of the nineteenth century notices of her work demand attention here. �Of the Nocturnal Reverie Christopher North (Black- wood's, March, 1837) says: �Christopher We find nothing comparable to what we have now North quoted in any of the effusions of the Thirty Poetesses �let us by courtesy so call them who flourished from the death of Lady W. to that of Charlotte Smith. �In Men, Women, and Books (1847) Leigh Hunt says of Lady Winchilsea: �We are now come to one of the numerous loves we Leigh Hunt �possess among our grandmothers of old or rather �not numerous, but select, and such as keep fresh with us forever, like the miniature of his ancestress whom the Sultan took for a living beauty. This is Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (now written Winchilsea), daughter of Sir William Kingsmill, of Sidmonton, in the county of Southampton. �He quotes the Nocturnal Reverie with the naive critical method of italicizing the words and phrases he especially likes. The celebrated Spleen still deserves, according to Mr. Hunt, a place on every toilet, male and female. �Mrs. Hale's Woman's Record (New York, 1853), "an �invaluable manual for the parlor table," is interesting as the �first American recognition of Lady Winchilsea. �TVTra TTalo �" It should not be forgotten," Mrs. Hale says, " that she was the first Englishwoman who attempted to scale the Parnassian heights "- a neglect of the matchless Orinda against which Ardelia would have been the first to protest. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxxi ���The Literary Women of England (1861) is a compila- tion made by Jane Williams, usually known as " Ysgafell." �Miss Williams was impelled to her work by indiff- Jane Williams f . J . �nation that Campbell had included in his one �hundred and seventy British poets but one woman, and that Dr. Johnson had admitted not one into his society of fifty-two English poets. Her commentary on Lady Win- chilsea's work is unusually full and interesting: �Her verses on the Spleen are very poor, and ill deserve the praise lavished on them by contemporary flatterers. Her answer to half a dozen rhymed couplets, " occasioned by four verses in ' The Rape of the Lock,' " is sharp-witted and adroit, but pert and unpleasing. Her celebrated Apologue of " The Atheist and the Acorn " doubtless did good service in its day. It is also remark- able for having suggested to Hannah More another Apologue called " The Two Gardeners," and published in the Cheap Reposi- tory Tracts Any one accustomed to contemplate rural �nature under the shades of night, in stillness and in solitude, must be struck with surprise and won to sympathy by the enchanting reproduction of emotions peculiar to that hour and scene in the " Nocturnal Reverie." It is thoroughly original; a living land- scape redolent of sweet tranquility, full of energy in gentlest exercise. The key-note of this most musical combination of words, thoughts, and images, seems to have been derived from Shakspeare's " Merchant of Venice," Act V., scene 1, where Lorenzo and Jessica in quiet enjoyment play upon the phrase, "In such a night." It is most true, �Soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. �Every stroke of Lady Winchilsea's description is effective ; and the horse, grazing leisurely and wandering at will as he crops the inviting herbage is wonderfully true to nature. The " Salisbury," whose strong and steady luster is advantageously contrasted with the pale and flickering sparkle of the glow-worm, was probably Lady Anne Tufton, second daughter of Thomas, sixth Earl of Thanet, who married in 1709, James Cecil, fifth Earl of Salisbury. Perhaps these verses were originally addressed to her, and perhaps she accompanied Lady Winchilsea in the mid-night stroll which ��� � ​Ixxxii INTRODUCTION ���occasioned them. Anyhow, this allusion indicates the existence of a friendship between the two countesses, and rescues the memory �of one from the obscurity of ancestral archives Great �experimental knowledge of human life and human feeling is mani- fested in this poem [TTie Progress of Life] ; and we are induced by it to regret our ignorance of that particular course of experience by which Lady Winchilsea acquired the wisdom which enhanced the power of her native genius. �Though there might be additions to this account of the �progress of Lady Winchilsea's fame, enough has probably �been quoted to show her place in critical �Edmund Gosse �esteem up to the time of the publication of Ward's English Poets (1880). Wordsworth was the first man of authority to pronounce a discriminating eulogy on Ardelia, and it is evident that his judgment impressed itself on all succeeding criticism. But that we have any actual knowledge of her life and poems is due to Mr. Edmund Gosse. He introduced her to a large circle of readers by securing for her a place in Ward's English Poets. Matthew Arnold was emphatic in his expression of delight in Ardelia 's work as it stood thus revealed. The feeling of surprise and pleasure was general, while students of the beginnings of romanticism were stirred to the keenest interest by the quality and significance of these poems. By his suggestive introductory comments in English Poets, by a notice in his Eighteenth Century Literature (1889), and in other ways, did Mr. Gosse contribute to the popularity and the right understanding of Ardelia's verse ; and, finally, in Gossip in a Library (1891) he made the lady herself known to us. At his touch she emerged from the shadow-land of the past, a charming and most real personality. �But with all this weight of high poetical and expository authority in favor of Ardelia, there was no opportunity to know more of her and her work than Ward's Selections and Mr. Gosse's Essay revealed. Dyce and Wordsworth had ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxxiii ���contemplated an edition of her poems in 1833. In 1876 Grosart, in his edition of Wordsworth's Prose Works, had complained with regard to Lady Winchilsea: "Sad to say, a collection of this remarkable gentlewoman's poems remains still an unfurnished desideratum." In Ward's English Poets Mr. Gosse, referring to possible existing collections of her poems in MS., had said, "If these unpublished poems are still in the possession of her family, it is highly desirable that they should be given to the world." In his Short History of English Literature (1898) Mr. Saintsbury repeats the wish. In his finely appreciative notice, he says: �It is a pity that her poems have not been reprinted and are difficult of access, for it is desirable to read the whole in order to appreciate the unconscious clash of style and taste in them. �That it is, at last, possible to bring out this much-desired complete edition of Lady Winchilsea's work is but another portion of the debt she owes to Mr. Gosse, as will be seen in the following account of the sources of the present volume. �The poems in this edition have been obtained from the printed volume of 1713, from two manuscript volumes, an octavo and a folio, and from scattered collections o various sorts - Of the manuscripts the octavo, now in the possession of the Earl of Winchilsea, is doubtless the earlier in date. Its beautiful morocco binding and gilt edges, and the exquisitely clear and neat hand- writing of the most of the book show that the compilation and tran- scription of the poems was counted a matter worthy of elegant attention. But toward the end there is a lamentable decline from the precise accuracy of the beginning. The penman- ship changes and is laborious and uneven, with many erasures. And a critical judgment seems to have passed sentence on some of the work, for two poems have been crossed out, letter by letter, in the most painfully effective fashion, while several leaves have been ruthlessly excised ��� � ​Ixxxiv INTRODUCTION ���from the center of the volume. The title-page with its crude sketch of a cherub's wing-enfolded head, and the table of contents are the work apparently of the same untrained hand employed in copying the last poems. That the table of contents is an after-thought is shown by the fact that the excised poems are omitted, so that we do not even know their titles. There are many slight indications that the octavo is an earlier manuscript than the folio. For example, most of the interlineations and substitutions in the octavo appear in the text of the folio. " Areta," Lady Winchilsea's first-chosen pen-name, is crossed out in the octavo and "Ardelia" is written above, while in the folio, though here also an original "Areta " is sometimes changed to "Ardelia," in by far the greater number of cases, the "Ardelia" is the name first written. Then, jtoo, no poem susceptible_o|_a date in the octavo is later than 1689. excepT~the last one, which is not the work of the original transcriber. This volume likewise is more intimate and personal in its general effect than the folio. The crossed-out poems that do not reappear in the folio were both personal, one being from Anne Kingsmill's maid of honor days, and one being a verse-epistle to her husband in the early days of their married life. Titles in the octavo carry out this personal impression, for they give information as to places and dates which do not reappear in the titles of the folio. For its early date, its beauty as a manuscript, and its personal character, this volume is of unique interest. It is a satisfaction to feel that after un tracked wanderings the little book has at last its natural home in the library of the Earl of Winchilsea. �Of the fifty-two poems in the octavo all but five reap- pear in the folio, to which we therefore turn as the real storehouse of Lady Winchilsea's unpublished work. This folio manuscript is an unusually impressive volume. Its ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxxv ���size, its heavy calf binding, its fine, strong paper, its careful arrangement, and its expert, clerkly penmanship are a dis- tinct advance in dignity and stateliness of form over the fine-lady elegance of the earlier volume. And there was justification for this advance, for, to the contents of that vol- ume, Ardelia is now ready to add sixty-five new poems, two long plays, an important preface, and two commendatory poems. The book was not made up from time to time as poems were written, for poems susceptible of dates do not appear in chronological order. The arrangement is rather according to subjects from the mass of poems on hand, the religious poetry making one group, the songs another, the fables a third, and the plays a fourth. The poems of gen- eral or biographical interest, however, are not so classified, but appear in different portions of the book. It is difficult to assign an exact date to this manuscript, but it probably belongs early in the eighteenth century, for it contains at least one poem, that on the death of James II., written after, and probably very soon after, 1701. This fact, together with the omission of so important a poem as the one on The Hurricane in 1703, would seem to date the manuscript about 1702. The title-page of this volume was not repro- duced in the printed form, but is more interesting than the printed one because of the characteristic quotation from Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, June: �I never list presume to Parnass Hill But piping low, in shade of lowly grove I play to please myself, albeit ill. �A note in pencil at the foot of the page says, "Ardelia was Anne, Countess of Winchilsea. See her poems, printed by John Barber on Lambeth Hill ; and sold by John Mor- phew, near Stationer's Hall, London, 1713." The title given is, Miscellany Poems with two Plays by Ardelia, neither the title nor the note being like the corresponding items on ��� � ​Ixxxvi INTRODUCTION ���the published title-pages. The book contains numerous slight alterations in pencil, and since some of these notes are in the first person, it is probable that this manuscript was corrected by Ardelia herself. �The history of this folio is also of interest. During the last years of the life of Heneage, fourth Earl of Winchilsea, one of his constant companions was Mr. John Creyk, vicar of Eastwell and the earl's private chaplain. In the letters of the earl to Dr. Stukeley Mr. Creyk is described as "my friend, a learned gentleman and a lover of antiquities." On September 30, 1726, Mr. Creyk wrote to Dr. Stukeley: �This morning at five minutes before six I performed the dole- ful office of closing the eyes of my dear Lord Winchilsea who died of the Iliac passion. �Lord Hertford, in writing to Dr. Stukeley in April, 1727, says of Lord Winchilsea: �By his will he left me his Medals and his Sark Antiquities ; what he wrote upon them is in possession of Mr. Creyk ; whether he will publish them or not I do not know ; he has the disposal of everything. �In this fashion did the folio volume of poems come into the possession of the Creyk family, a second one of whom, also a Mr. John Creyk, held the vicarage of Eastwell from 1742 to 1745. Birch in his General Dictionary (1734-1741) said that a great number of Lady Winchilsea's poems still continued unpublished "in the hands of the Rev. Mr. Creake." And there they apparently remained. For a hun- dred and forty years the manuscript quietly outlived its successive owners in the Creake family, till some turn of the wheel of fortune brought their effects to public sale. Mr. Gosse, in Gossip in a Library, thus describes the manner in which the precious volume came into his possession: �In 1884 I saw advertised, in an obscure book-list, a folio vol- ume of old manuscript poetry. Something excited my curiosity, ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxxvii ���and I sent for it. It proved to be a vast collection of the poems of my beloved Anne Finch. I immediately communicated with the bookseller and asked him whence it came. He replied that it had been sold, with furniture, pictures, and books, at the dispersing of the effects of a family of the name of Creake. �The progress of the gentle lady from the sumptuous retire- ment of the library at Eastwell Park down the long proces- sion of the years had been lonely and unheralded, but it was surely a gracious and benignant fate that brought her at last to the company of her peers in the library of the man who had years before constituted himself her champion. And now two hundred years after the last words were added to the book by the pen of the scribe, the poems speak for the first time from the printed page. �In 1713 Lady "Winchilsea published a volume of selec- tions from her poems. There was apparently but one edition The Volume ^ this book, yet in the slow progress of publi- ofi7l3 cation two title-pages were used. The one �dated 1713 has, in the center of the page, a wood-cut of two flying cherubs bearing palm branches and laurel wreaths. The title reads Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions. Written by a Lady. The second title-page is dated 1714. It omits the cherubs. Written by a Lady is changed to Written by the Right Hon ble Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, a change showing probably a favorable reception of the earlier volumes, and certainly an advance in self-confidence. Of the eighty-one poems in this volume, forty-five are in neither of the manuscripts. It would not be entirely safe to assert that these new poems were all written between 1702 and 1713, but the four to which dates may be assigned do belong after 1708. �Still other poems by Lady Winchilsea are to be found scattered through various publications. In Steele's Miscel- lany, 1714, there is one poem, To Mr. Jervas, by the Countess ��� � ​Ixxxviii INTRODUCTION ���of W , that I have not found elsewhere. Another �unsigned poem, The Sigh, is by her, and between these two poems are four unsigned poems that cannot be certainly ascribed to Lady Winchilsea, but that resemble her work and may be by her. Her Lines to Prior appear only in Prior's Miscellaneous Works. To Mr. Pope is found in the early collected editions of his works. Four poems are to be found only in Birch's General Dictionary. The endeavor has been to make this edi- tion of the poems complete, but there may be fugitive poems that have not been discovered. There is a possibility that Birch did not quote all the new poems in the manu- script belonging to Lady Hertford, but of that manuscript, if it is still in existence, I can get no trace. A more valu- able possible discovery would be the letters of Ardelia. She was highly esteemed as a correspondent and she wrote much to various members of the Thynne family at Longleat, to Lady Tufton and her daughters, to her cousin, Lady Hatton, to her sister Dorothy, and to many others. The publication of such letters, if there are any extant, would almost certainly be a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the period of William and Mary and of Anne. ���Ill �LADY WI-NCHILSEA'S POEMS �What has called attention to Lady Winchilsea's work is not so much its intrinsic worth as its place in literary evolution. The chief attempt of the following brief study will therefore be to show the relation of her poems to those of other writers both before and after her day. . A minute study of Lady Winchilsea's versification is not imperative, but some points are of considerable interest in ��� � ​INTRODUCTION Ixxxix ���connection with the work of Dryden and of Pope. When Pope's Pastorals came out Lady Winchilsea was forty -eight �years old, and by far the greater number of her Versification J �poems had been written; hence her heroic- �couplets are to be judged by the standards of Dryden rather than by the stricter canons of Pope. Swift, for instance, boasted that his offensive triplet at the end of the City Shower in 1710 had killed triplets in English verse. Pope had likewise expressed his dislike for this break in the regu- larity of the couplet, and both Swift and Pope had made war on the Alexandrine. But Dryden, in the Preface to his JEneis (1697), had said of triplets and Alexandrines, "I regard them now as the Magna Charta of heroic poetry." Writing under the gis of Dryden, Lady Winchilsea would come strongly under the condemnation of Pope, for she used these two devices for varying the couplet so frequently as sometimes almost to destroy the couplet effect for a page at a time. Again, Dryden protests vigorously against the " shock of two vowels immediately following each other." "The army" leaves, he thinks, "a horrid, ill-sounding gap betwixt the words," while " th' army " is smooth. He there- fore almost invariably made use of " synalcephas," as he called elisions. Pope also disliked the hiatus but said that it was frequently to be preferred to elision, as, for example, "the old " is " smoother and less constrained" than "th' old." Lady Winchilsea holds by the canon of Dryden even when it gives rise to combinations so difficult as " t' attempt," u sh' extorts," or so broken in appearance as "th' o'r- shadowing," "t'o'r-match," but she rather inconsistently admits the hiatus sometimes when "the" is needed as filling for the verse, as �We wait on the event with ease. �In the endeavor to hold a line to ten syllables she follows the fashion of her day in preferring elisions to slurring or ��� � ​xc INTRODUCTION ���the substitution of the trisyllabic foot. To modern taste the custom of marking all metrical variations so that the eye as well as the ear must recognize them is annoying. The brackets that indicate triplets, and the apostrophes with which all elisions and contractions are marked seem to be especially in evidence in Ardelia's pages. Not only do all preterites and past participles where the "ed" is not to be separately pronounced have the "e" elided, but many trisyllables with an unaccented middle vowel have this vowel elided. Most forms of "to be" and "to have" are contracted with pronominal subjects, contractions so diffi- cult as "t'had," "t'have," "thou'dst," being not infrequent, while colloquial contractions, such as "'tis," "'twas," and "sha'nt" are much used even in serious verse. In "could" and similar words the "1" is elided, and "does" is written "do's," though for what reason is not apparent. �Pope also objected to expletives, but Dryden's more rapid and freer verse did not always disdain " these fillers- up of unnecessary syllables," while Lady Winchilsea certainly carried the easy device so far as distinctly to enfeeble her verse. �In one interesting point Lady Winchilsea's verse is at variance with both the theory and the practice of Pope and of Dryden. Dryden says in the Preface to his ^33neis, �It is possible, I confess, though it rarely happens, that a verse of monosyllables may sound harmonious, and some examples of it �I have seen. My first line of the ^Eneis is not harsh It �seldom happens but a monosyllabic line turns verse to prose, and even that prose is rugged and inharmonious. Philarchus, I remember, taxes Balzac for placing twenty monosyllables in a file without one dissyllable betwixt them. �And Pope says that monosyllabic lines unless "artfully managed" are "stiff, languishing, and hard." Now, mono- syllabic lines are of constant occurrence in Lady Winchilsea's verse. In short-line stanzaic forms or in octosyllabics a ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xci ���line made up of monosyllables is not unusual in the work of any poet, but even in such cases Lady Winchilsea's use of monosyllables is excessive. In the second stanza of The Wit and the Beau there are twenty-four monosyllables before the first dissyllable is reached. There are frequent octosyllabic couplets with no dissyllables, as, �Love when next his] leave he took Cast on both so sweet a look. �Cloath me O Fate, tho' not so gay, Cloath me light and fresh as May. �There are also frequent pentameter couplets with but a single dissyllable, and some without even the one dis- syllable, as, �Thus washed in tears, as fair my soul does shew As the first fleece, which on the Lamb does grow. �In the Poor Man's Lamb, a poem of fifty-seven lines, from which this couplet is taken, there are eight monosylla- bic lines besides the couplet. Single pentameter mono- syllabic lines may be counted by the hundred. Even Alexandrines are sometimes monosyllabic, as, �Urg'd him to keep his word and still he swore the same. �Though some of the monosyllabic lines have vowels and consonants so cunningly linked, or are so placed in connec- tion with others of different composition that the ear is not conscious of any break in the general harmony, yet often the recurring monosyllables give an unpleasantly staccato effect, or they make the verse seem childish. �In a consideration of Lady Winchilsea's rhymes their cor- rectness must, of course, be judged by the pronunciations current in her day. Certain variations from modern pro- nunciation are of especial interest. She almost invariably, for instance, rhymes a oi" or "oy " with " I." We find the follow- ing as regular rhymes: join, coin + fine; join'd, coin'd -f- kind; ��� � ​xcii INTRODUCTION ���enjoy + lie; joys, noise + devise ; oyl, spoil, toil + smile; spoil'd + wild. " Ea " and " ai " usually rhyme with " a," but with interesting variations. Meat, treat, seat and other similar words rhyme with cate, but also sometimes with meet ; we find reveal, conceal + vale, but also -j- feel ; said -f- made or + wed; sais (for say s) + plays; again + vain or + men (in which case it is usually written " agen"); tea and sea always rhyme with day; but seas rhymes with ease, which in turn rhymes with these, but easy rhymes with lazy. We find also pleas'd + rais'd or+seiz'd; leave + grave or-}- receive (but receive, conceit, seize, and similar words apparently often had in her poems the sound of "a") ; ceas'd, feast, east, and beast rhyme with rest. Divert + art, reserv'd + starv'd, wreck + back, wreck'd + pack'd are frequent combinations. Are is fre- quently used with care, and were with air; wind always rhymes with mind. We find shew + foe or -f- new, been + sin or + seen, fault (sometimes written f aught) -f- taught. The fact that all of these rhymes occur in Dryden and in Pope would indicate that the pronunciation of the day sanctioned them. �In general it may be said of Lady Winchilsea's rhymed heroics that, according to the standard of her days they were more than respectably correct, but that she never attained to a conception of the couplet as the unit of verse. She has almost no enjambment, but she mars the couplet effect, as Pope conceived it, by full stops in the middle of a line or of a couplet, by triplets and by Alexandrines, by the use of feminine rhymes and by combinations of couplets with stan- zaic effects. Nor does she have, except faintly, the antithesis of idea, the structural balance of line and phrase, and the sharp, closing word that mark the couplet in its highest development. When her heroic verse is good its excellences arise from vigor and ease rather than from minute finish. �Less than half of Lady Winchilsea's non-dramatic verse ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xciii ���is in the heroic couplet. Her dramas are in blank verse, she makes large use of octosyllabics, her hymns and songs show many stanzaic forms, and she has numerous pindaric and other irregular metrical combinations. In general the movement in all her lines is iambic, but An Enquiry after Peace is a pretty good example of the catalectic trochaic tetrameter, a line effectively combined with iambic tetrame- ters in the Petition for an Absolute Retreat. Anapaestic movement is found in Le Passion Vaincue, and in The Circuit of Apollo, where the anapaest is lightly handled for humorous effects. One song in this measure, Let the Fool still be true, only now and then catches the right anapaestic dance, but the Lines on a Punch Bowl, a slightly modified form of the same stanza, is a capital bit of versi- fication. Most of the stanzas are in tetrameter lines, but with trimeters and pentameters in frequent combinations. At least six stanzaic forms close with an Alexandrine, the sinuous length of which was apparently pleasing to Ardelia's ear. The stanza of The Sigh is the one most often used, but that of Life's Progress is more novel and used with more smoothness and grace. In several long stanzas there are sustained rhyme schemes that show a good deal of skill. �Of Lady Winchilsea's style not much need be said. " Poetry requires adornment," said Dryden, "and that is not to be had from our old Teuton monosyllables," and hence his avowed attempt to naturalize "elegant words" from classic authors. But Lady Winchilsea remained strangely content with the Teuton monosyllables. Her diction has absolutely no pedantry. She errs rather on the side ofl colloquialisms, and in her humorous poems she is not afraid! of slang. She seems always to seek for the simplest, plainest words she can find. Her sentences, too, are straightforward and intelligible. Not even her pindarics have involutions that really obscure the sense. She has no conceits, no ��� � ​xciv INTRODUCTION ���preciosity, almost no periphrases, and little poetic diction. She has surprisingly few metaphors or similes. There is no abundance or richness of descriptive epithets. It would, indeed, be difficult to find so large a body of work with less adornment. Frequently this extreme plainness of style results in long passages that are dull, commonplace, prosaic ; but now and then, when Lady Winchilsea is at her best, when her ideas are based on deep and rich experience, her honesty, her reticence, her inability to say any more than just what she sees or feels, flowers out into an exact, lovely simplicity like that of the facts she records. �Among Lady Winchilsea's earliest works are her transla- tions from the Italian. In spite of her association with Mary of Modena, she never gained more than a cursory knowledge of the Italian language, and she was obliged to make her translations through French or English versions. But it was, doubtless, while at court that she became acquainted with Tasso's Aminta, which so fascinated her that she at once secured a verbal translation and proceeded to turn it into verse. When, however, she had " finished the first Act extreamly to her satisfaction," and was convinced that the original " must be as soft and full of beauty s as ever anything of that nature was," her conscience asserted itself, pointing out that there was nothing of "a serious morality or usef ullnesse " in this soft Italian pastoral, and remanding her to the "more sollid reasonings" of her own mind. In the Preface to the folio she austerely recorded her repentance, and her determination to devote herself to strictly religious verse, but she is obliged to admit in a footnote that she was later beguiled into " a scene or two more," and when she selects poems for publication five " pieces " out of the Aminta are chosen. This translation and the tragi-comedy, Love and Innocence, seem to belong to the same early period of Ardelia's work. They are both ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xcv ���marked by a soft, vague emotionalism, a hurry and abund- ance of detail, a luxuriance of phrase, not characteristic of later poems. �Lady Winchilsea had a competent knowledge of the French language and literature, but none of her translations from the French shows the eager delight apparent in the extracts from Tasso. Many of the earlier translations from the French read like mere exercises in versification, yet even here her choice of passages is rather significant. Mathurin Regnier caught her attention not by his clever social satire, but by the rarer, half -pensive moralizing of his occasional verse, and she reproduced his somewhat stiffly allegorical Equipage. So, too, in Montaigne it is not the homely common sense, the sly wit, the shrewdness, that interest her as these quali- ties certainly would have done later in life, but she chooses for translation the fanciful love-song of the young cannibal chieftain. From Bussy-Rabutin she selects some of the rather cynical maxims on love. Another author in whom she was interested was Madame Deshoulieres, whose Idyls, especially Les Moutons, had gained for her the appellations of " la Calliope Frangaise^ ' "la dixieme Muse."" She was a Pre- cieuse, the leader of a brilliant salon, and at the same time " a faithful wife, tender mother, and generous friend," qualities of a sort to appeal to Ardelia. Perhaps, too, the cruel frankness with which Madame Deshoulieres was advised, on the appear- ance of her tragedy, to retourner a ses moutons, touched a sympathetic chord. The most important of the translations from the French is the fragment from Racine's Athalie. When this play was first acted in 1691 it was far from a success. In book-form in the same year it likewise met with neglect or disapproval. Boileau alone among critics prophe- sied its final victory, a victory that did not come till 1716. It therefore speaks well for Lady Winchilsea's insight and independence that she should, before 1713, choose it to ��� � ​xcvi INTRODUCTION ���translate. Probably the whole drama proved a task to which she was unequal, but the published fragment has real merit. The heroic couplet necessitated some padding; at any rate she regarded her material with the freedom inculcated by Dryden, and so did not hesitate to introduce fresh details suggested by her knowledge of the Bible story. There is inevitable a loss of vigor, a slight blurring of clear-cut out- lines, but in general the imperious dignity, the superstitious terror of the beautiful and wicked daughter of the painted Jezebel is well maintained. Doubtless the scriptural theme and the elevated tone of the drama made it especially con- genial to Lady Winchilsea. �" Our most vertuous Orinda " translated plays, hence Ardelia feels that her own dramatic attempts cannot be alto- gether reprehensible. Her two plays can be dated with some exactness. Her account of the writing of Aristomenes as given in the Preface definitely puts the composition of this play very soon after 1688. In the Epilogue she adds that it was written at "lonely God- meersham." The Prologue commemorates the first reading of the play to Lord Winchilsea. If this were the second earl, the tragedy was completed before September 1689, the date of his death. If the reference is to Charles, the young earl and it almost certainly is the reading of the com- pleted work was somewhat later, but in either case the actual composition belongs in 1688-91. Of Love and Innocence Ardelia says that it was written as an experiment to see whether she could carry through such an attempt; hence this play probably was written before Aristomenes. �The fable of Love and Innocence consists of a main plot and a sub-plot organically interwoven. The inter- Love and es ^ ^ suspense is well maintained, the double innocence denouement not occuring till within a page or two of the end of the play. The minor crises of each ��� � ​INTBODUCTION xcvii ������action are clearly marked and they contribute to bring about the catastrophe toward which each plot seems tend- ing. The deus ex machina, whereby the main plot escapes the apparently inevitable tragic end, is an opportunely furious storm by means of which the parted lovers are brought together, and saved, the one from suicide, the other from impending death. In the sub-plot the interfering providence is a soldier who awakens from a drunken stupor at just the time and place to arrest the villain and save the lady. The villain is the center of each story. His evil plans, if successful, would compass the destruction of both pairs of lovers. Most of the crises in the story are the forward steps of his machinations. The drama observes the unities of time and place. It is indeed, for a first attempt, a surprisingly well-knit piece of work. Of the characteri- zation less can be said. Innocence is too innocent, virtue too virtuous, villainy too villainous. There is no shading. Everything is marked off in black and white. Ardelia's " factious suttle villain " is not a success. He is sufficiently armed with evil deeds, but he fails to arouse interest. There are in his case none of the inciting, half-excusing causes apparent in Macbeth or Richard III., nor are we for a moment blinded by poetic charm or over-mastering person- ality. Blvalto is merely a vulgar, bad man who wishes to be revenged on his prince for a deserved rebuke, to steal the money of his confederates, and to kidnap a girl who detests him. His motto is: �To all my senses their full pleasure give, I care not how reproached or scorned I live. �He has not even intellectual supremacy in his low plots. He succeeds less through his own subtlety than through the abnormal stupidity or credulity of his victims. Even the greatness of his contemplated crimes seldom raises him out of the commonplace. His most vigorous speech comes when ��� � ​xcviii INTRODUCTION ���he rejoices over the probable outcome of his scheme to defame the virtuous Great Master of Rhodes: �Think how twill feed revenge, To see this Saint, this praying fighting Saint, This child of Fame, this cloud of Holy Incence, Exposed a profligate, and secret sinner, And like an o'er spent taper stink and vanish. �Capriccio, the comic character, is elephantine in his attempted quips and cranks. The comedy scenes are not offensive like those of Venice Preserved, but they are crude and amateurish. Cappriccio as a drunkard would never deceive the initiated. His tipsy jokes and thirsty raptures, and even his slang, have a premeditated, calculated air. There is no abandon. His best speech is the description of the bacchanalian and sensual orgy that broke out in Rhodes with most improbable celerity on the report of Aubusson's sin: �Tis a rare world, a brave world, A ranting, flanting, shining world; �***** �Never such a time in Rhodes, never such an example, �Every one quoting the Great Master, �And trooping on to sin, under his banner, �As if they were beating up volunteers for the Devil. �The triumph of innocence is typified by Aubusson the Great Master of Rhodes. For a nice courtesy, a delicately fastidious sense of honor, he could set the pace for Sir Charles Grandison, and in absolute, spotless, untempted vir- tue he walks in the footsteps of King Arthur. As a general he equals the splendid exploits of Dryden's heroes. As a ruler he is surnamed " The Just." But before an accusation of hypocrisy and secret sin he has no force, he attempts no defense. He withdraws like the traditional deer struck by the hunter's dart. He is irritatingly meek and inefficient. His plaintive, "Tell them I am not wicked," when accused, ��� � ​INTRODUCTION xcix ���and his triumphant, " I am not wicked," when his innocence has been attested, are without dignity or pathos. The tri- umph of love is illustrated by the Queen of Cyprus and her lover Lauredan. The women are more successfully repre- sented than the men. There is the real play of contending emotions in the portrayal of the Queen. Love, jealousy, hope, suspicion, despair, claim her in turn, and one of the most spontaneous passages in the play is expressive of her anger and grief when she discovers the deceptions that have induced her to banish her lover. In Blanfort we see pictured one of the astonishingly rapid emotional developments so frequent in contemporary tragedy. His hot-headed love for the queen reaches its height, and declines, and the old love for Marina reasserts itself with pristine vigor, all within seven hours. Marina is the most interesting personality in the play. She is a strictly romantic heroine. She would be an appropriate Sylvia, for instance, for the Daphne of the Aminta. She is apparently Ardelia in the stage of expe- rience represented by the Lines to Prior and the translations from Tasso. The character of* Marina reminds one of,/ Wordsworth's conjecture that Lady Winchilsea gave up love-poetry because she could not sufficiently temper its transports. The chief characteristics of Marina's love are its extravagance and self-abnegation. Her conception of " immortal blisse " is to have "her lover stretch at her feet for hours imprinting kisses on her hand by thousands." Soft, modest, tender by nature, poetic, sensitive, dreamy, she lives in her emotions, but in endurance of injuries inflicted by a false lover she is a very patient Griselda. With none of the dash, sparkle, and independence of Rosalind, with no abet- tors like Celia and the Fool, Marina is driven by love to a more strenuous enterprise than their holiday visit to the Forest of Arden. Alone, disguised as a man, she seeks a foreign court, consorts with rough soldiers, listens to the ��� � ​INTRODUCTION ���raptures of her recreant lover for the Queen, and meanwhile is defenceless before the tempestuous and vulgar wooing of the villain, Bivalto. Finally, last test of the romantic heroine, she can submit to poverty and shame, can give her lover up to a rival Fair One if he so decrees, and can die with prayers for their happiness on her lips. Most of the effective passages in the play have to do with Marina. Take, for example, this description of the love-nest at Rome where Blanfort won her heart: �The place, oh ! twas most fit for the occasion, Secret and blooming with the verdant spring ; A Grove of mirtles, compassed itt about, Which gave no more admittance to the Sun Then served to chear the new appearing flowers, And tell the birds itt was then: time to sing. A crystal spring, stole through the tufted grasse, Hasting to reach a fountain which itt fed, But murmur'd still, when 'ere it found a stop. �The description of Marina herself is almost as charming as Marvell's lines on Maria and not unlike them : �'Twas here, my lord, neer to this fountain's side, �I saw the Maid, the soft, the charming maid, �That seemed to give the sweetness to the place, �And in herself possesst all I've described, �The season's youth, and freshnesse of the flowers, �The harmony of all the tunefull birds, �And clearness of the Spring on which she gaz'd. �Marina is, in truth, a winning and pathetic character, and it is a pity that her fidelity could not have a better reward than the regained love of the handsome, inconstant, selfish Blanfort. �The play closes with a proper distribution of rewards. Punishments are not, however, so meted out. The villain, Rivalto, is romantically, and in the grand style, forgiven, and even furnished with funds. But he takes himself off with ��� � ​INTRODUCTION ci ���a not altogether unintelligible distate for the abundant, self- conscious, successful virtue blooming about him. �Aristomenes follows the fashion set by Dryden, Lee, and Otway, in presenting as its hero a noted historical character. �Most of the events and most of the personages Aristomenes ... ...., , �come with little change from the narrative of �Pausanias, but Ardelia successfully manipulates dates and places in such a way as to bring the more picturesque por- tions of the life of Aristomenes very nearly within the compass prescribed by the unities, and that without too great sacrifice of probability or ordered sequence. The escape of Aristo- menes from the cave by means of the fox, and his rescue through the assistance of Amalintha, the daughter of his enemy, are cleverly made parts of a single incident, and Amalintha' s act is motived by the love she bears Aristor, the son of Aristomenes. This love is also elaborated into one of the sub-intrigues, another being the love between Demagetus, son to the Prince of Rhodes, and Herminia, daughter to Aristomenes. The play is curiously constructed, all the complications of the two subordinate love-stories hav- ing reached an apparently happy termination before the fifth act, and the hero, likewise, having succeeded in his contest with Sparta. But then a new set of cir- cumstances brings about a tragic end. Ardelia calls this play "wholly tragical," but till near the end it certainly moves likes a tragi-comedy. The real purpose of the play is to present the character rather than the fortunes of Aris- tomenes. He is shown in success and in failure, in joy and in sorrow, always with the intent that he may prove himself the best of men and serve as an incitement to virtue and to wisdom. He is the Aubusson of Love and Innocence. We see him idolized by the soldiers, loved and reverenced by his children, adored by the people. In war he is a lion. In captivity he speaks out brave words of defiance. His ��� � ​cii INTRODUCTION ���wits are keen, his nerves steady, his personal resource unfailing. Just, generous, forgiving, with high spirit and passionate emotions, he yet is but an aggregation of virtues, not a man. �There are more reminisences of the heroic tragedy in this play than in Love and Innocence. The prison-scene between Aristor and Amalintha is not without some likeness to the wit-combats popular in Dryden's day. The long death-scene when Aristor, mortally wounded in the battle, conceals his wound from Amalintha, and Amalintha, likewise mortally wounded, conceals her wound from Aristor, until they die almost simultaneously, the promptness with which the nurse expires on seeing their dead bodies, the unanimity with which the others prepare to fall on their swords, carry us into just the air of extravagant unreality found in many of the tragic closing scenes of the heroic drama. On the stage Arisiomenes would offer bustle and variety, with its clamor and hurry of war, its pastoral love-making, its assem- blies of state, its prison-scenes, and its underground caves with spectral musicians; but it would hardly hold interest either by the plot or the characters. �Wordsworth commented on the lines: �Love's soft bands, �His gentle cords of Hyacinths and Roses, Wove in the dewy spring whem storms are silent, �as a characteristic passage, but more characteristic and quite as charming are the pathetic words of Amalintha: �But are there none, none that do Live and Love. x �That early meet, and in the Spring of Youth, �Uncrossed, nor troubled in the soft design, �Set sweetly out, and travel on to age, �In mutual joys, that with themselves expire. �Of great beauty is the lament of Aristomenes for his son Aristor : ��� � ​INTRODUCTION ciii ���The Sun will Keep his pace, and Time revolve, Rough Winters pass, and Springs come smiling on ; But thou dost talk of Never, Demagetus : Yet ere Despair prevails, retract that word, Whose cloudy distance bars the reach of thought. Aristor rather subtly analyzes the process of falling in love. He says to Amalintha: �I saw you Fair, beyond the Fame of Helen ; �But Beauty's vain, and fond of new applause, �Leaving the last Adoarer in despair �At his approach, who can but praise it better: �Whilst Love, Narcissus-like, courts his reflection, �And seeks itself gazing orf Bothers eyes. �When this I found in yours, it bred that passion, �Which Time, nor Age, nor Death, shall ere diminish. �Almeria in Ardelia to Ephelia says that Ardelia Speaks of Otaway with such delight As if no other pen could move or write. �and various passages emphasize her partiality for The Orphan and Venice Preserved, which came out when she was nine- teen and twenty-one years of age, at just the right time to" affect her taste and guide her efforts. Otway's tragic death occurred while she was still in London, three or four years before the composition of her plays. Her attention was thus strongly directed to him, and it is not strange that her work should betray his influence. She read Lee with admiration, but she could not have imitated the Rival Queens. Lee at his best and at his worst was out of her range. But the tenderness and delicacy of Otway, the pathetic sweetness of his verse, and his love of external nature, would all strike a responsive chord in her mind and heart. �Of the songs, eighteen appear in the first manuscript. �These are copied into the folio with seven or eight additions, �but the impulse to song- writing died early, nor �did Lady Winchilsea later set much value on �this portion of her work. Her acknowledgement of indebt- ��� � ​civ INTRODUCTION ���edness to Prior must refer to her conventional love-lyrics and her few convivial songs; and so far as dates go it is not impossible that Prior should have been influential in turning her attention to this sort of writing, for though his songs were not published till 1709, many of them were written as early as 1692, and they were well-known in manuscript. Doubtless these songs would find their way to Eastwell and they might so have caught Ardelia's ear and attuned it to novel melodies. The impulse must, however, have been one quickly acted on, for Ardelia's songs are very nearly con- temporary with Prior's. Beyond this suggestion or impulse, Prior's influence on Lady Winchilsea is not apparent. She calls him the master-singer, while she is but the bird crudely striving to imitate his ravishing notes ; but this is an overstate- ment. Certainly where Prior is most characteristic it is impossible that she should imitate him. She was too inflexi- ble, too serious, too deeply conscious of realities, to reproduce the abandon, the gayety, the dash, the moral indifference, of Prior's captivating appeals to Chloe. Let the Fool Still Be True and If for a Woman I Would Die have something of Prior's spirit. But though Ardelia touches with some deft- ness the philosophy of the butterfly lover who, inconstant �to one, �Can each Beauty adore, And love all, and love all, and love all, and forever, �she much more effectively represents the dark obverse, �Who make the hearts of men then: care Will have their own betrayed. �Ardelia's delicately imaginative appreciation of the Punch Bowl in the lines to Leslie Finch must free her from any suspicion of a puritanic rigor hardly known in her day, but her other poems on wine were never inspired by the god of mirth. The riotous glee of Prior's �'Tis the mistress, the friend, and the bottle, old boy ! ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cv ���was not only outside the compass of her lyre, but typified a bacchanalian excess that aroused her strongest disapproval. According to her theory, which is not without a certain novel pungency, wine makes of the heart " an inaccessible island " to which no nymph need try to win her way. �Ardelia's best songs are not in Prior's vein at all. The Losse, A Sigh, The Progress of Life, are marked by a strain of tender, subdued melancholy as natural to Ardelia as the flippant gayety of the conventional love-song was alien to her. To Grief, a little poem inspired by the troubles of 1688, has dignity, reserve, and genuine pathos. It is in sad little poems, the direct and simple outcome of her own expe- rience, that her lyric impulse finds most nearly adequate expression. �Lady Winchilsea's religious poems are nearly all direct paraphrases from Scripture passages, or they are so saturated i^ Religious with biblical phraseology as to read like para- �Poems phrases. In such poems the simplicity and �literary distinction of the original must always make the smoothest pindaric, or stanzaic, or heroic reproductions seem, to say the least, superfluous. But aside from this objection, Ardelia's religious poetry is of especial interest. The delight with which she wrote it resulted in an unusual vigor and variety of versification. And in mood and theme these poems contribute much to a statement of her philosophy of life. The bitter and almost contemptuous resume of human ambitions and attainments that characterizes the early work of both Mary of Modena's rhyming maids of honor seems to have been a genuine expression of opinion. The lament of the preacher was a view of life quite natural to detached and sober-minded observers in the reign of Charles II. But philosophic pessimism was not to be Ardelia's permanent mental attitude. Definite trials soon brought her face to face with spiritual experiences of a more personal sort. ��� � ​cvi INTRODUCTION ���Even in her gayest days she was incapable temperamentally of drowning grief by an acceptance of the epicurean philoso- phy. Her summary of this doctrine in The Wisdom of Solomon is probably her best heroic verse, but the doctrine itself is vigorously remanded to "th' industrious Devil." It was impossible that carpe diem should be her motto. It was her tendency to look before and after, and her tempta- tion when trials came was to fall into a state of distrust and despair. The shortness of life, the failure of the highest hopes, the prosperity of the wicked, the affliction of the righteous, were facts that stirred her to doubts and ques- tionings, and the supreme religious experience commemorated in her poems is her struggle to interpret and accept sorrow according to the Christian ideal. She persistently describes grief as the line by which every saint is measured, as the furnace fire that tries the gold of true piety, as the only "certain purifying roade" that leads to the Heavenly City. For the earthly life Ardelia's ideal is the via media. Accord- ing to her philosophy " all extreams to their own Ruine haste." To walk quietly and steadily, to hold oneself in hand, to realize that �No Joy a Rapture must create, No Grief beget Despair, �in a word, to have the sources of life independent of externals, is her creed. But in her pictures of the final happiness of victorious saints, her eagerness and longing find expression in phrases more nearly akin to the " enthu- siasm" of Watts and the Wesley s than to the formal morality of her own day. �In an Ode to Cowley Bishop Sprat said, �The Pindar has left his barbarous Greece, and thinks it just �Pindaric To be led by thee to the English shore ; �des An honour to him. �Pindar was, in fact, known to the seventeenth century only ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cvii ���through Cowley and his imitators. But Congreve said in his Discourse (circa 1706) that Cowley not only had not brought Pindar to England, but had, through his "irregular Odes," been the principal, though innocent, cause of the great crowd of deformed poems supposedly formed on Pindar. From this time on there was a reaction against the more extreme licenses of the pindaric form. But the school of Cowley held that the true pindaric marks were exalted themes, striking and unusual figures, abrupt transitions, impetuosity and excitement of mood, with an extreme com- plexity and irregularity of stanzaic structure and rhyme scheme. Lady Winchilsea's three Odes come between 1694 and 1703, hence they belong to the last period of Cowley's influence and just before the reactionary period set in. She called Cowley master, and theoretically she accepted his pindaric conventions; but her Odes, while irregular, are not markedly so, nor have they any of the "flights" of Cowley's Odes, nor any of the conceits. Lady Winchilsea had an inherent respect for order and coherence, and she could never quite trust herself to the stiff gale on which the Theban swan was supposed to stretch his wings. Hence her pindarics seldom " toil too much the reader's ear." The themes, moreover, are interesting. All is Vanity is, to be sure, timid, and too much a versified resume of her reading, but it is well-knit, and its fearless outlook, its dignity and controlled pathos, make it a promising early poem. The Spleen has none of the softness and grace of All is Vanity. It reads like more mature work. It is more keenly analytic, the outlines are sharper, and the material is more frankly based on observation and experience. The third ode, On the Hurricane, written in 1703, immediately after the disas- trous storm of November 27, 1703, is longer and much looser in structure than the other odes. It was evidently written in great haste and while the events of the storm ��� � ​cviii INTRODUCTION ���were still fresh in memory. Its chief value is in descriptive �passages which will be spoken of later. �At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a �new and- wide spread interest in fables. English prose ver- sions of ^3sop had held their place in popular �Her Fables �favor from the days of Caxton down, and the �Latin dSsop was in use in the schools, but it is to La Fon- taine that this striking revival of interest is chiefly due. The first six books of his Fables were published in France in 1668, other parts appearing in 1671, 1678, 1679, and the twelve books in 1694. Their popularity in England is shown by a remark of Addison, who, writing in 1711 in praise of fables, says that La Fontaine " by this way of writ- ing is come into vogue more than any other Author of our times." In 1692 appeared the first edition of Sir Roger L'Estrange's collection, in which he added to the fables of JEsop most of the new sets of fables that had been published abroad. In spite of the size of this extensive compilation it quickly passed through seven editions. L'Estrange's idio- matic and telling prose versions of the old tales were weighted down by "morals" and "reflexions," written purely from the point of view of a Tory statesman. In 1722 the ever-useful .ZEsop was used by the Rev. Samuel Croxall to establish Whig doctrines. These versions served to make the fables widely known, but it was not till the appearance of Gay's Fables in 1728 that there was any notable attempt to follow in English the versified fable of La Fontaine, and Gay has always been counted the progenitor of the race of verse fable-writers in England. It seems rather surprising that the first quarter of the eighteenth century should not have been a fable-writing as well as a fable-reading age. One is led to join in Shenstone's regret that Addison did not write fables, his purity of style, his dry humor, his easy manner, being qualities likely to insure success. Swift, too, ��� � ​INTBODUCTION cix ���would seem to have had some natural affinities for the fable form, but though he said there was no kind of writing he esteemed more, he was forced to acknowledge that he had "frequently endeavoured at it in vain." Gay agrees in counting the fable a most difficult kind of writing, saying that when he had completed one he was always in despair of ever being able to find another. It is, perhaps, this real difficulty under the apparent ease and naturalness that warned off many writers to whom the opportunity for effect- ive moralizing would have made the fable a seductive form. At any rate the fact stands that before Gay, Lady Winchilsea holds a solitary pre-eminence as an English fable-writer in the manner of La Fontaine. But two of her fables appear in the folio and none in the earlier manuscript. They were probably all written between 1700 and 1713. She formed herself almost entirely on La Fontaine, who had broken dis- tinctly with the literary tradition of his predecessors. It had been said that the ornament of the fable was no orna- ment, that brevity and conciseness were essential, that morals must be explicitly stated. But La Fontaine deliberately challenged this conception. He set himself to "egayer" the tales, to add to them something of novelty and adornment, to show that the fables would not resent les graces Iac6d6- moniennes. It was to this fable convention that Lady Winchilsea gave allegiance. She does not attempt, as did Gay, originality of invention, but relies as frankly on La Fontaine and L'Estrange as they had relied on their prede- cessors, and she follows her models with as widely varying degrees of fidelity as did they. Sometimes her fable is a mere translation of La Fontaine, holding as close to the original as verse translation would allow ; but in general the material is treated with great freedom. Two lines are expanded into as many pages ; there are large omissions and frequent condensations ; details are replaced by others giv- ��� � ​ex INTRODUCTION ���ing English local color; fables are broken in two; morals are added or altered; titles are changed. But, though influ- enced now and again by L' Estrange' s racy idiom, "the easy words," "the plain honest English" on which he prided himself, she holds throughout to La Fontaine's ideal of smooth, graceful, amplified narration. �Lady Winchilsea's most famous fable is The Atheist and the Acorn. This poem is a brief and picturesque version of La Fontaine's La gland et la citrouille. It is not an JEsopic fable but was based on a tale found in various forms in several sources open to La Fontaine. It excited much attention when it first appeared in French in 1671. Lady Winchilsea's change of the naive countryman into the sophisticated atheist involves much loss in the way of humor- ous contrast. But the French Garo and the English Atheist alike speak with scorn of the providential ordering that could assign acorns to lordly oaks and pumpkins to slender vines. And each, reclining under the tree in fatu- ous self-complacency, on being hit in the eye by an acorn, is led to justify the ways of God to man by the reflection that had the acorn been a pumpkin, not his eye only, but his precious brain itself would have suffered damage. Neither La Fontaine nor Lady Winchilsea nor any of their readers seemed to feel what Voltaire pitilessly pointed out, the "egoisme comique" of this argumentum ad hominem. On the contrary, Garo and the Atheist held their own for a cen- tury as apt illustrations of the creed formulated by Pope, "Whatever is, is best." �In spite of the fact that fables constitute one-third of her published work, Lady Winchilsea speaks lightly of them in general, calling them "childish Tales" by which "lazy Triflers" seek to purchase fame. And Wordsworth regretted that she should have spent so much time on an inferior species of poetry. Yet in a general survey of her work the ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxi ���fables are of importance for various reasons. They show her first in the field with a poetic form destined to great popularity in succeeding years; they reveal her opinions; they are vignettes of social satire ; and they are interesting examples of versification. �One line of reading in which Lady Winchilsea was much interested was the critical literature of her own day. Verse Boileau's L'Art Poeiique (1673) had stimu- �Criticism lated verse criticism in England as well as in �France. The Earl of Mulgrave's Essay on Satire (1679), his Essay on Poetry (1682), Roscommon's Essay on Trans- lated Verse (1681), his translation of Horace's Ars Poetica (1680), Sir William Soame's paraphrase and adaptation of Boileau's IS Art Poetique (1683), were verse renderings of the critical dicta counted most authoritative by the late seventeenth century writers. All of these, with the addition of Rapin and Madame Dacier, Lady Winchilsea knew well. Horace and the Stagirite are the critical law-givers, but Mulgrave is their prophet, and she finds his Essay on Poetry as "delightsome" as it is instructive. But it is Dryden, she thinks, who has laid open the very mysteries of poetry and made the whole art so clear that even females should be held accountable if they transgress the rules. �Of critical work on her own account Lady Winchilsea gives us little, but that little is not without interest. Poets should " teach while they divert" is her creed. Poetry may be allowed to "stir up soft thoughts," but this must be delicately and modestly done so as to cause no blushes, and poetry most successfully responds to its divine origin when it leads men "back to the Blissful Seats Above." Yet she seems to refer with some regret to the days of Charles II, when �Witty beggars were in fashion, And learning had o're-run the Nation. �The Merry Monarch, "so nice himself," and the " refin'der ��� � ​cxii INTBODUCTION ���sort" knew a good play when they heard it, but the literary standards of her own day are, she thinks, much coarser and less critical. The Miser and the Poet is a humorous arraignment of the age for its failure to give poets due recognition, a subject cleverly worked up in Ardelia's Return Home. In the Critic and the Writer of Fables she gives delightful little burlesques of the popular literary forms, the pastoral, the heroic poem, and the fable. In the closing lines of this poem, operas and panegyrics are coupled as the two forms of literature most certain of pleas- ing. This fling at the Italian opera is but an early expres- sion of the critical attitude that found full statement in the Dunciad, and that contributed to the gusto with which The Beggar's Opera was received. Panegyric, though that was her own fertile vein, always awakened Ardelia's laughter. When she went to Apollo once for aid, his excuse for not loaning Pegasus was that this weary steed had been of late so spurred through thick and thin in panegyric, that he could no longer endure the bit a sarcastic reference, doubtless, since the poem was written in 1689, to the poeti- cal tributes incident to the revolution. In comedy Lady Winchilsea preferred Etheredge and Wycherley because they had more " sense and nature " than their successors a literary judgment enunciated, however, before Congreve had begun to write. In tragedy Dryden, Lee, and Otway, especially Otway, are her masters. It is a pity that Lady Winchilsea's critical remarks are so few, for they show con- siderable acumen and an unexpected cleverness in playfully sarcastic analysis. �Dr. Johnson calls The Splendid Shilling of Philips " a mode of writing new and unexpected," and it is probable Fanscomb ^ na ^ Philips's poem, which came out in 1701, �Barn gave Lady Winchilsea the hint for her Fans- �comb Barn, which, since this poem does not appear in either ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxiii ���the octavo or the folio manuscript, was probably written after 1701. The novelty of Philips's poetical experiment in applying the splendid diction and elaborate sentence struc- ture of Milton to the description of the trivial or vulgar events of ordinary life caught Lady Winchilsea's fancy, and she made use of the Miltonic blank verse to portray the tramps that congregated in Fanscomb Barn. Her poem is almost as successful a parody of Milton's style as is The Splendid Shilling, and the amusing contrast between the style and the subject-matter is as well sustained. But the chief importance of Lady Winchilsea's poem is in the subject- matter itself. Stropeledon and Bugeta with their "hoof- beating" compeers of the beggars' fraternity would find no worthy comrades till they could visit the ale-house of Ramsay's Maggie Johnstone, and they would not feel quite at home till they could consort with their kith and kin, the jolly beggars of Burns. Lady Winchilsea is as free as Ramsay or Burns from any display of moral censorship toward her tramps. They lie and steal and drink and brag with a self-complacency equal to that of the highwaymen and trulls of Gay's Beggar's Opera. Stropeledon counts mendicancy a profession with inevitable privations and hard- ships, but with well-earned hours of luxurious repose. He and his Bugeta grow confidential and boozy over their cups, recount their lawless deeds, and finally fall down in a drunken stupor, without a word of condemnation from their lady chronicler. A subsidiary little picture of the children drinking sugared water at Pickersdane Well is also sympa- thetically drawn, and approaches in effectiveness the descrip- tion of the children at their sports by Shenstone in The School-Mistress. We can hardly say with Dr. Harris, pre- bendary of Rochester and rector of Winchilsea, that both Pickersdane Well and Fanscomb Barn have been "dignified" by the pen of a "notable Kentish Poetess;" but we can say ��� � ​cxiv INTRODUCTION ���what is far more significant, and that is that the notable poetess wrote the first of modern tramp-poems and gave the earliest effective modern picture of English peasant school- children, and that she was one of the first to write in blank verse of the Miltonic pattern. �During Lady Winchilsea's early maid of honor days the chief literary sensation in the court circle was Dryden's �satires and the ensuing host of lampoons and Satiric Work ... XT �libels. No personal portraits so masterly and �so malicious as those by Dryden had before appeared in English literature. Nor during Lady Winchilsea's period of poetical production did any other portraits so masterly appear, but the malice remained as the possession of all the Grub-street race. There were no more great satiric poems till Pope, but there was, in the meantime, plenty of snarling and snapping. The detracting, censorious spirit was pervasive. Against this Ardelia uttered her protest. Indeed, she rather plumed herself on the fact that her own resentments had never but once lured her into personal satiric verse. And this, too, in spite of the tempting inner consciousness that she could tag rhymes in abuse of her neighbors as well as another if she would but set her hand to such business. Yet Lady Winchilsea was much more of a satirist than she was willing to admit, for besides the one satiric poem to which she confesses, there is a vein of satiric comment giving tang and pungency to many poems. �The more we study Lady Winchilsea's work, the more certain it becomes that, in her youth at least, the phrase "the gentle Ardelia," could never have been rightly applied to her. Life at Eastwell brought serenity, but her young womanhood seems to have been one of smothered revolt. Bred at court, she was yet mentally at war with contempo- rary social, religious, and literary ideals, and, on a surprising number of topics, she expresses herself with caustic severity. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxv ���The Fair Sex, and especially the dominant ideal concern- ing woman's work and woman's education, was the theme most certain to touch her pen with bitterness. In her famous Preface of 1703, Mary Astell says: �In the first place, Boys have much Time and Pains, Care and Cost bestowed on their education, Girls have little or none. The former are early initiated in the Sciences, are made acquainted with Antient and Modern Discoveries, they Study Books and Men, have all imaginable encouragement; not only Fame, a dry reward now- a-days, but also Title, Authority, Power, and Riches themselves which purchase all things, are the reward of their improvement. The latter are restricted, frown'd upon, beat, not for but from the Muses; Laughter and Ridicule that never-failing Scare-Crow is set up to drive them from the Tree of Knowledge. But if in spite of all difficulties Nature prevails, and they can't be kept so ignorant as their masters would have them, they are stared upon as Mon- sters, Censured, Envyd and every way discouraged, or at the best they have the Fate the Proverb assigns them: Virtue is praised and starved. �These words must have been read with secret satisfaction by Lady Winchilsea, for she had, years before, confided similar ideas to that gilt-edged, morocco-bound, diffident first manuscript of hers, and had summed up the situation in the epigrammatic phrase, "Women are Education's and not Nature's Fools." To read, to write, to think, to study these, she indignantly exclaims, are tabooed lest they should cloud a woman's beauty, and exhaust the time more profit- ably spent in adorning herself for conquest. She resents the commonly received opinion that dressing and dancing, fashions and theaters, are woman's only legitimate interests. She resents with equal emphasis the ultra-domestic ideal. She frankly declares that she, at least, was never meant for "the dull manage of a servile house." Her own tastes are of the simplest. Of her table she asks little except that it be "set without her care." She can dispense with "orto- lane," "treufles," and "morilia," but leisure and a free ��� � ​cxvi INTRODUCTION ���mind are necessities. For fashion she cares not at all, and discussions concerning brocades and laces infinitely weary her. A new gown in spring, when the lilies and the birds put on fresh attire, quite satisfies her ambition in the way of apparel. Against the so-called feminine accomplishments of her day she puts herself definitely on record. She simply will not, she declares, �in fading silks compose, Faintly, the inimitable Rose, Fill up an ill-drawn Bird, or paint on Glass, The Sovereign's blurred and undistinguished face, The threatening Angel and the Speaking Ass. �The courageous expression of tastes so unconventional inevitably made Ardelia the target for ill-natured jests, and the jests bore their natural fruit in bitterness of spirit. It is, however, the prejudice against women authors of which Ardelia is most acutely conscious. During her memorably unhappy visit to London, shortly after her retirement to Eastwell, the caustic social commentary that fell trippingly from the gay Almeria's tongue reached its unendurable climax when that young gossip pointed out with a sneer, " a poetess! a woman who writes, a common jest!" Then Ardelia's prudence and politeness give way to an indignant sense of justice. "Why," she exclaims, "should this poetess be a common jest? Does she make public boast of her skill ? Does she write a song so popular that the car-men sing it, and then allow her name to be flourished above it ? Does she cause herself to be painted with a laurel wreath and with commendatory verses encircling her picture? Does she write lampoons? " So the badgered Ardelia, stung by the secret knowledge of a tell-tale portfolio of rhymes down at Eastwell, frees her mind for the nonce. But she can never quite escape the benumbing conviction that a woman who delights in the groves and secret springs of the muses, who thus "deviates from the known and common ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxvii ���way," who dares to trace "unusual things," will be con- sidered an intruder on the rights of men, a presumptuous creature whom no excellence of work can justify, and in many a dark moment she is ready to confess that "a woman's way to charm is not by writing." But when the splenetic mood is past she brings forth all sorts of defensive arguments, her best weapons being always drawn from the arsenal of the Old Testament. It was, in fact, almost imperative to carry on the contest with Hebrew arguments, for the foes to the advancement of women had from the out- set massed their forces in the Garden of Eden. This sort of discussion is well illustrated in some contemporary anonymous letters between a certain Chloe and Urania who are discussing woman's education. Chloe, being a repre- sentative Fair One, cannot argue for herself, but she repeats with pretty docility, and much apparent loss of force, the arguments of her lover, Lysander. His reasoning is to the effect that "in the Beginning Woman was created for Obedience and Man for Rule" but that if to the beauty of woman reason should be added, not Deity itself could main- tain the order of precedence. Urania in answer merely expresses a laconic surprise that Lysander should be so inti- mately in the secret counsels of the Almighty. But Mary Astell takes up, in a minute and exhaustive manner, the texts commonly quoted against female education, and she reaches the comforting conclusion that the " Bible is for, and not against us, and cannot, without great violence done to it, be urg'd to our prejudice." And Lady Winchilsea earnestly reminds her readers that holy virgins joined in the song when the ark was brought back ; that conquering David was welcomed by a bright chorus of women; that Deborah led the fainting hosts of Israel to victory, and so on through the convincing proofs that if Ardelias wish to write pindarics they should be given pen and ink. ��� � ​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." ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxix ���The picture of the belles at Tunbridge in 1706 is of the most sarcastic sort. The blase' indifference of the men, and the too willing, too grateful reception of slight masculine attentions on the part of the maidens aroused Lady Win- chilsea's indignation. The pert, shallow, forward hoydens of the fashionable watering-place were even more obnoxious to her than the trifling fops whose admiration they were courting. Especially open to Ardelia's scorn is the wife of the rich parvenu, who, without birth or breeding, displays her husband's wealth by wearing more gold and lace than a duchess. In her rooms, which are "drest anew at every Christ'ning," �Grinning Malottos in true Ermin stare, �The best Japan, and clearest China-ware �Are but as common Delft and English Laquer there. �Such is the contemptuous triplet with which Ardelia dis- misses this lady's pretension to gentility. The foolish old owl in the fable is a playful but searching portrayal of many a doating mother. The wrangling woman with the " eternal clack " in Reformation is the typical vulgar scold and busy-body. And so on through the slight portraits which show that Ardelia, howsoever "gentle," had yet a keen eye and quick word for all that fell below her standards. �A second general topic never touched upon without severity is the mobile. Lady Winchilsea was an aristocrat and a royalist. She always deprecates an appeal to the public. " How can we," she exclaims, �with their opinions join, Who to promote some interest would define, The People's Voice to be the Voice Divine. �She pities the man of sense who must be judged by a " Crowd of Fools." "The Vulgar Throng," she says, must not be cajoled or reasoned with, but governed " by stated laws." L'Estrange searched through the beast-world for ��� � ​cxx INTRODUCTION ���similitudes expressive of his detestation of the mob. They are asses, and asses they will be, no matter who rides them ; they are " mungril curs" that bawl, snarl, and snap; they are " hares that wish to secure universal parity by leveling all beasts to their own state of weakness," and so on. With less boldness and less contempt, Lady Winchilsea is entirely in accord with Sir Roger's views. �" Pocket- Arguments " likewise quickly irritated Ardelia. The man who grants �no worth in anything But so much money as 'twill bring, �the man whose interests are in the price of corn and stand- ing market laws, are outside the pale of her sympathies. Marriage based on considerations of dowry or jointure is offensive to her. In her judgment an impecunious scholar always outranks the successful business man or even the successful professional man. The best illustration of this attitude is the poem to Dr. Waldron, who had given up a fellowship at Oxford that he might make a better income through the practice of medicine. Ardelia admits that money, that sordid plant, does not flourish near the odor of the bays, but she cannot understand how any hope of gain could induce a wit to leave Oxford, " that Eden to the Fruit- ful Mind." Dr. Waldron's accomplishments did not extend apparently beyond gay discourse, witty extempore effusions in verse or prose for table-books, and an occasional poem in some Miscellany, but even this dilettante consorting with the muses was superior to "druggery," even though druggery led to "glittering profit." Ardelia's satiric list is really a long one and comprises "rallying wits," " greedy parasites," flatterers when they " fawn and leer," knavish lawyers, travel- ing foj5s, and such social bores as buffoons, "mimmicks," " quoters of old saws," and retailers of second-hand jokes. Her antipathies were lively and her insight acute, yet her satire ��� � ​was seldom personal, and seldom really acrimonious. Much of it is in the fables and even those with the most caustic morals are often marked in the narrative portions by a gayety, a humorous lightness of touch, and a tolerance far enough removed from a genuinely pessimistic view of human nature.
The satiric poems are enlivened by many realistic details of value to the student of social life in the years from 1680 to 1714. Ardelia had almost as keen an eye for manners and customs, for personal idiosyncrasy, for trifling indications of moral standards and motives, as she showed later in her treatment of external nature.
That Lady Winchilsea, in her attitude toward external nature, was so far in advance of her age as to be isolated from it, is put beyond dispute by a detailed study of her poems. This forms, in fact, her principal claim to the notice of posterity.
Her preference for the country and her correspondingly strong dislike for the city find emphatic expression in Ardelia's Answer to Ephelia, about 1690, and the Preface, about 1702. The "Almeria" of the first of these poems belongs to the true apostolic succession of poetical heroines who abhorred the country. Isabella in Dryden's Wild Gallant says, "I cannot abide to be in the country like a wild beast in the wilderness." Harriet in Etheredge's Man of Mode counted all beyond Hyde Park a desert, and she said that her love of the town was so intense that she hated the country even in tapestry and in pictures. Sylvia in Shadwell's Epsom Wells assures the boor, Clodpate, the apostle of "a pretty innocent country life," that people really live nowhere but in London, for the "insipid dull being" of country folk cannot be called living. The list could be increased indefinitely and goes far down into the eighteenth century. Pope's "fond virgin" whose unhappy fate com​cxxii INTRODUCTION ���pelled her to seek wholesome country air, Shenstone's lady who "could not breath anywhere else but in town," Little- ton's fair maiden to whom country life is " supinely calm and dully innocent," Young's Fulvia who preferred "smoke and dust and noise and crowds " to " odious larks and night- ingales," Browne's Celia who makes her banishment from the city endurable by not giving herself up to " dull land- scape" but by thinking of the country as the "town in miniature" these ladies represent in varying phases the traditions of their fathers, and Almeria is legitimately of their kin. She secretly ridicules Ardelia's "rural tastes" and "rustic" clothes, and wonders how anyone can leave "the beaux-monde and the dull country love," yet, "if but an afternoon 'twould cost," she really could bring herself to visit Ardelia in the country, " to quit the town, and for that Time be lost." The attitude of these ladies toward the coun- try was but the attitude of their time. Ardelia's feeling toward city and country becomes, then, novel in the extreme. In the midst of all the social delights Almeria can offer her, she longs for her "groves and country walks" where "trees blast not trees nor flow'rs envenom flow'rs," and she returns to Eastwell with a haste and pleasure hardly to be under- stood by her contemporaries. The antithesis between the town and the country was not so sharply denned by any succeeding poet before Cowper. �The importance of Lady Winchilsea's contributions to the poetry of external nature depends not so much on the The Mountains number as upon the characteristics of the and the Sea poems that have to do with the out-door world. In some respects these characteristics are like those of her contemporaries. The mountains and the sea, for instance, are treated by her in conventional fashion. She uses the sea in similitudes where storms rage and where tides swal- low up brooks, much in the manner of Dryden and Waller. ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxxiii ���There are no good descriptions except, possibly, this line on the ocean in a calm, �For smooth it lay as if one wave made all the sea. �The treatment of mountains is equally ineffective. In her Hymn she does, however, address mountains as "Ye native altars of the Earth," a phrase which in the midst of utilitarian and theological objections to mountains as " huge, monstrous excrescences of nature," as mere "barriers between one sweet plain and another," as "wild, vast, undigested heaps of stone and earth," " great ruins, the result of sin," has a strangely exalted and Hebraic sound. �Dryden and his followers used storm similes with weari- some frequency and monotony, but storms themselves were not counted poetical property till Thomson called attention to them in The Seasons, after which they became part of the stock in trade of every poet- aster who could make the elements crash and hurtle. Lady Winchilsea's one storm is her description of the hurricane that swept over England in November, 1703, devastating the southern counties, uprooting fine old trees, unroofing palaces, destroying a third of the navy, and causing the death of fifteen hundred seamen. Eastwell was within the storm radius, and the poem is doubtless based on actual obser- vation. This poem was subjected to much revision in the manuscript, but even in the printed form it is still unequal and disjointed. It was written too near to the event. It is marred by much that is local, personal, temporary in inter- est. The best passages are descriptive of external nature pure and simple, the fierce and turbulent winds, the ruined trees, the storm-beaten birds. But one point calls for especial comment here, and that is the emphasis put on the sounds of the tempest. They are so appalling and tremen- dous as to " wound the listening sense." They have the effect ��� � ​cxxiv INTRODUCTION ���of a battle symphony. The winds beat against solid sur- faces with a drum-like resonance, they are their own fifes and clarions ; each cavity and hollow tube becomes a trumpet. Crude though the poem is, it now and then has in it some- thing of the stress and strain, something of the sweep of the storm itself. �No object in inanimate nature attracted Lady Winchilsea more strongly than trees. A charming early poem is called simply The Tree. The kind of tree is not named, though it was probably an oak. But more important than botanic exactitude is the impression made by the regal personality of this tree with its imposing height and wide hospitable spread of branches. Destruction by the ax of the common workman would be degradation. Fierce winds alone are of a rank worthily to compass its fall. And the news of such an event should resound from the earth to the congregated clouds, while in the end con- suming flames would be but as the funeral pyre of ancient heroes. The poem has no "unforgettable lines," but the conception of the patriarchal tree is not paralleled in kind before Christopher Smart's oak-tree in the Immensity of the Supreme Being. �In later poems this interest in trees is a frequent note. Ardelia's petition for an absolute retreat, �Mongst Paths so lost and Trees so high, That the world may ne'er invade Through such windings and such shade, My unshaken Liberty, �was practically answered at Eastwell. During her first summer there she was so enthusiastic in her pleasure that she was constantly overtaxing her strength by long walks through the forest-like park. Its solitude and beauty gave her inexplicable joy. Her released romantic tendencies found suddenly most happy activity. The silent forest ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxxv ���became the home of legend and myth, a realm of Spenserian enchantment. For hours at a time she wandered about alone, peopling the shades with fawns and sylvans, convert- ing lovely nooks into the secret haunts of nymphs and fairies. Toward individual trees or groups of trees her feeling is almost as intimate as that of Lowell. She addresses them as " numerous brethren of the leafy kind," she applies the adjective "fraternal" to a clump of oaks in quite the manner of Wordsworth in his description of the yew-trees, the ' ' fraternal four of Borrowdale." In recounting the results of the great storm, the frustrated ambitions of the beech, the oak, and the pine are sympathetically recorded along with human fatalities. The destruction of a fine old grove at Eastwell is narrated with dramatic liveliness. The winds sigh through the sentenced trees. The household awaits in dismayed silence the catastrophe it cannot avert. Even the hired clowns refuse at first to lift the ax. But when to his word of command the master adds his example by striking the first blow, all follow suit, and presently the splendid trees lie helpless in the field of their birth. This disaster occurred before Ardelia went to Eastwell, but she commemorates it with a sense of personal hurt and outrage, and one of her reasons for gratitude to Charles was that he replanted the denuded field. �Lady Winchilsea frequently "moralized" her trees, but on the way to the moral we find much excellent description, the outcome of first-hand observation. Willows, for instance, stand for youth, but we discover likewise that they are smooth of rind, straight of bough, moist of fiber, that they throw out at the top a mass of leaves, that they gather in social ranks along little streams. One forgets the moral of the dead tree in the hedge, in looking at the picture of the tree itself. Mischievous, entangling vines encompass it. Dismal-flowered night-shade, and "honesty" with its feath- ��� � ​cxxvi INTRODUCTION ���erd down curl from the topmost bough, while the honey- suckle climbs by its dead branches to the thorn-trees above. The oak is used as a symbol for age, but it is not the pathos of man's declining years that stays in the memory; it is rather the pathetic dignity of that " lonely stubborn oak" �whose �distorted trunk Sapless branches bent and shrunk, �show the force of the imperious whirl-winds it has defied. �Lady Winchilsea's poems show a delight in flowers, but �not at all the conventional delight. Her chief pleasure in �flowers arose from their odor. That her olfac- �Flowers �tory sense was especially acute may be inferred from the description of the physical effect of some penetrat- ing odors, as that of the jonquil. She faints beneath the "aromatic pain." And she is as pronounced as Cowper in her protest against the perfume so lavishly used by the beaux and belles of London. But of the gener- ally diffused fragrances wafted from gardens or fields she speaks frequently and with great pleasure. In the descrip- tions of the wilderness at Longleat, the entire stress was put on the ravishing odors from woodbine, jasmine, Hes- perian broom, and the Assyrian rose, which were so cun- ningly arranged that only by detecting their separate odors could one find his way through the maze. She observes, also, that odors are more powerful on hot days, especially "piny" odors, and in the evening. The colors of flowers did not so strongly attract her. Most of her color words have to do with textures and gems. But even in colors she is much richer than most of her contemporaries who describe flowers. One of her most interesting notes is a defense of the common white lily against the opinion of commentators who think "that flower not gay enough" to stand in the famous comparison of Solomon's attire to the lilies. But no ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxxvii ������flower, she contends, "can have a greater luster than the common white lily." �On the whole, Lady Winchilsea's references to flowers are original, suggestive, and pleasing. The glowing poppy, the bright blue flowers among the standing corn, the bramble-rose on the banks of the stream, the sleepy cowslip in a sheltered nook, the foxgloves that at eventide checker the brakes with pale red, are not flowers indigenous to early eighteenth century poetry. In novelty of choice, in aptness of phrase, and in directness and simplicity of effect, these little flower pictures are of unique value in the poetry of their day. �The use of birds in Lady Winchilsea's poetry is slight, but of real significance. There is one sympathetically drawn picture of a bird by chance imprisoned in a room. In its fright it dashes itself against the ceiling, beats with its wings on the window-panes, or flutters about in "endless circles of dismay," till some kind hand restores it to "ample space, the only heaven of birds." Equally direct and sympathetic is the description of the birds in the great storm. The picture of the "wide free sky," " where none from star to star could call the space his own," the "unentailed estate of birds," renders more effect- ive the accompanying picture of the birds bewildered by the storm, beaten to earth by rough blasts, or tossed about by the whirlwind. �Lady Winchilsea's owl in the fable is by no means a mere reproduction of La Fontaine's. She amplifies his brief generalized description into many homely details. The curiously shaped beak, the high shoulders, the ruff around the neck, the frowsy lids, the waddling steps, the dull eye under its greenish film, are details that in the poetry of the day certainly mark an unusual attempt at minute, realistic portrayal of a bird. She speaks of an "ancient yew" that ��� � ​cxxviii INTRODUCTION ���has for three hundred years belonged to "lineal Heirs" of the owl tribe, and one of the pleasing night-sounds that fehe records is the clear "hollowing" of the owl from a tree 'famed for her delight." All of this bears the mark of first-hand and interested observation, as do likewise the two descriptions which the young rat and his dam give of the cock, in the fable The young Bat and his Dam, the Cock and the Cat. In Jealousy the Rage of a Man there is a delightfully fresh and vivid description of the courtship of two doves. The male bird puts on his most enticing airs while the female carelessly shifts her ground and indifferently pecks away at the scattered grain, but on the appearance of a rival her seeming coldness disappears, her feathers become sleek as she prepares for a fight, and in a rage she attacks the parti-colored neck of the new favorite. The dove had been long poetically relied upon as an image of cooing, con- jugal content, hence this picture of a jealous, fighting dove is as original as it is effective. The observation in the little poem is strikingly exact. Wordsworth himself could not find fault with it. �The nightingale is immemorially the poet's bird. English verse has never failed to give enthusiastic, if somewhat monotonous, recognition of Philomela's claims. From Chau- cer, Spenser, Sidney, Lyly, Shakespeare, Carew, Crashaw, Milton, Marvell, even Dryden, Lady Winchilsea might have compiled an anthology of nightingale poetry. From these poets the characteristics of the traditional nightingale are easily deducible, and it is interesting to discover in how far Lady Winchilsea's poem The Nightingale is in accord with the work of her predecessors. She is almost the only poet in the list to give no note of the time of the song, but she is at one with Lyly and Milton in mentioning spring as its season. Her nightingale apparently sang in May. The sweetness of the song is, of course, generally observed, but ��� � ​Lady Winchilsea is curiously like Carew and Crashaw in her attempt to give a more exact description of its musical quality. As she listens to the long, pure notes, the ecstasy of pleasure becomes almost a pain, and she implores the bird to "let division shake her throat," a seventeenth century phrase for the production of runs and trills. Carew speaks of the bird's "sweet dividing throat," and Crashaw says that she pours
through the sleek passage of her open throat A clear un wrinkled song; then doth she point it by short diminutions.
What Mathew Arnold calls the "wild, deep-sunken, old-world pain" of the song seldom escapes the ear or the classically trained memory of the poet. The early concrete embodiment of this grief, a bird singing with a thorn "uptill her breast," as given by Sir Philip Sidney, and several times by Shakespeare, is followed by Lady Winchilsea. The new point in Lady Winchilsea's poem is her way of listening to the song. The traditional interpretation of the "thorn" had always been some love-longing, but to her it is the poet's despair in the presence of a musical perfection to which he cannot attain. In a faint, but sweet and real way, Lady Winchilsea's emotional experience in listening to the nightingale was like that of Shelley with the sky-lark. She traces the song from point to point, she listens with rapture, and has a consciousness that such strains, " taught by the for- ests," are beyond human skill. In none of the earlier nightingale poems does the human emotion arise thus out of the song. The general plan is to use the song to illustrate, to augment, or to assuage some human emotion. But Lady Winchilsea's experience wherein the song, heard first for its own sake, creates the emotion and suggests the human anal- ogy, is exactly like that of Shelley with the sky-lark, Words- worth with the daffodils, and Burns with the mouse or the daisy.
​cxxx INTRODUCTION ���The song of the bird in Eastwell Park seems, it must be confessed, tame, circumscribed, even thin, when compared with the rich, voluptuous, soul-enthralling notes of the nightingale that a century and a quarter later sang in the garden in Hampstead Heath and moved the poet Keats to thoughts of easeful death. But when considered in connec- tion with its predecessors, and especially its contemporaries, Lady Winchilsea's poem becomes a remarkable production. �Of other animals than birds little is said except in the fables. Their first duty there is loyalty to the moral, and they are only secondarily independent animals, but they are often touched off with a sly, gay humor that makes some of them interesting even apart from the fable. �The traditional lover who flees to the shades to hide his �mortal wound, who sees nothing in nature but rocks and �thorns and other painful reminders of Sylvia's �cruelty, and who, therefore, with rare good �sense, goes back to the city, preferring to die by realities �rather than by shadows, is described in By Love Persu'd. �And in Aristomenes are examples of the subordination of �nature to man, as when Climander hears Herminia utter the �word "love" and exclaims: �Oh! speak it once again, and the fond Vine Shall with a stricter grasp embrace the Elm, Whilst joyful birds shall hail it from the Branches. �This reads like a reminiscence of Tasso's Aminta, and is an unusual note in Lady Winchilsea's poetry. Even in the description of Marina the lover said that she seemed to give all the sweetness to nature, not that she did give it, and the lament of Aristomenes for his son distinctly recognizes the independence of Nature. It is especially in elegiac verse that Lady Winchilsea's conception of the relation between man and nature is shown to be widely different from the ideas then dominant. In the customary elegy, Nature is ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxxxi ������represented as "convulsed with grief" at the death of the illustrious human being. The rivulets are flooded with tears of the water-gods, brows of hills are furrowed by new streams, the heavens weep, birds droop, lilies hang their heads. Dr. Johnson characterizes such passages as " sylla- bles of senseless dolour." Their grotesque extravagance and unreality become even more apparent when they are put side by side with the direct recognition of the truth, the daring, almost painful frankness in such lines as those in which Wordsworth declares the indifference of Nature to the death of sweet Lucy, whose body is �Rolled round in Earth's diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees. �The transition from the artificial subordination of nature to man, to the conception of nature as a vital and separate entity, was the slow process of a century. Lady Winchil- sea's place in this historical sequence becomes then of especial significance, when we find in her poems not only a forecast of the modern thought, but a protest against the conventional idea. In an elegy commemorative of her relative, Sir William Twysden, she says she rejects the custom- ary invocation to flocks and fields and flowers to join her in her grief because to her mind it is false and but a poet's dream that eternal nature is moved by man's sorrow. She is con- scious that no human woe can deprive the spring of joy in her fragrant odors and purple violets. It is in vain that mourners attempt to force on inanimate things some portion of their grief. Nature, unconcerned for our sorrows, " per- sues her settled path, her first and steady course." That all may seem to die with the death of a friend is, she admits, true, but she insists, with the emphasis of Coleridge in the Ode to Dejection, that the clouds darkening over the outer world proceed only from the sad, awakened heart. ��� � ​cxxxii INTRODUCTION ���In an early poem, The Echo, Lady Winchilsea expressed �a quite romantic pleasure in a walk taken on a fair night to �hear a certain famous echo, but in the actual �experience it was not so much the mechanical �perfection of the sound that pleased her, as it was its remote, �elemental suggestiveness when associated with the loneliness �and beauty of the night. In Democritus one line, �Solitary walks on starry nights, �seems to have a personal touch as if she had known such walks. The Hymn strikes a somewhat deeper note in its address to the moon as the gentle guide of �Silent night, That does to solemn Praise and serious thoughts invite. �Brief though these references are, each one has a quality of originality. But they hardly even foreshadow the perfection of the Nocturnal Reverie. The fullness and delicate accuracy of the observation in this poem have already been sufficiently commented on. The description is doubtless the outcome of many a fair summer night at Eastwell, but the picturesque details are unified into a consistent whole, so that they give the impression of a single vivid experience. The style is simple, straightforward, unelaborated, almost bare. There is nothing traditional or bookish. There is no ecstacy, no emphatic statement. But in some indefinable, inevitable fashion the little poem is suffused with the charm of the lovely night. And not only the charm of the night, but its significance, its message, its gift to man, find adequate expression. The eight lines beginning, "When a sedate content the spirit feels," present an interpretation of the effect of nature on the heart and mind of man so exactly Wordsworthian in substance and mood that it is hard to date it eighty-five years before the Lyrical Ballads. Words- worth's strong interest in Lady Winchilsea is justified by the law of affinities. She is like him in that her genius needs ��� � ​INTRODUCTION cxxxiii ���no strong or novel stimulus, and in this one poem, at least, she has attained to his " wise passiveness," his power of fixing an exquisite regard on the commonest facts of nature, and his ability to state these facts with fine precision, and to interpret them, not allegorically, but actually in their rela- tion to human life. �In a faint but not at all fanciful way, Lady Winchilsea's poetical development is also comparable to that of Words- worth. Most of the men who wrote well of nature in the eighteenth century, as Armstrong, Dyer, Thomson, Ram- say, Mickle, Bruce, Beattie, spent their youth in the country; their poetry of nature was their earliest work and was remi- niscent of their country life ; and the large body of their later work was didactic or dramatic. In other words they wrote their poetry of nature, before, not after, they had come into close contact with the complex and strenuous life of the city. Lady Winchilsea's experience was exactly the reverse. She first knew the court and the city ; she first knew the tragic realities of life, and she first wrote dramas and satires and odes ; and then at fifty years of age she wrote the Reverie. She was, in her spiritual history, like Wordsworth in that her chief poems on nature were not written in the flush and fervor of youth. Personal deprivations, frus- trated ambitions, loss of faith in man, doubts of the provi- dential ordering of human affairs, were the deep waters through which she was called to pass, and the end of the bitter experience found her in a state of dejection border- ing on despair, a condition similar in kind though not in degree to Wordsworth's condition at the close of the experi- ences connected with the French revolution. The influences that led to healing in each case were human affection and the beauty and order of the external world. To her hus- band and to East well Park Lady Winchilsea owed her resto- ration to her birtright of serenity and joy. But the process ��� � ​cxxxiv INTRODUCTION ���was not an instantaneous one. It took time for the delicate originality of her taste to assert itself. And she had not, as had Wordsworth, a fund of childhood impressions on which to draw. It was only after long and familiar contact with nature that its full effect was apparent. But yet, sea- son by season, year by year, new lessons were being learned, and insensibly nature was bringing to her its normal gifts. It is not of the sweet surprises, the novel excitements of the early life at Eastwell of which she writes best. The ade- quate poem comes only after years of accumulated experi- ence, when the loveliness of the place is known and taken for granted, when love for it is a part of herself, when the thought of it has mellowed and ripened. . In spite of many impor- tant differences that might be insisted on, there is this one important point of likeness between Lady Winchilsea and Wordsworth they both write out of the calm that follows the storm. Their simplicity and repose grow out of the fact that so much of life has been tested and set aside, and that the essentials of happy living have been found to be few and not difficult of access. In her youth Ardelia wrote an Enquiry after Peace. It is a brief version of the world-old vanitas vanitatum, very much in the style of Parnell's Hymn, and there is a suggestion, reminding one inevitably of Dyer's Grongar Hill, that peace may be found on some mountain- top under the wide arch of the sky, or in some shut-away valley. This plaintive little poem is only a fragment, but it is beautifully rounded out and answered by the Reverie. The two poems represent the extremes of the portion of Lady Winchilsea' s life best known to us its early dissatisfactions, questionings, rejections, its final certainties and poise. ��� �