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

lady, the great scholar that nobody can understand." Her lover tells her Æsop's fable of the nightingale that tried to imitate a linnet, and adds:

Wright's play was revived at Lincoln's Inn Fields in January, 1721, in order to anticipate Cibber's Refusal, likewise 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 Cibber's The Refusal, the learned woman is a not infrequent 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 literary 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 understand Greek and to set herself up for a critic." The heroine, Marsilia, was Mrs. Manley, whose tragedy, The Royal Mischief, had appeared in 1696 and is the drama supposed 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."