This historical play gives the lie to the above theory pretty broadly,
yet delicately. Our heroine is as vain as she is ignorant, and as
unprincipled as she is both, and without an idea or wish of any kind but
that of adorning her person in the glass, and being called and thought
a lady, something superior to a citizen's wife.(4) She is so bent on
finery that she believes in miracles to obtain it, and expects the
fairies to bring it her.(5) She is quite above thinking of a settlement,
jointure, or pin-money. She takes the will for the deed all through the
piece, and is so besotted with this ignorant, vulgar notion of rank and
title as a real thing that cannot be counterfeited that she is the
dupe of her own fine stratagems, and marries a gull, a dolt, a broken
adventurer for an accomplished and brave gentleman. Her meanness is
equal to her folly and her pride (and nothing can be greater), yet she
holds out on the strength of her original pretensions for a long time,
and plays the upstart with decency and imposing consistency. Indeed,
her infatuation and caprices are akin to the flighty perversity of a
disordered imagination; and another turn of the wheel of good or
evil fortune would have sent her to keep company with Hogarth's
_Merveilleuses_ in Bedlam, or with Decker's group of coquettes in the
same place.--The other parts of the play are a dreary lee-shore, like
Cuckold's Point on the coast of Essex, where the preconcerted shipwreck
takes place that winds up the catastrophe of the piece. But this is
also characteristic of the age, and serves as a contrast to the airy and
factitious character which is the principal figure in the plot. We had
made but little progress from that point till Hogarth's time, if Hogarth
is to be believed in his description of city manners. How wonderfully we
have distanced it since!
Without going into this at length, there is one circumstance 1 would
mention in which I think there has been a striking improvement in
the family economy of modern times--and that is in the relation of
mistresses and servants. After visits and finery, a married woman of the
old school had nothing to do but to attend to her housewifery. She had
no other resource, no other sense of power, but to harangue and lord
it over her domestics. Modern book-education supplies the place of the
old-fashioned system of kitchen persecution and eloquence. A
well-bred woman now seldom goes into the kitchen to look after the
servants:--formerly what was called a good manager, an exemplary
mistress of a family, did nothing but hunt them from morning to night,
from one year's end to another, without leaving them a moment's rest,
peace, or comfort. Now a servant is left to do her work without this
suspicious and tormenting interference and fault-finding at every step,
and she does it all the better. The proverbs about the mistress's eye,
etc., are no longer held for current. A woman from this habit, which at
last became an uncontrollable passion, would scold her maids for fifty
years together, and nothing could stop her: now the temptation to read
the last new poem or novel, and the necessity of talking of it in the
next company she goes into, prevent her--and the benefit to all parties
is incalculable.