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Thus it is, at bottom, a system of patronage. It offers to the author that aid, advertisement, and protection which he had once sought from a patron. Patronage of literature was, as we have seen, an essential feature of the court life of the Renaissance. It had lived on through the seventeenth century at courts and in noble houses. During its rapid decline in the eighteenth century, many of its duties were taken over by the salons. In the person of the hostess, the salon made gifts of money, granted unofficial pensions, paid printers' bills, and even gave authors a home. Walpole was amused at the number of authors who were 'planted' in the homes of French ladies. Madame Geoffrin in Paris, like Mrs. Montagu in London, was recognized as a patron of all the arts, and both gave of their wealth to the support of indigent or improvident authors.

But the salon bestowed a yet more valuable favour in its recognition of literary merit. Like the patron, it vouched for new authors. It gave its support to their new ideas. And in this subtler form of patronage, in the discharge of the duties of a literary jury or academy, it anticipated the modern press, for it had similar influence and fell into similar errors. Like the modern critical review, it was at once feared and courted by authors who affected at times to despise its pronouncements but never ignored them. The salon mediated between the author and the public. It aimed, like a true critic, to correct both the conceit of the author and the indifference of the world. It responded to a genuine critical demand created by the disappearance of the outworn system of patronage and by the rapid growth of a reading democracy. The salon sprang into renewed activity during a period of transition. It served a peculiar need during changing conditions, and passed away with the dawn of a new century which had its own system of criticism by which to dispense fame and to create opinion.

Was it possible for the reading world to render assistance to men of this temper? Could a way be found to make grants of money or to draw attention to worthy writings without an offensive display of philanthropy? Was it not possible to assist an author, yet cause him to feel that any favour was conferred by himself? The salon was the answer. It summoned authors out of their seclusion and segregation, and confidently bade them show the world that genius might express itself elsewhere than in the study or the coffee-house. Let them try an appeal to a 'select public.' Let them, by the charm of their conversation in a congenial company, break down the barriers of indifference and prejudice. It was a call to men of letters to treat with the world. The drawing-room in which they were received, not as a dependent or tool, but as chief guests doing honour to the company by their presence, was a new field of arbitration between authors and the world.

In the successful execution of any plan for the social recognition of letters, woman must have a prominent place. If the drawing-room is to replace the tavern as a favourite resort of authors, the presence of woman is as truly implied in the one as her absence is from the other. The shift from the coffee-house to the drawing-room was indeed a plain tribute to woman, the new critic and the new patron. As she was already displaying her power in the world of readers by bringing a new tone of refinement into literature, she was exerting the same power to draw the men of letters into her salon.

As personality is of more consequence to the hostess than authorship, so maturity of experience is of more value to her than youth and beauty. None of these women, except Madame du Bocage pretended to the fascinations of youth. Madame de Tencin was forty-six when her salon became famous; Madame Geoffrin was fifty when she succeeded Madame de Tencin as the chief hostess in Paris, and she was sixty-seven when, as 'queen-mother,' she made her triumphal visit to the King of Poland. Madame du Deffand was sixty-eight when, in the eyes of Walpole, she eclipsed all the other hostesses in Paris; when she was eighty, Edward Gibbon still found in her salon, 'the best company in Paris.' Julie de Lespinasse, the youngest of them all, died--and died of love--at forty-four. It is not surprising that Walpole found in Paris the 'fountain of age.' 'One is never old here,' he writes, 'or never thought so'; and elsewhere, 'The first step towards being in fashion is to lose an eye or a tooth. Young people I conclude there are, but where they exist I don't guess: not that I complain; it is charming to totter into vogue.' Ten years later he finds no change: 'It is so English to grow old! The French are Struldbrugs improved. After ninety they have no more caducity or distempers, but set out on a new career.'

But what of the influence of the salon upon the authors who composed it? That it produced an effect upon them the least sympathetic was obliged to acknowledge: 'At worst,' says Walpole, 'I have filled my mind with a new set of ideas.' There men corrected as well as expanded their personal views. There they might 'clarify their notions by filtrating them through other minds.' The salon gave an opportunity for the development of ideas in a new medium--the liveliness of conversation. At such time, when the formulation of opinion is stimulated by contact with other minds, when all barriers are down, all dread of critics forgotten, a man may give free rein to his doctrines and borrow all the brilliancy that lives in exaggeration. The pomposity of the platform and the solemn pedantry of the study disappear, and a man talks for the joy of talking. He makes up in vivacity what he loses in dignity. When an author deserted the salons, as did Rousseau, it frequently indicated a state of self-absorption which was not always advantageous; and, on the other hand, when an author made his submission to them, the result was frequently evident in a note of urbanity and in a piquancy of illustration which he could hardly have attained elsewhere. Thus the function of the salon was to preserve the sanity and clarity of literature, to keep authors abreast of the times and in touch with one another and with the world. But in this alliance of authors with the world, in this exchange of solitude for society, of the study for the drawing-room, there were dangers which threatened the very life of literature; for it was an attempt to serve two masters. Far from removing the petty faults of a literary life, it brought with it a host of new ones--flattery, the overestimation of the works of a clique, the attempt to direct public opinion by force, and above all, the cultivation of the graces at the expense of the imagination. There was actually a tendency towards the dangers of democracy--the surrender to majority, the descent to a common level--but without a saving reliance upon the elemental instincts of mankind. The whole prophetic side of literature, the vision of the poet, the glory and the folly of the ideal, priest and lyrist, Wordsworth and Shelley, de Vigny and de Musset--these are all beyond the ken of salons. But they had their office. It was their function to teach the observation of life, to lend clearness and vivacity to style, and so to add a charm to learning, to win the ignorant and to elevate the frivolous by showing that dulness could be overcome with wit and pedantry with grace.

The cosmopolitan tone was contributed to the salon by the eighteenth century. It begins with Madame de Tencin. This brilliant woman, somewhat promiscuous in all her tastes, expanded the influence of her drawing-room, and thereby that of later salons, by welcoming distinguished men without respect of nationality; nor were foreigners slow to improve the opportunity of meeting a woman who was no less renowned for her social prestige than for the picturesque iniquity of her past. Her salon was in truth the atonement which she offered the world for the sins of her youth.

She had begun her career by running away from the convent where she had taken the veil. She used her secularized charms to win lovers, and used her lovers to advance her brother in the Church. She became mistress of the Regent, who snubbed her because she wished to talk business when his mind ran on love. The royal harlot then sank into a cheap adventuress; she gave birth to a son, destined to become famous as d'Alembert, and 'exposed' him on the steps of Saint Jean le Rond in the hope of making an end of him. At length when a maddened lover shot himself to death under her own roof, she was imprisoned in the Bastille, where she languished for some months. And then, after her release, as if to show that she had a head if not a heart, she abandoned her career of profligacy as lightly as she had formerly abandoned a lover or a child, and opened a drawing-room which, with the death of Madame de Lambert in 1733, became the most brilliant and influential in Paris. Here for twenty years she reigned over such retainers as Montesquieu and Fontenelle. Her success is easier to understand than her motives. Certain it is, however, as Professor Brunel has suggested, that she attracted the men of letters because she gave them to understand that their respect was the one thing in the world for which she cared.

'In future, then,' said Fontenelle, after the death of Madame de Tencin, 'I shall go to Madame Geoffrin's.' The change must have supplied the aged wit with many observations on the diversity of the female character; for though 'la Geoffrin' had studied the methods of her predecessor, there was no resemblance in character between the two. There is no suggestion of Madame de Tencin's subtlety in the amiable bourgeoise who became a queen of society at fifty, but rather a rich simplicity of nature that is very winning. Her faults as well as her virtues are quite obvious. Her humour is for ever expressing itself in homely maxims which suggest the lore of peasants. She made her way by the simplest means, a warm heart, abiding common sense, and a persistent will. Her keen intelligence, the gift of nature, not of books, enabled her to understand the philosophers at least as well as they understood themselves, to advise--almost lead--them, to be their 'Mother,' and to push them into the Academy. It is, at first blush, amazing that a woman without education, who, indeed, found grammar a mystery, could thus have become the empress of the wits. But living as she did in an 'age of reason' when the imagination was turning back to contemplate man in a 'state of nature,' unspoiled by the arts of a luxurious civilization, such a defect was not fatal. Shrewd, placid yet alert, simple and with the sweep of vision that is given only to the simple, she looked out fearlessly upon the society of her time, with all its elaborate systems and new philosophies--and understood. As she was without fear, so she was without contempt. She saw what was good in the new order and encouraged it, but without becoming its slave. Like Johnson , she contrived to 'worship in the age of Voltaire,' but this was with no surrender of her interest in Voltaire. She was intolerant of pretence. She adopted a manner of treating her friends which, in its combination of brusqueness and affection, is thoroughly parental. She scolds and pushes, punishes and rewards. She decides disputes with a word. She spends with open hand. Her great desire is to be of help to her children. D'Alembert writes of her, '"Vous croyez," disait elle ? un des hommes qu'elle aimait le plus, "que c'est pour moi que je vois des grands et des ministres? D?trompez-vous; je les vois pour vous et pour vos semblables, qui pouvez en avoir besoin: si tous ceux que j'aime ?taient heureux et sages, ma porte serait tous les jours ferm?e a neuf heures, except? pour eux."' But she never forgot that, in her own house, she alone was mistress. Her charity, which she conducted on a heroic scale, implied a certain obedience in the recipients of it; but both charity and obedience were only devices for promoting their interests. 'Elle ne respirait que pour faire le bien,' said d'Alembert. He and the other writers for the Cyclopaedia profited by her charity, for without her patronage that great work could hardly have been carried to publication.

But to more serious souls he was even as the Spirit of the Age. He had voiced the new scepticism. He had given the death-blow to miracles. Before his coming to Paris, all his better-known work had been done, and the fame of it preceded him. Alexander Street wrote from Paris to Sir William Johnstone, on December 16, 1762: 'When you have occasion to see our friend, David Hume, tell him that he is so much worshipped here that he must be void of all passions, if he does not immediately take post for Paris. In most houses where I am acquainted here, one of the first questions is, "Do you know M. Hume whom we all admire so much?" I dined yesterday at Helv?tius's, where this same M. Hume interrupted our conversation very much.'

His influence was, in truth, greater in France than in England; for the temper of English literature never became openly rationalistic. Deism itself was living a subterranean existence; for the authority of such powerful men as Johnson and Burke ran directly counter to it. But in France all sails were set, and men's faces turned towards 'unpath'd waters, undreamed shores.' To the 'free' thought that was becoming ever freer and now drifting towards all manner of negation, Hume came as a high priest, an acknowledged pontiff. He was the man whom the King delighted to honour, whose praises were lisped by the King's children, who was approved by Voltaire, petted by all the women and revered by all the men. In less than two years, Walpole finds him 'the mode,' 'fashion itself'; he is 'treated with perfect veneration,' and his works held to be the 'standards of writing.' Hume himself writes to Fergusson that he overheard an elderly gentleman, 'esteemed one of the cleverest and most sensible' of men, boasting that he had caught sight of Hume that day at court. At last they pay him the compliment of 'bantering' him and telling droll stories of him. He begins to fear that the great ladies are taking him too much from the society of d'Alembert, Buffon, Marmontel, Diderot, and the rest.

The most immediate cause of their rupture was a letter, written by Walpole, to amuse Madame Geoffrin's coterie. It purported to be by the King of Prussia, and invited Rousseau to come to court and enjoy his fill of persecution. A brief extract will show the character of this sprightly epistle:

Si vous persistez ? vous creuser l'esprit pour trouver de nouveaux malheurs, choisissez-les tels que vous voudrez. Je suis roi, je puis vous en procurer augr? de vos souhaits: et ce qui s?rement ne vous arrivera pas vis-?-vis de vos ennemis, je cesserai de vous pers?cuter quand vous cesserez de mettre votre gloire ? l'?tre.

This letter, which had been touched up by Helv?tius and the Duc de Nivernois, circulated in the salons, and at last found its way to England, where it was printed by various newspapers in April 1766. The quarrel between Rousseau and Hume, which had been threatening for some weeks, now burst in fury; for Rousseau believed that Hume was in league with Walpole to disgrace him.

Every one now plunged into controversy and correspondence. Mlle. de Lespinasse attempts to soothe feelings. D'Alembert outlines Hume's campaign. Baron d'Holbach condoles. Walpole explains. Madame de Boufflers fears for the renown of philosophy. Madame du Deffand, who hated everybody concerned, except Walpole, and whom d'Alembert accused of having stirred up all the trouble, finally did as much as any one to put an end to it. Nothing having been accomplished, and the vanity of all having been fully displayed, the matter subsided, leaving a general conviction in the mind of each that all the others had conducted themselves very foolishly.

Hume never returned to the salons, though Mlle. de Lespinasse implored and Madame de Boufflers protested. It was to the latter that he wrote the tranquil letter from his death-bed 'without any anxiety or regret' which elicited the admiration even of Madame du Deffand and delighted the salons by showing that their favourite could die like a philosopher.

Madame Geoffrin came and sat two hours last night by my bedside: I could have sworn it had been my lady Hervey, she was so good to me. It was with so much sense, information, instruction, and correction! The manner of the latter charms me. I never saw anybody in my days that catches one's faults and vanities and impositions so quick, that explains them to one so clearly, and convinces one so easily. I never liked to be set right before! You cannot imagine how I taste it! I make her both my confessor and director, and begin to think I shall be a reasonable creature at last, which I had never intended to be. The next time I see her, I believe I shall say, 'Oh! Common Sense, sit down: I have been thinking so and so; is it not absurd?'--for t'other sense and wisdom, I never liked them; I shall now hate them for her sake. If it was worth her while, I assure your Ladyship she might govern me like a child.

The attention which he received was not without its effect, and at last he was obliged to admit himself pleased. He does not know when he will return to England; and he dwells with delight on the honours and distinctions he receives.

In a beautiful letter to her on her blindness, which had become total about a dozen years before the period when we encounter her, Montesquieu reminded her that they were both 'small rebel spirits condemned to darkness.' There is in truth something suggestive of the powers of darkness in Madame du Deffand's pride and perversity. She was of a will never to submit or yield. Pride in the reputation she had made, a passionate delight in conversation, and, above all, the horror of her lonely hours of introspection determined her to continue her salon in spite of all. She did not fail. But a blow hardly less grievous had yet to fall. Mlle. de Lespinasse, on whose assistance she had leaned, had caught the secret of her success, and was forming a coterie of her own, an inner circle within Madame du Deffand's. When the blind woman learned of her assistant's treachery, she broke with her, and Mlle. de Lespinasse departed, carrying with her d'Alembert, adored of Madame du Deffand, and his friends, the flower of the flock.

Even then the dauntless old woman would not give up. The aged sibyl in her 'tonneau' at the Convent Saint Joseph could still attract the curious and the clever. Blind as she was, her 'portraits' of character were better than Madame Geoffrin's,--who excelled in portraits,--and the clarity of her vision was surpassed only by the crispness of her phrasing. At sixty-eight, she had an eager curiosity about her own times that was a stimulus to youth. To speak with her was to witness the triumph of mind.

And then, in the late evening of her days, a miracle occurred. The dry branch budded and bloomed. In the person of Walpole, with his chill though delicate cynicism , romance burst into her life, and she knew love and the pain of love. Her passion for the Englishman twenty years her junior transcends all comparison. It has in it the tenderness of age without its resignation, and the insistence of youth without its joy. It wreaks itself in protestations, reproaches, and demands which it knows must be futile. In Madame du Deffand's letters to Walpole, recently published in their entirety, there is a strong undercurrent which moves relentlessly to tragedy--tragedy that is no less poignant because its protagonist is an old woman and its theme the progress of a slow despair.

To Walpole all this was a source of great uneasiness. Like most superior folk, he feared the world. He feared that letters might be intercepted, that Madame du Deffand might talk; that the story might become public; that he might become an object of ridicule--and ridicule was to him a hell. He urged upon Madame du Deffand the necessity of reticence. He was crushingly persistent. The aged woman did her best to smother her feelings, but she could not altogether smother her resentment:

Walpole's letters to Madame du Deffand are fortunately not preserved; but one imagines that he was bored by this strain. To him Madame du Deffand was an aristocratic French woman, a match for him in wit, frankness, and cynicism, who could provide him with that social life which, like her, he affected to despise but could not abandon. He had admired her capacity for disillusion, and now she was the victim of an illusion, and he was the object of it. The situation was unusual.

But though Walpole could not respond, he did not break with her, or care to break. When, in 1775, he visited her, for the third time, she showered him with so many engagements that he needed 'the activity of a squirrel and the strength of a Hercules' to go through with them. He was pleased. He asserted that Madame du Deffand was a star in the East well worth coming to adore. With a literary friendship that displayed itself in salons, in dedications of books, and in temperate letters, he could be well content. At her death he wrote of her with true affection, gratitude, and grief. But she had longed in vain for the expression of these, and of more than these, during the desolation of her latter months.

The effect upon Walpole of this acquaintance with Madame du Deffand and her salon was to fix in him certain characteristics not always attractive. She had been able to show him the salon in the one aspect which could appeal to him; where persiflage had not yielded to the pedantry of the new philosophy. In his association with her and with the group whose inspiration she was, he acquired that amused tolerance with which he viewed the attempts of the bluestockings in England to rival the salons which he had known in France.

It would be interesting to know the conversation that passed between Burke and Walpole after the former's return to England. They met, and it would seem that Burke expressed strong opinions on the growing atheism of France, and told of his attempt to defend the Christian system, for Walpole wrote to the Countess of Upper Ossory: 'Mr. Burke is returned from Paris, where he was so much the mode that, happening to dispute with the philosophers, it grew the fashion to be Christians. St. Patrick himself did not make more converts.' But whatever effect Burke may have had upon the freethinkers of Paris, there can be no doubt of their effect upon him. The amazing downrush of principles, religious, philosophical, and political, which he witnessed in France confirmed him in that natural conservatism, that desire 'never wholly or at once to depart from antiquity' to which he was becoming more and more passionately devoted as the great French crisis drew on.

It is probable that Sterne made a pretty complete tour of the salons, and there is good reason for assuming that at Madame Geoffrin's he made the acquaintance of Mlle. de Lespinasse. This young woman, who was about to become one of the most brilliant hostesses in Paris, was eagerly appreciative of the emotional aspect of Sterne's work. Compact of passion and nerves, a disciple of Rousseau, a 'daughter of the Sun,' and a sort of female counterpart of Byron, she ate her heart out, was consumed with hopeless love for three men at once, and attempted suicide, quite in the familiar manner of a later school. To love and pain, to heaven and hell, she determined to devote herself. Loathing the world where 'fools and automatons abound,' she must construct the world of romance for herself.

Shandyism won her by its frank display of emotion. There were aspects of it which she could never have appreciated, its wayward humour and insincerity, its sprightliness and its dirt; but the tears and the tenderness she understood by instinct. The loves of Yorick and Eliza, never very popular in England, appealed to her as after the order of nature, and no doubt reminded her of her own relations with d'Alembert.

This imitation of Sterne seems to be the chief record in French of Yorick's impression on the salon. If it is a reliable view--and there seems to be no good reason for rejecting it--it is clear that Sterne preferred to appear in the drawing-room of Paris without his cap and bells. He realized perhaps that the way to win the hearts of French ladies was with his warm heart and his tearful eye, and not by the sudden caprice of his humour. It was Sterne the emotional epicure, the professed philanderer, and not Yorick the jester, who was known to the salons; and in thus exploiting his sentimentalism, he continued and emphasized one aspect of the work of Rousseau, and, with Richardson, became one of the chief foreign influences exerted upon the romantic movement in France.

When Gibbon left Paris there was universal regret. At the Neckers' they talked of nothing but this bereavement and the hope of a return. He went back, in pudgy complacency, to his historical studies. He had conversed and even disputed with the prophets of a new era; but like the other rationalists, he seems to have had no suspicion of the great change which was presently to make salons impossible. His ignorance of the approaching storm is a significant illustration of the fact that the discussions of the salon were essentially academic, conducted in happy ignorance of the results which were destined to succeed them.

PART II

THE ENGLISH SALON

THE EARLIER ENGLISH SALON

Hardly less distinguished is the group of men who surrounded Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Her house at Twickenham Park, famous for its Holbeins and its garden, she loved to fill with men of genius. Ben Jonson, Chapman, Davies, Drayton, and Daniel were all proud to call themselves her friend, and almost every one of them dedicated to her some work of permanent value in English literature. Jonson addressed to her a poetical epistle and three characteristic epigrams. His language, though pompous, is probably sincere:

Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are The Muses' evening as their morning-star.

Receive such balmes as else cure everything.

He writes to Sir Henry Goodyer:

For her delight I had reserved not only all the verses I should make, but all the thoughts of women's worthiness.

He is concerned not to be lightly esteemed 'in that Tribe and that house' where he has lived.

In all respects, therefore, the Countess's coterie would seem to stand just half-way between court and salon--if it is necessary to distinguish the two terms at all. If it is urged that we have no evidence of the stimulus wrought by conversation in the group, it may be answered that even this lack is apparent only and is due simply to the meagreness of contemporary records.

Similarly slender is our knowledge of other women whom we ought in all probability to associate with the two just discussed: Lady Rutland, Lady Wroth, and the Countess of Huntington, women who felt a keen interest in poets and in the welfare of poetry. As it is, the death of Lady Bedford in 1627 must be taken as marking the end of the Elizabethan system of feminine patronage.

When with the Restoration the feminine influence on the current of literature emerges once more, it is again changed in aspect--like everything else. So far as the destinies of the English salon are concerned, the Restoration marks no real advance. If there is not an actual loss of ground, there is at least a change of direction. Women now become aspirants to an independent literary reputation. The groups which literary women formed about themselves never quite suggest the atmosphere of the salon, for their aims seldom give evidence of a desire to approach literature from the social side. It was no longer the ambition of woman to rule the world of letters from above or from beyond as a sort of Muse by whose aid and in whose honour all was to be done, but to enter that world herself and there to claim equality with man. It was again only a shift of emphasis, but it was sufficient to destroy the social aspect of the salon. A salon is not a school of professionals.

It seems strange that the Parisian salon should not have been imported bodily by the returning courtiers. A French salon was for a time conducted at court, as we shall see; but it was not brought there through English influence, and always remained a foreign growth, not even adopting the English language. English literary women, despite the presence of this model, seem to have been incapable of creating anything more than a circle of friends, cordially interested in their literary ambitions, but hardly considering the coterie the highest social expression of the literary life.

The nearest approach to salon life in this period is the coterie formed by the 'matchless Orinda,' Mrs. Katherine Philips. This amiable young woman, with a gift for versifying and a truly social instinct, achieved no slight reputation in her own day. At Cardigan Priory, her Welsh estate, she conducted something very like a salon. 'She instituted,' says Mr. Gosse, 'a Society of Friendship to which male and female members were admitted, and in which poetry, religion and the human heart were to form the subjects of discussion.' Here is the salon spirit and a reliance on conversation as the truest inspiration to social life--a thing which we shall not encounter again till the days of the bluestockings. Orinda adopted the prevalent custom of giving literary names to her friends, indulged in Platonic friendships of the most florid kind, praised her female friends in verse, and despatched glowing sentiments to them in letters:

I gasp for you with an impatience that is not to be imagined by any soul wound up to a less concern in friendship than yours is, and therefore I cannot hope to make others sensible of my vast desires to enjoy you.

Whatever interest Mrs. Philips's works may possess must be shared with this group, with 'Rosania,' 'Lucasia,' 'Poliarchus,' and the rest, for to them a large proportion of her writing was directly addressed. It is to be regretted that we are not more fully informed regarding the relations of certain eminent men with the coterie. The general interest felt by the Royalist poets in her career has been taken to point to a personal connection with her, but it is doubtful whether the relations of such men as Dryden, Cowley, and Denham with her were anything more than formally courteous. To them she was a new phenomenon in the literary world, a female author, a prodigy that attracted attention but did not threaten rivalry--a woman and therefore to be flattered, a poetess and therefore to be called a tenth Muse. Cowley, who equates her with Pope Joan, is almost comic in his praise:

But if Apollo should design A woman laureat to make, Without dispute he would Orinda take, Though Sappho and the famous Nine Stood by and did repine.

But this is elegy, not burlesque.

In the postscript to Mrs. Philips, she is requested to forward the essay to Dr. Wedderburn, if she 'shall think it fit that these pass further' than her own 'eye and closet.' Such was Taylor's trust in Orinda; such his tribute to her.

It must be admitted that Orinda's relations with the authors of her time are little short of remarkable. Her name is written across some of the most characteristic poetry of the age. When she was but twenty, commendatory verses by her were prefixed to the Poems of Vaughan the Silurist. Before the end of her short life--she died in 1664, soon after her thirty-fourth birthday--she had even attracted the notice of Dryden. Her contemporaries appear to have been serious in their belief that she had made herself a permanent place in English literature, and for many years after her death kept her fame alive by publishing her plays, poems, and letters, in which she was invariably described as 'celebrated,' 'matchless,' and 'incomparable.' Her coterie made but little impression on the literature of its time; but that may well have been due to its short career. Mrs. Philips possessed a refinement of taste and of character by no means common among the literary ladies of the time, and a noble though highly sentimental affection for her friends. These are characteristics which, had she lived, she might have made of practical advantage to the world of letters.

The salon Mazarin, which came to an end with the death of the Duchess in 1699, thus tended to associate the literary hostess with vice as well as with letters. As Mrs. Behn had degraded the name of woman in the world of hack-writers, so the Duchess of Mazarin degraded it in the drawing-room. Her salon represented a vicious and a foreign institution, which, though it gained a foothold at Court, was quite without influence upon English life and literature.

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