ive, and through which she
anticipated men of true and real genius. To give only one example, she
too may be credited with having anticipated Richardson in her "Sociable
Letters," in which she tries to imitate real life, to describe scenes,
very nearly to write an actual novel: "The truth is," she writes, "they
are rather scenes than letters, for I have endeavoured under cover of
letters to express the humors of mankind, and the actions of man's life
by the correspondence of two ladies, living at some short distance from
each other, which make it not only their chief delight and pastime, but
their tye in friendship, to discourse by letters as they would do if
they were personally together."[336] Many collections of imaginary
letters had, as we have seen, been published before, but never had the
use to which they could be put been better foreseen by any predecessor
of Richardson.

[Illustration: CONVERSATION AND TELLING OF STORIES AT THE HOUSE OF THE
DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE, 1656.]

The Duchess lived till 1674, surrounded by an ever-increasing group
of admirers, deaf to the jokes of courtly people concerning her
old-fashioned chastity; more than consoled by the firm belief she had as
to the strength of her mind and genius. In this persuasion "she kept,"
wrote Theophilus Cibber, "a great many young ladies about her person,
who occasionally wrote what she dictated. Some of them slept in a room
contiguous to that in which Her Grace lay, and were ready at the call of
her bell to rise any hour of the night to write down her conceptions,
lest they should escape her memory. The young ladies no doubt often
dreaded Her Grace's conceptions, which were frequent."[337] Here, again,
her restless spirit was in some manner anticipating unawares another
great writer, namely, Pope.

Thus, in spite of Cromwell and the Puritans on the one side, and Charles
II. and his courtiers on the other, French ideas as to the possible
dignity and purity of lives in which the worldly element was not wanting
grew to some extent on the English soil, though, it is true, with less
success, being as we see mainly relegated at that time to the country.
The true hour for virtues not the less real because sociable, virtues
such as they were understood by Madame de Sevigne or Madame de
Rambouillet, had not yet come. They were to be thoroughly acclimatized
only in the next century, principally through the exertions of Steele
and Addison.

But the strictly hero