their intellect.

PHIL. And our sex does you justice in this respect: but we will
show to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women
also have knowledge; that, like men, they can hold learned
meetings--regulated, too, by better rules; that they wish to unite
what elsewhere is kept apart, join noble language to deep learning,
reveal nature's laws by a thousand experiments; and, on all
questions proposed, admit every party, and ally themselves to none.

TRISS. For order, I prefer peripateticism.

PHIL. For abstractions, I love platonism.

ARM. Epicurus pleases me, for his tenets are solid.

BEL. I agree with the doctrine of atoms; but I find it difficult to
understand a vacuum, and I much prefer subtile matter.

TRISS. I quite agree with Descartes about magnetism.

ARM. I like his vortices.

PHIL. And I, his falling worlds.

ARM. I long to see our assembly opened, and to distinguish
ourselves by some great discovery.

TRISS. Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature
has hidden few things from you.

PHIL. For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one
discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.

BEL. I have not, I believe, as yet quite distinguished men, but I
have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.

ARM. In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar,
history, verse, ethics, and politics.

PHIL. I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was
formerly the admiration of great geniuses: but I give the
preference to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their
founder.

"Les Precieuses Ridicules" is an earlier and lighter treatment of the
same theme. The object of ridicule in both these pieces was a lapsed and
degenerate form of what originally was a thing worthy of respect, and
even of praise. At the Hotel de Rambouillet, conversation was cultivated
as a fine art. There was, no doubt, something overstrained in the
standards which the ladies of that circle enforced. Their mutual
communication was all conducted in a peculiar style of language, the
natural deterioration of which was into a kind of euphuism, such as
English readers will remember to have seen exemplified in Walter Scott's
Sir Piercie Shafton. These ladies called each other, with demonstrative
fondness, "Ma precieuse." Hence