uestion, as it regards individual and private
manners. There is a fine illustration of the effects of preposterous and
affected gentility in the character of Gertrude, in the old comedy
of _Eastward Hoe,_ written by Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in
conjunction. This play is supposed to have given rise to Hogarth's
series of prints of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice; and there
is something exceedingly Hogarthian in the view both of vulgar and of
genteel life here displayed. The character of Gertrude, in particular,
the heroine of the piece, is inimitably drawn. The mixture of vanity and
meanness, the internal worthlessness and external pretence, the rustic
ignorance and fine lady-like airs, the intoxication of novelty and
infatuation of pride, appear like a dream or romance, rather than
anything in real life. Cinderella and her glass slipper are common-place
to it. She is not, like Millamant (a century afterwards), the
accomplished fine lady, but a pretender to all the foppery and finery of
the character. It is the honeymoon with her ladyship, and her folly
is at the full. To be a wife, and the wife of a knight, are to her
pleasures 'worn in their newest gloss,' and nothing can exceed her
raptures in the contemplation of both parts of the dilemma. It is not
familiarity, but novelty, that weds her to the court. She rises into
the air of gentility from the ground of a city life, and flutters
about there with all the fantastic delight of a butterfly that has just
changed its caterpillar state. The sound of My Lady intoxicates her
with delight, makes her giddy, and almost turns her brain. On the bare
strength of it she is ready to turn her father and mother out of doors,
and treats her brother and sister with infinite disdain and judicial
hardness of heart. With some speculators the modern philosophy has
deadened and distorted all the natural affections; and before abstract
ideas and the mischievous refinements of literature were introduced,
nothing was to be met with in the primeval state of society but
simplicity and pastoral innocence of manners--

And all was conscience and tender heart

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