s a piece of
genius in a writer to make a woman's manner of speech portray her. You
feel sensible of her presence in every line of her speaking. The
stipulations with her lover in view of marriage, her fine lady's
delicacy, and fine lady's easy evasions of indelicacy, coquettish airs,
and playing with irresolution, which in a common maid would be
bashfulness, until she submits to 'dwindle into a wife,' as she says,
form a picture that lives in the frame, and is in harmony with Mirabel's
description of her:

'Here she comes, i' faith, full sail, with her fan spread, and her
streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.'

And, after an interview:

'Think of you! To think of a whirlwind, though 'twere in a whirlwind,
were a case of more steady contemplation, a very tranquillity of mind
and mansion.'

There is a picturesqueness, as of Millamant and no other, in her voice,
when she is encouraged to take Mirabel by Mrs. Fainall, who is 'sure she
has a mind to him':

MILLAMANT: Are you? I think I have--and the horrid man looks as if he
thought so too, etc. etc.

One hears the tones, and sees the sketch and colour of the whole scene in
reading it.

Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness. An air of bewitching
whimsicality hovers over the graces of this Comic heroine, like the
lively conversational play of a beautiful mouth.

But in wit she is no rival of Celimene. What she utters adds to her
personal witchery, and is not further memorable. She is a flashing
portrait, and a type of the superior ladies who do not think, not of
those who do. In representing a class, therefore, it is a lower class,
in the proportion that one of Gainsborough's full-length aristocratic
women is below the permanent impressiveness of a fair Venetian head.

Millamant side by side with Celimene is an example of how far the
realistic painting of a character can be carried to win our favour; and
of where it falls short. Celimene is a woman's mind in movement, armed
with an ungovernable wit; with perspicacious clear eyes for the world,
and a very distinct knowledge that she belongs to the world, and is most
at home in it. She is attracted to Alceste by her esteem for his
honesty; she cannot avoid seeing where the good sense of the man is
diseased.

Rousseau, in his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the Misanthrope,
discusses the character of Alceste, as though Moliere had put him forth
for an absolute e