been at all tinged with pretension. "I should fear from
your example to write in a style too elevated," says Voiture, in a
letter to her. But traditions are strong, and people do not readily
adapt themselves to new models. Character and manners are a growth.
That which is put on, and not ingrained, is apt to lack true balance
and proportion. Hence it is not strange that this new order of things
resulted in many crudities and exaggerations.

It is not worth while to criticize too severely the plumed knights who
took the heroes of Corneille as models, played the harmless lover,
and paid the tribute of chivalric deference to women. The strained
politeness may have been artificial, and the forms of chivalry very
likely outran the feeling, but they served at least to keep it alive,
while the false platonism and ultra-refined sentiment were simply moral
protests against the coarse vices of the time. The prudery which reached
a satirical climax in "Les Precieuses Ridicules" was a natural reaction
from the sensuality of a Marguerite and a Gabrielle. Mme. de Rambouillet
saw and enjoyed the first performance of this celebrated play, nor does
it appear that she was at all disturbed by the keen satire which was
generally supposed to have been directed toward her salon. Moliere
himself disclaims all intention of attacking the true precieuse; but the
world is not given to fine discrimination, and the true suffers from the
blow aimed at the false. This brilliant comedian, whose manners were
not of the choicest, was more at home in the lax and epicurean world of
Ninon and Mme. de la Sabliere--a world which naturally did not find the
decorum of the precieuses at all to its taste; the witticism of Ninon,
who defined them as the "Jansenists of love," is well known. It is not
unlikely that Moliere shared her dislike of the powerful and fastidious
coterie whose very virtues might easily have furnished salient points
for his scathing wit.

But whatever affectations may have grown out of the new code of manners,
it had a more lasting result in the fine and stately courtesy which
pervaded the later social life of the century. We owe, too, a profound
gratitude to these women who exacted and were able to command a
consideration which with many shades of variation has been left as a
permanent heritage to their sex. We may smile at some of their follies;
have we not our own which some nineteenth century Moliere may serve up
for the delight and po