Such topics, and many more of a higher order, which were the subject of persistent debate in the drawing-rooms of the Hotel de Rambouillet, were also discussed in England; there was, it is true, no Hotel de Rambouillet, but there was the house of the Philips at Cardigan. There was no Marquise, but there was Catherine Philips, the "matchless Orinda," who did much to acclimatize in England the refinements, elegancies, and heroism _a panache_ of her French neighbours. With the help of her friends she translated some of the plays of Corneille, not without adding something to the original to make it look more heroical. The little society gathered round her imitated the feigned names bestowed upon the habitues of the Parisian hotel. While she went by the name of Orinda, plain Mr. Philips, her husband, was re-baptized Antenor; her friend Sir Charles Cotterel, translator of "Cassandre," was Poliarchus; a lady friend, Miss Owen, was Lucasia;[332] fine names, to be sure, which unfortunately will remind many a reader not only of matchless Arthenice, of the Hotel de Rambouillet, but of Moliere's Cathos and Madelon, who, too, had chosen to imitate the Marquise, and insisted on being called Aminte and Polixene, to the astonishment of their honest father.[333] The high morality and delicacy, both of the "Hotel," and, alas, of Moliere's "Precieuses," were also imitated at Cardigan. To get married was a thing so coarse and vulgar that people with refined souls were to slip into that only at the last extremity. "A fine thing it would be," says the Madelon of the "Precieuses," "if from the first Cyrus were to marry Mandane and if Aronce were all at once wedded to Clelia!" We have seen that such is not the case, and that ten volumes of adventures interpose between their love and their marriage. In the same way an eternal friendship, a marriage of soul to soul, having been sworn between Orinda and Lucasia, it was a matter of great sorrow, shame and despair for the first when the second, after thirteen years of this refined intercourse proved frail and commonplace enough to marry a lover of appropriate age, fortune and position. Another centre for heroic thoughts and refined morality was the country house of the pedantic but pretty Duchess of Newcastle, a prolific writer of essays, letters, plays, poems, tales, and works of all kinds. To her, literature was a compensation for the impossibility, through want of opportunity, of performing with her own hand heroical deeds: "I dare not examine," says she, "the former times, for fear I should meet with such of my sex that have out-done all the glory I can aime at or hope to attaine; for I confess my ambition is restless, and not ordinary; because it would have an extraordinary fame. And since all heroick actions, publick employments, powerfull governments and eloquent pleadings are denyed our sex in this age or at least would be condemned for want of custome, is the cause I write so much."[334]