The new century brought little improvement. Anne was not of a sufficiently independent character to influence greatly the lives and pursuits of her subjects. As was natural in the reign of a Queen, the position and dignity of women were somewhat raised; and in that ‘Augustan age’ there was one class of literature specially addressed to the ladies, the newly invented essay. Addison really wanted to elevate their position and social influence, but his success was literary rather than moral. If we may trust the novelists of the last century, public morality was never at a lower ebb. The men of that day worshipped idleness, and it was not surprising that they did not care to see their wives and mistresses at work. Show was the aim throughout, and the ‘accomplishment’ reigned supreme. The second half of the century witnessed a great increase in the boarding-school system. Hitherto it had been confined to the fashionable world; now tradesmen and farmers who had made some money began to emulate their ‘betters.’ Imitations of the fashionable schools sprang up everywhere. ‘We have,’ says the heroine of General Burgoyne’s play, _The Heiress_, “Young ladies boarded and educated” upon blue boards in gold letters in every village; with a strolling player for a dancing-master, and a deserter from Dunkirk to teach the French language.’ The eighteenth century, too, had its distinguished women; indeed, the Blue-Stocking Club, so called, it seems, from the dress of one of its masculine _habitués_, is regarded as the representative group of learned ladies. But Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone, and Hannah More were exceptions, and themselves only too conscious of their opposition to the rest of their sex. There was a touch of the _précieuse_ about some of them which exposed them to a good deal of cheap satire, and they were keenly alive to the antagonism with which the other sex regarded them. Mrs. Chapone even advises her niece to avoid the study of classics and science, for fear of ‘exciting envy in one sex and jealousy in the other.’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complains bitterly that ‘there is hardly a creature in the world more despicable and more liable to universal ridicule than that of a learned woman,’ while ‘folly is reckoned so much our proper sphere, we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that than the least pretensions to reading and good sense.’