AG’NES, daughter of Mr. Wickfield the solicitor, and David Copperfield’s second wife (after the death of Dora, “his child wife").  Agnes is a very pure, self-sacrificing girl, accomplished, yet domestic.—­C.  Dickens, David Copperfield (1849).

AGNES, in Moliere’s L’Ecole des Femmes, the girl on whom Arnolphe tries his pet experiment of education, so as to turn out for himself a “model wife.”  She is brought up in a country convent, where she is kept in entire ignorance of the difference of sex, conventional proprieties, the difference between the love of men and women, and that of girls for girls, the mysteries of marriage, and so on.  When grown to womanhood she quits the convent, and standing one evening on a balcony a young man passes and takes off his hat to her, she returns the salute; he bows a second and third time, she does the same; he passes and repasses several times, bowing each time, and she does as she has been taught to do by acknowledging the salute.  Of course, the young man (Horace) becomes her lover, whom she marries, and M. Arnolphe loses his “model wife.” (See PINCH-WIFE.)

Elle fait l’Agnes. She pretends to be wholly unsophisticated and verdantly ingenuous.—­French Proverb (from the “Agnes” of Moliere, L’Ecole des Femmes, 1662).

Agnes (Black), the countess of March, noted for her defence of Dunbar against the English.

Black Agnes, the palfry of Mary queen of Scots, the gift of her brother Moray, and so called from the noted countess of March, who was countess of Moray (Murray) in her own right.

Agnes (St.), a young virgin of Palermo, who at the age of thirteen was martyred at Rome during the Diocletian persecution of A.D. 304.  Prudence (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens), a Latin Christian poet of the fourth century, has a poem on the subject.  Tintoret and Domenichi’no have both made her the subject of a painting.—­The Martyrdom of St. Agnes.

St. Agnes and the Devil.  St. Agnes, having escaped from the prison at Rome, took shipping and landed at St. Piran Arwothall.  The devil dogged her, but she rebuked him, and the large moor-stones between St. Piran and St. Agnes, in Cornwall, mark the places where the devils were turned into stone by the looks of the indignant saint.—­Polwhele, History of Cornwall.

Agnes of Sorrento, heroine of novel of same name, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.  The scene of the story is laid in Sorrento, Italy.

AGRAMAN’TE (4 syl.) or AG’RAMANT, king of the Moors, in Orlando Innamorato, by Bojardo, and Orlando Furioso, by Ariosto.