Millamant is an admirable, almost a lovable heroine.  It is 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 example of misanthropy; whereas Alceste is only a misanthrope of the circle he finds himself placed in:  he has a touching faith in the virtue residing in the country, and a critical love of sweet simpleness.  Nor is he the principal person of the comedy to which he gives a name.  He is only passively comic.  Celimene is the active spirit.  While he is denouncing and railing, the trial is imposed