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Amorous Twire. p. 210 gutling. Guzzling, cf. supra, p. 479. p. 210 Docity. cf. II, p. 441. Docity. p. 210 laid in Lavender. An old and common phrase for 'to pawn'. cf. Florio, Worlds of Wordes : 'To lay to pawne, as we say, to lay in Lavender. Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, Act iii, sc. p. 210 Enter Rag and Landlady. Mrs. Behn remembered how Don John treated Dame Gillian, his landlady.
The style in which the "Atalantis" is written is so mean, that no person could have derived any pleasure from its pages other than the gratification of a depraved taste. A writer of fiction of much greater importance appeared in the person of Aphra Johnson, more generally known as Mrs. Behn, or "the divine Astræa"; "a gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of Canterbury."
Behn kept out of charity, to put him to bed drest in her night-cloaths in her place, when Astræa was passing the evening in a merchant's house in the town.
It is grievous to me, dear Bobus, a man of notorious gallantry, to find that the ladies, after consenting to smirch their rosy fingers with Erebean ink, are among the first who are discarded. If you will go into the College Library, Mr. Sibley will show you a charming copy of the works of Mrs. Behn, with a roguish, rakish, tempting little portrait of the writer prefixed. Poor Mrs.
'Poetry, the supreme pleasure of the mind, is begot, and born in pleasure, but oppressed and killed with pain. This reflexion ought to raise our admiration of Mrs. Behn, whose genius was of that force, to maintain its gaiety in the midst of disappointments, which a woman of her sense and merit ought never to have met with.
A stage career, connected with a certain degree of infamy, had been open to the sex since Restoration times, and writing for the theatre had been successfully practiced by Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Pix, and Mrs. Davys. The first two female playwrights mentioned had produced beside their dramatic works a number of pieces of fiction, and Mrs. Mary Hearne, Mrs.
Behn suffered enough at the hands of supercilious prudes, who had the barbarity to construe her sprightliness into lewdness; and because she had wit and beauty, she must likewise be charged with prostitution and irreligion. Her dramatic works are, The Rover: Or, the banished Cavalier. In two parts, both comedies; acted at the duke's theatre, and printed in 4to. 1677 and 1681.
After passing some time in this manner at Antwerp, she embarked at Dunkirk for England; and in her passage, was near being lost, for the ship being driven on the coast, foundered within sight of land, but by the assistance of boats from the shore, they were all saved; and Mrs. Behn arriving in London, dedicated the rest of her life to pleasure and poetry.
Behn bears away the palm in this witty passage. Recent critics have pertinently suggested that the device of furnishing Loveby with money was the chief hint for which Dryden is indebted to Spain.
Etheredge's third comedy, The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter was produced at the Duke's Theatre in 1676. It met 'with extraordinary success'. Mrs. Behn points at Act iv, II. p. 186 Valentinian. The reference is to the Earl of Rochester's Valentinian, altered from Fletcher, which was produced with great applause at the Theatre Royal in 1684.
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