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It must be recollected that Eliza Haywood lived in the very twilight of English fiction. Sixteen years were still to pass, in 1724, before the British novel properly began to dawn in Pamela, twenty-five years before it broke in the full splendour of Tom Jones. Eliza Haywood simply followed where, two generations earlier, the redoubtable Mrs. Aphra Behn had led.
Behn was a notability as well as a notoriety in her day; and when I have great leisure for the work, I mean to write her life and do her justice. The task would have been worthy of De Foe; but, with a little help from you, I hope to do it passably. Poor Aphra! poet, dramatist, intriguant strumpet! Worthy of no better fate, take my benison of light laughter and of tears! Then there is Mrs.
Ninon de Lenclos, as we have seen, was not strictly a courtesan, but she was a pioneer in the assertion of woman's rights. Aphra Behn who, a little later in England, occupied a similarly dubious social position, was likewise a pioneer in generous humanitarian aspirations, which have since been adopted in the world at large.
I cannot think without horror, even now, of that play we saw on that night in the King's Theatre. It was Mrs. Aphra Behn's tragedy, called Abdelazar, or The Moor's Revenge, and Mrs. Lee acted the principal part of Isabella, the Spanish Queen. We sat in a little box next the stage, which we had to ourselves; and in the box opposite was my Lord the Earl of Bath with a couple of his ladies.
Ousley's claim cannot be lightly set aside. There is nothing to add to this, and we can only say that Aphra Behn had such true lyric genius that 'Oh! Love that stronger art' is in no way beyond her. A statement which neither disposes of nor invalidates Ousley's claim based, as this is, upon such strong and definite evidence.
Aphra Behn's plays, where the cavaliers are denominated the heroicks, and Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough represented as going to meeting, their large Bibles carried before them by their pages, and falling in love with two banished cavaliers by the way.
Aphra Behn; but these two were necessary to my purpose, which was not only to give an estimate of the novels as I found them, but to describe how it had come to pass that the English novels of the present day have become what they are, to point out the effects which they have produced, and to inquire whether their great popularity has on the whole done good or evil to the people who read them.
'sequestered from the world in a remote part of the house, and had a large garden to range in, in which she would frequently walk, singing and giving way to that innocent frenzy which had seized her in the earlier part of her life. Aphra Behn, first acted in London in 1687.
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."
In a comedy, written by Ravenscroft, after the Italian manner, Joe Haines, in 1667, donned the motley jacket of Harlequin, and which, in all probability, was the first appearance of Harlequin on the English boards, though not in England, as stated above. In a farce of the audacious Mrs. Aphra Behn's, produced twenty years afterwards, Harlequin and Scaramouch were two of the characters. Mrs.
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