hension of the tastes of our ancestors-our English ancestors, from whom we inherit our language, if not our lives in turning over the pages of the third edition of Plays Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn, published in 1724, "printed for Mary Poulson, and sold by A. Bettesworth in Pater-noster Row, and F. Clay without Temple-Bar." They used that word "ingenious" in those days rather more freely than we do, and I suppose it meant witty and clever. My copy of the book has the old calf binding and the elaborate book - plate of one "George Raper, Gent," but it lacks the portrait, and is therefore only a specimen of the disjecta membra of collectors. Afra, Aphra, Aphara, or Ayfara Behn, whose Christian name was spelled in divers ways, has long been celebrated in an unpleasant way; but, although she was certainly without delicacy, she was really ingenious in the sense of her own time and she was "the first female writer who lived by her pen in England."" I am not positive that her fame ought not to rest more surely upon the fact that she introduced milk-punch into England. Mr. Gosse admits that her plays are coarse, and he does not attempt "to defend her manners as correct or her attitude to the world as delicate." He calls her the George Sand of the Restoration, the chère maître to such men as Dryden, Otway, and Southerne, who all honored her with their friendship. Her novels, included in the same edition, are perhaps worse than her dramatic effusions. It is not easy for us to comprehend how such things could ever have attracted the favorable notice of decent people or could ever have been regarded as ornaments of literature. 1 Edmund Gosse, Dictionary of National Biography. The records of the stage in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries are filled rather too generously with the accounts of actresses and their relations to royalty. Among them is the Public and Private Life of that Celebrated Actress, Miss Bland, otherwise Mrs. Lord, or Mrs. Jordan, which purports to have been written "by a confidential friend of the departed," and was published by J. Dunscombe, 19 Little Queen Street, London, about 1830. Mr. Joseph Knight says that it is somewhat scandalous and exceedingly rare. My own copy has in it an autograph letter of the fair Dora, Dorothea, or Dorothy for she had almost as many Christian names as surnames and it has been "extended" to two volumes by the insertion of many portraits, views, and old play-bills of her day. As is usual with portraits of that period, no one of Mrs. Jordan's portraits bears any resemblance to any of the others. Sometimes one is inclined to believe that the fabricators of these curious pictures of noted people may have fallen into the habit of doing what some genius did for my first edition of Ford's True George Washington, where you may discover a portrait labelled "Nelly Custis," which is only a familiar representation of that tragic muse, the great Sarah Siddons. All of the portraits of the fascinating Dora, whose person, said Hazlitt, "v was large, soft, and generous, like her soul,"1 are the likenesses of a pretty woman, and it can easily be understood why the chuckle - headed Duke of Clarence, later his Majesty King William IV., found her irresistible, and their ten Fitzclarence children, including Lord Adolphus, Rear Admiral, and George Augustus Frederick, Earl of Munster, became ornaments of the proudly born nobility of Great Britain. The Duke allowed her £1000 a year, but, at the suggestion of George III., is said to have written to her proposing a reduction to £500. Her answer consisted of the bottom part of a play-bill bearing these words: "No money returned after the rising of the curtain." With all her faults and frailties, she must have been far better worth knowing than the royal noodle, yclept in common parlance "Silly Billy," who honored her with what he was pleased to call his affections. In the same book there is a colored portrait of a woman whose beauty is striking and undeniable, a saucy sort of beauty, and she became the occasion of one of those national scandals which from time to time have adorned the annals of the British army. I do not mean to assert that such scandals are peculiar to the political history of our cousins over - sea, for there is a man still living, honored as a soldier and as a lawyer, who could tell, if he would, a story of one of our administrations and of the fall of a certain cabinet officer which would be as interesting as any romance ever written. He told it once to me, in the leisure hours of a long railway journey, and I am sorely tempted to betray the confidence of that chat over the perpetual cigars of a Pullman private compartment, but I sternly resist. Comedy and tragedy, with the ruin of a Presidential candidacy, were strangely mingled in that graphic narrative; the passions, the jealousies, the rivalries of politics were all depicted vividly upon that canvas which he unrolled before me as we smoked and talked in the delightful unreserve of a friendly communion. But there are living persons who might suffer if the truth were told, and I respect the confidences of my friend, who will, I hope, leave some record of that curious episode in our political history. Returning to the portrait, it is one of the many counterfeit presentiments of the notorious Mary Anne Clarke, actress, who died as late as 1852, at the respectable age of seventy-four. Who can imagine that pretty person at seventy-four? She enjoyed the protection, if one may call it so, of that renowned warrior-son of King George III., the illustrious Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany, who became Bishop of Osnaburg at the age of six months (fairly young for a church dignitary) and commander-in-chief of the army, without a victory to his credit, at thirtyfive, after a career in the field which makes the memory of James Wilkinson respectable. Somewhere in the mass of miscellaneous matter relegated to the dark corners of the hall I might find Mary Anne's Authentic Memoirs, a shabby old volume, with an autograph letter of hers inserted therein, if I had the patience to search for it. It is quite a delight now and then to burrow in the purlieus and to discover forgotten prizes. In a newspaper I saw recently an atrocious cut representing a house on fire, the firemen heroically struggling with the problem, and the owner calmly reading a small volume, saying, "Why, this fire is a good thing; I have found a book I lost ten years ago." At all |