pany that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll
Flanders in her middle age: but he makes not the slightest attempt to
give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment,
novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make _The English
Rogue_ is simply this: "Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan
pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the 'coney-catching'
variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy
personages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them."
Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk and
substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this
muck-heap--which the present writer, having had to read it a second time
for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave
henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.

Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of. It is true
that--since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a
"fie-fie!" which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits--there
has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely
in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too
highly, but in reference to these novels. _Oroonoko_ or _The Royal
Slave_, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his
love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture
at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the
public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and
Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover,
and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed,
had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their
matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very
inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello
had caught her fresh imagination. On the other hand, there was the
heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage: and a
much less nimble intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitan
experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.
Still, there is no doubt that _The Royal Slave_ and even its companions
are far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of
_The English Rogue. Oroonoko_ is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere
"coney-catching" jest. To say that it wants either contraction or
expansion; less "talk