he did not spare to lend me treasured
items from his library so rich in first, and boasting unique, editions
of Mrs. Behn. Mr. G. Thorn Drury, K.C., never wearied of answering my
enquiries, and in discussion solved many a knotty point. To him I am
obliged for the transcript of Mrs. Behn's letter to Waller's
daughter-in-law, and also the Satire on Dryden. He even gave of his
valuable time to read through the Memoir and from the superabundance of
his knowledge made suggestions of the first importance. The unsurpassed
library of Mr. T. J. Wise, the well-known bibliographer, was freely at
my disposal. In other cases where I have received any assistance in
clearing a difficulty I have made my acknowledgement in the note itself.

MEMOIR OF MRS. BEHN.

The personal history of Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her
livelihood by authorship, is unusually interesting but very difficult to
unravel and relate. In dealing with her biography writers at different
periods have rushed headlong to extremes, and we now find that the
pendulum has swung to its fullest stretch. On the one hand, we have
prefixed to a collection of the _Histories and Novels_, published in
1696, 'The Life of Mrs. Behn written by one of the Fair Sex',
a frequently reprinted (and even expanded) compilation crowded with
romantic incidents that savour all too strongly of the Italian novella,
with sentimental epistolography and details which can but be accepted
cautiously and in part. On the other there have recently appeared two
revolutionary essays by Dr. Ernest Bernbaum of Harvard, 'Mrs. Behn's
_Oroonoko_', first printed in _Kittredge Anniversary Papers_, 1913;
and-- what is even more particularly pertinent-- 'Mrs. Behn's Biography
a Fiction,' _Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America_, xxviii, 3: both afterwards issued as separate pamphlets, 1913.
In these, the keen critical sense of the writer has apparently been so
jarred by the patent incongruities, the baseless fiction, nay, the very
fantasies (such as the fairy pavilion seen floating upon the Channel),
which, imaginative and invented flotsam that they are, accumulated and
were heaped about the memory of Aphra Behn, that he is apt to regard
almost every record outside those of her residence at Antwerp[1] with a
suspicion which is in many cases surely unwarranted and undue. Having
energetically cleared away the more peccant rubbish, Dr. Bernbaum
became, it appears to us, a