and a page or two of insipid spiritless rhymes, _The Female
Laureat_, find a place in _State Poems_. The same collection contains
_A Satyr on the Modern Translators_. 'Odi Imitatores servum pecus,' &c.
By Mr. P----r,[54] 1684. It begins rather smartly:--

Since the united Cunning of the Stage,
Has balk'd the hireling Drudges of the Age;
Since _Betterton_ of late so thrifty 's grown,
Revives Old Plays, or wisely acts his own;

the modern poets

Have left Stage-practice, chang'd their old Vocations,
Atoning for bad Plays with worse Translations.

In some instances this was true enough, but when the writer attacks
Dryden he becomes ridiculous and imprecates

May he still split on some unlucky Coast,
And have his Works or Dictionary lost:
That he may know what _Roman Authors_ mean,
No more than does our blind Translatress _Behn_,[55]
The Female Wit, who next convicted stands,
Not for abusing _Ovid's_ verse but _Sand's_:
She might have learn'd from the ill-borrow'd Grace,
(Which little helps the Ruin of her Face)
That Wit, like Beauty, triumphs o'er the Heart
When more of Nature's seen, and less of Art:
Nor strive in _Ovid's_ Letters to have shown
As much of Skill, as Lewdness in her own.
Then let her from the next inconstant Lover,
Take a new Copy for a second Rover.
Describe the Cunning of a jilting Whore,
From the ill Arts herself has us'd before;
Thus let her write, but _Paraphrase_ no more.

These verses are verjuiced, unwarranted, unfair. Tom Brown too in his
_Letters from the Dead to the Living_ has a long epistle 'From worthy
Mrs. Behn the Poetess, to the famous Virgin Actress,' (Mrs.
Bracegirdle), in which the Diana of the stage is crudely rallied. 'The
Virgin's Answer to Mrs. Behn' contains allusions to Aphra's intrigue
with some well-known dramatic writer, perhaps Ravenscroft, and speaks of
many an other amour beside. But then for a groat Brown would have proved
Barbara Villiers a virgin, and taxed Torquemada with unorthodoxy. Brown
has yet another gird at Mrs. Behn in his _The Late Converts Exposed,
or the Reason of Mr. Bays's Changing his Religion &c._ Considered in a
Dialogue (1690, a quarto tract; and reprinted in a Collection of Brown's
_Dialogues_, 8vo, 1704). Says Eugenius: 'You may remember Mr. Bays, how
the famed _Astrea_, once in her Life-time unluckily lighted upon such a
Sacred Subject, and in a stra