his drink was so great a favourite with Louis XIV that a
particular sort was named Rossolis du Roi.

p. 51 _The Cheats, Mother, the Cheats._ John Wilson's excellent comedy,
_The Cheats_, which was written and produced in 1662, attained great
popularity. It ran into four editions ('imprimatur, 5 November, 1663');
4to, 1664; 1671; 1684; 1693. Caustically satirizing the Puritans, it
became a stock piece, and was acted as late as May, 1721, when Griffin,
Harper, Diggs, and Mrs. Gifford sustained the parts which had been
created by Lacy, Mohun, Hart, and Mrs. Corey.

* * * * *
* * * *

THE FAIR JILT.

INTRODUCTION.

Although _The Fair Jilt_ was published in 1688, it is interesting to
note that ten years earlier, Michaelmas Term, 1678, there is advertised
for R. Tonson _The Amorous Convert; being a true Relation of what
happened in Holland_, which may very well be the first sketch of Mrs.
Behn's maturer novel. The fact that she does not 'pretend here to
entertain you with a feign'd story,' but on the contrary, 'every
circumstance to a tittle is truth', and that she expressly asserts, 'To
a great part of the main I myself was an eye-witness', aroused
considerable suspicion in Bernbaum as to the veracity of her narration,
a suspicion which, when he gravely discovers history to know no such
person as her 'Prince Tarpuin of the race of the last Kings of Rome', is
resolved into a certainty that she is romancing fully and freely
throughout. It is surely obvious that such a point does not so much
demonstrate Mrs. Behn's untruthfulness as her consummate art. With all
the nice skill of a born novelist she has so mingled fact and fancy,
what did occur and what might have been, that any attempt to disentangle
the twain would be idle indeed. The passages where she is most insistent
upon the due sequence of events, most detailed in observation are not
impossibly purely fictional, the incidents related without stress or
emphatic assertions are probably enough the plain unvarnished happenings
as she witnessed them. That the history is mainly true admits of little
question; that Mrs. Behn has heightened and coloured the interest is
equally certain.

_The Fair Jilt_ must be allowed to stand in the very first rank amongst
her novels. It has been aptly compared to a novella by Bandello, and is
indeed more than worthy of the pen of the good Dominican Bishop of Agen.