Marsh thought it too
licentious for registration (an improbable supposition), and so, as
Hazlitt suggests, printed it abroad.

But the initials A.B. at the end of the _Letter_ in the first part may
be a clue, though a perplexing one. It is a plausible guess that they
are those of Aphra or Aphara Behn, the dramatist and poet, the first
woman to earn her living by her pen. It is true that she was, so to
speak, a feminist: the preface and epilogue to her _Sir Patient
Fancy_ speak bitterly of those who would not go to her plays because
they were by a woman. On the other hand, she had a free pen, to say
the least of it, and often a witty one. And she had Dutch
associations. Her husband was a Dutch merchant living in London. She
had herself been on secret service in the Netherlands. She translated
a Dutch book on oracles. If the book was printed in Holland, she of
all people could get the work done. And she knew the city of London
intimately.

There are, too, some odd details in her plays, especially in _Sir
Patient Fancy_, which recall touches in _The Ten Pleasures_. She
introduces a Padua doctor on the stage. She shows, in several of her
plays, a curious interest in medicine, especially quack medicine. Sir
Patient, a hypochondriac, thinks he is swelling up like the "pipsy"
husband. Isabella, in the same play, says "keeping begins to be as
ridiculous as matrimony.... The insolence and expense of their
mistresses has almost tired out all but the old and doting part of
mankind." It is not inconceivable that in a freakish or embittered
moment this singular woman threw herself with malicious joy into an
attack on her own sex.

"Love in fantastic triumph sat...." Aphra Behn's great lyric
deservedly lives. If she wrote _The Ten Pleasures_, the sort of love
she describes in it still lives, but hardly in fantastic triumph. Yet
if we want to know our fellow-men, we must know something of it. Apart
from the curious interest of its rarity, _The Ten Pleasures_ is a
sturdy piece of human nature.

JOHN HARVEY.

* * * * *

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

"Of the making of many books there is no end," nor is there an end to
the Romance of books, as the little volume here, privately reprinted
by the Navarre Society, is surely proof most positive. The original is
a small thick volume; it bears the imprint "London, Printed in the
year 1683," and but one perfect copy is known; that copy lay
unappreciated i