t investigation that John Amis
did not follow a barber's trade, but was probably of good old stock.
Accordingly, the conclusions drawn by Dr. Bernbaum from this point
cannot now be for a moment maintained.]

It was perhaps from the reading of La Calprenede and Mlle de Scuderi
Aphra gained that intimate knowledge of French which served her well and
amply in after years during her literary life; at any rate she seems
early to have realized her dramatic genius and to have begun a play
drawn from one of the most interesting episodes in _Cleopatre_, the love
story of the Scythian King Alcamene, scenes which, when they had
'measured three thousand leagues of spacious ocean', were, nearly a
quarter of a century later, to be taken out of her desk and worked up
into a baroque and fanciful yet strangely pleasing tragi-comedy, _The
Young King_.

In Surinam she witnessed the fortunes and fate of the Royal Slave,
Oroonoko, of whom she writes (with all due allowance for pardonable
exaggeration and purely literary touches), so naturally and feelingly,
that 'one of the Fair Sex' with some acerbity makes it her rather
unnecessary business to clear Aphra from any suspicion of a liaison. It
was Surinam which supplied the cognate material for the vivid comedy,
the broad humour and early colonial life, photographic in its realism,
of _The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia_. Mistakes
there may be, errors and forgetfulness, but there are a thousand touches
which only long residence and keen observation could have so deftly
characterized.

We now approach a brief yet important period in Mrs. Behn's life, which
unless we are content to follow (with an acknowledged diffidence and due
reservations) the old Memoir and scattered tradition, we find ourselves
with no sure means whatsoever of detailing. It seems probable, however,
that about the close of 1663, owing no doubt to the Restoration and the
subsequent changes in affairs, the Amis family returned to England,
settling in London, where Aphra, meeting a merchant of Dutch extraction
named Behn, so fascinated him by her wit and comeliness that he offered
her his hand and fortune. During her married life she is said to have
been in affluence, and even to have appeared at the gay licentious
Court, attracting the notice of and amusing the King himself by her
anecdotes and cleverness of repartee; but when her husband died, not
impossibly of the plague in the year of mortalit