an Barber's kept mistress
and died in his house. Mrs. Behn has given us poetic pseudonyms for
many of her lovers, Lycidas, Lysander, Philaster, Amintas, Alexis,
and the rest, but these extended over many years, and attempts at
identification, however interesting, are fruitless.[16]

[Footnote 16: Amintas repeatedly stands for John Hoyle. In _Our
Cabal_, however (_vide_ Vol. VI, p. 160), Hoyle is dubbed
Lycidas.]

There has been no more popular mistake, nor yet one more productive, not
merely of nonsense and bad criticism but even of actual malice and evil,
than the easy error of confounding an author with the characters he
creates. Mrs. Behn has not been spared. Some have superficially argued
from the careless levity of her heroes: the Rover, Cayman, Wittmore,
Wilding, Frederick; and again from the delightful insouciance of Lady
Fancy, Queen Lucy, and the genteel coquette Mirtilla, or the torrid
passions of Angelica Bianca, Miranda and la Nuche; that Aphra herself
was little better, in fact a great deal worse, than a common prostitute,
and that her works are undiluted pornography.

In her own day, probably for reasons purely political, a noisy clique
assailed her on the score of impropriety; a little later came Pope with
his jaded couplet

The stage how loosely does Astrea tread
Who fairly puts all characters to bed;

and the attack was reinforced by an anecdote of Sir Walter Scott and
some female relative who, after having insisted upon the great novelist
lending her Mrs. Behn, found the _Novels_ and _Plays_ too loose for her
perusal, albeit in the heyday of the lady's youth they had been popular
enough. As one might expect, Miss Julia Kavanagh, in the mid-Victorian
era[17] (_English Women of Letters_ 1863), is sad and sorry at having to
mention Mrs. Behn-- 'Even if her life remained pure,[18] it is amply
evident her mind was "tainted to the very core. Grossness was congenial
to her.... Mrs. Behn's indelicacy was useless and worse than useless,
the superfluous addition of a corrupt mind and vitiated taste".' One can
afford to smile at and ignore these modest outbursts, but it is strange
to find so sound and sane a critic as Dr. Doran writing of Aphra Behn as
follows: 'No one equalled this woman in downright nastiness save
Ravenscroft and Wycherley.... With Dryden she vied in indecency and was
not overcome.... She was a mere harlot, who danced through uncleanness
and dared them [the male dramatists]