a Morning_, played at
Covent Garden, 18 April, 1792, a jejune effort. _Les Femmes Savantes_
was rather racily transformed by Thomas Wright into _The Female
Virtuosoes_, and produced at Drury Lane in 1693. It was revived as _No
Fools like Wits_ at Lincoln's Inn Fields, 10 January, 1721, to
anticipate Cibber's _The Refusal; or, The Ladies' Philosophy_, which had
a run of six nights. Miller, in his _The Man of Taste_, once more had
resource to Moliere. His play was produced at Drury Lane, 6 March, 1735.
It has no value.

Of all these borrowers Mrs. Behn is infinitely the best. _Sir Patient
Fancy_ is, indeed, an excellent comedy, and had she used more leisure
might have been improved to become quite first rate. Perhaps she
plagiarized so largely owing to the haste with which her play was
written and staged, but yet everything she touched has been invested
with an irresistible humour. A glaring example of her hurry remains in
the fact that the 'precise clerk' of Sir Patient has a double
nomenclature. In Act III he appears as Abel; in Act IV, iii, he is
referred to as Bartholomew, and under this last name has an exit marked
in Act V. This character is only on the stage twice and is given but
some three or four lines to speak. Obviously, when writing her fourth
act, Aphra forgot she had already christened him.

THEATRICAL HISTORY.

_Sir Patient Fancy_ was produced at the Duke's Theatre, Dorset Garden,
in January, 1678, with an exceptionally strong cast which included both
Betterton and his wife. It met with the great success it fully deserved.
The critics, indeed, were not slow to detect Mrs. Behn's plagiarisms,
but the only real opposition was negligible disapproval of a modest
clique, who a few years later vainly tried to damn _The Lucky Chance_.
After the death of the two famous comedians Antony Leigh and James Nokes
in December, 1692, _Sir Patient Fancy_, owing to the inability of
succeeding actors to sustain the two roles, Sir Patient and Sir
Credulous, which had been created by this gifted pair, completely
dropped out of the repertory of the theatre. It was not singular in its
fate, for Cibber expressly tells us that D'Urfey's excellent comedy _The
Fond Husband_, and Crowne's satirical _City Politics_, 'lived only by
the extraordinary performance of Nokes and Leigh.'

TO THE READER.

I Printed this Play with all the impatient haste one ought to do, who
would be vindicated from the most unjust and si