d the Roses of her lovely Cheeks and Lips! How
useless her snowy arms and polished Fingers! they hung in a
melancholy Decline, and seemed out of other Employment, but
sometimes to support the Head of the dejected Fair One! Her limbs
enervated and supine, wanting of that Energy which should bear her
from a Solitude so affrighting!

From this very accurate description of the condition of virtue at the
end of the seventeenth century, it might be supposed that Mrs. Manley
deplored her neglected state. But such is far from being the case.
Astraea and Virtue meet with a personage called Intelligence, who
furnishes them with a detailed account of current scandal calculated to
still further depress the dejected Virtue. The trio are soon joined by
Mrs. Nightwork, a midwife, who never breaks an oath of secrecy unless
it be to her interest, and the character of whose contributions to the
general fund of gossip may be easily imagined. This semi-allegorical
method of narration is kept up during the first two volumes; in the
third and fourth Mrs. Manley tells her story in her own way. In the
course of these four volumes is unrolled an extraordinary series of
crimes, some unnatural, and all gross in highest degree. The details
which Mrs. Manley could not obtain from authentic sources are supplied
by her vivid and heated imagination. She gloats over each incident with
a horrible relish, and adds, with no unsparing brush, a heightened
color to each picture. Only a society whose conduct could afford
material for this composition could possibly have read it. Mrs. Manley
no doubt invented and exaggerated without scruple, but the fact that
her work was widely read and even popular is a sufficient commentary on
the taste of the time. The reader of to-day is sickened by the
multiplication of repulsive scenes, and the absence from the book of
any good qualities or actions whatever. The style in which the
"Atalantis" is written is so mean, that no person could have derived
any pleasure from its pages other than the gratification of a depraved
taste.

A writer of fiction of much greater importance appeared in the person
of Aphra Johnson, more generally known as Mrs. Behn, or "the divine
Astraea"; "a gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of
Canterbury." Her father was appointed to a colonial office in the West
Indies, where he took his family while Mrs. Behn was yet a young girl.
There the future authoress began