Besides the women whose work was sufficiently specialized to be grouped under particular subjects or species there were many women to whom learning was itself an avocation with no thought of any literary outcome, and there were many more whose interests were in the general field of _belles-lettres_ and who wrote either in verse or in prose, and on such varied themes as the occasion might suggest. Since no effective principle of classification suggests itself in connection with these writers, it will probably be in the interests of clearness to discuss them in an order as nearly chronological as may be. [Sidenote: Joan Philips (fl. 1679)] An early, almost unknown, little volume of poems, published in 1679 under the title, _Female Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Ephelia_, is the work of Joan Philips whose portrait accompanies the poems. Such of Miss Philips's poems as can be dated belong but a year or two before the publication of the book. She apparently had some rather close connection with court circles. Her little volume is dedicated to the "Most Excellent Princess Mary, Dutchess of Richmond and Lennox"; she sends a congratulatory poem to Charles II on the discovery of the Popish Plot; and she writes an elegy on Archbishop Sheldon. Her poems are not, however, usually concerned with court and state. The "Several Occasions" calling forth her verse are chiefly amatory or friendly. Her love-poems are highly personal. From poem to poem the lady pursues the uneven and finally disastrous course of her love for "Strephon," sometimes less poetically addressed as "F. G." From "Love's First Approach" to Strephon's final decisive nuptials with a wealthier Fair One the hopes and despairs of Ephelia are spread before us. She can find no surcease from sorrow. Books fail her as a resource, and her pen proves as recalcitrant as that of the White King in Looking Glass Land. Sometimes with Books I would divert my mind, But nothing there but F's and G's I find. Sometimes to ease my Grief, my Pen I take But it no letters but F. G. will make. Miss Philips's friendship poems, in their addresses to "the honoured Eugenia," "the beauteous Marinda," to "Damon," and to "Phylocles inviting him to friendship" show how definitely Ephelia formed herself on the model of the great Orinda whom she praises as having reached the summit of excellence. Miss Philips also wrote in awe-struck admiration of "Madam _Behn_" whose "strenuous polite lines" seemed to her a union of "Strong and Sweet" such as might be envied by the wittiest men. And she followed in the footsteps of Mrs. Behn to the extent of writing one comedy, _The Pair-Royal of Coxcombs_ which had the humble success of being acted at a dancing-school. The deprecatory Prologue and Epilogue were included in her poems together with some of the love-songs in the play.