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 era17 (_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 xxx 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] to follow.’ Again, we have that she was ‘a wanton hussy’; her ‘trolloping muse’ shamefacedly ‘wallowed in the mire’; but finally the historian is bound to confess ‘she was never dull’.