It is probable that about this date, 1683-4, she penned her little novel _The Adventure of the Black Lady_, and also that excellent extravaganza _The King of Bantam_.42 Both these and _The Unfortunate_ xlvii _Happy Lady_ are written as if they had certainly been completed before the death of Charles II, in which case they must have lain by, MSS, in Mrs. Behn’s desk. The King, at the height of his power, after a short illness, died 6 February, 1685, an event that together with the accession of James naturally evoked a plethora of State Poems, to which flood Mrs. Behn contributed. Her Pindarics rank high amongst the semi-official, complimentary, threnodic or pastoral pseudo-Dithyrambs, of which the age was so bounteous; but it needed the supreme genius of a Dryden sustainedly to instil lyric fire and true poetry into these hybrid forms.43 The nadir is sounded by the plumbeous productions of Shadwell, Nahum Tate, and ‘Persons of Quality’. Aphra’s _Pindarick on the Death of Charles II_ ran through two editions in 1685, and her _Poem to the Queen Dowager Catherine_ was xlviii published the same year. James II was crowned on St. George’s Day, and she greeted her new monarch and old patron with a _Poem on the Happy Coronation of His Sacred Majesty_. A little later she published a _Miscellany_ of poems by various hands: amongst whom were Etheredge, Edmund Arwaker, Henry Crisp, and Otway, including not a few from her own pen, ‘Together with Reflections on Morality, or Seneca Unmasqued. Translated from the Maximes of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld’, a number of clever apophthegms tersely turned. The following note,44 however, affords ample evidence that at this juncture, maugre her diligence and unremitting toils, she was far from being in easy circumstances:— ’Where as I am indebted to Mr. Bags the sum of six pownd for the payment of which Mr. Tonson has obleged him self. Now I do here by impowre Mr. Zachary Baggs, in case the said debt is not fully discharged before Michaelmas next, to stop what money he shall hereafter have in his hands of mine, upon the playing my first play till this aforesaid debt of six pownd be discharged. Witness my hand this 1st August, —85. A. Behn.’