Having energetically cleared away the more peccant rubbish, Dr. Bernbaum became, it appears to us, a little too drastic, and had he then discriminated rather than swept clean, we were better able wholly to follow the conclusions at which he arrives. He even says that after ‘1671’2 when ‘she began to write for the stage ... such meagre contemporary notices as we find of her are critical rather than biographical’. This is a very partial truth; from extant letters,3 to which Dr. Bernbaum does not refer, we can gather much of Mrs. Behn’s literary life and circumstances. She was a figure of some note, and even if we had no other evidence it seems impossible that her contemporaries should have glibly accepted the fiction of a voyage to Surinam and a Dutch husband named Behn who had never existed. Ayfara, or Aphara4 (Aphra), Amis or Amies, the daughter of John and Amy Amis or Amies, was xvii baptized together with her brother Peter in the Parish Church of SS. Gregory and Martin, Wye, 10 July, 1640, presumably by Ambrose Richmore, curate of Wye at that date.5 Up to this time Aphra’s maiden name has been stated to be Johnson, and she is asserted to have been the daughter of a barber, John Johnson. That the name was not Johnson (an ancient error) is certain from the baptismal register, wherein, moreover, the ‘Quality, Trade, or Profession’ is left blank; that her father was a barber rests upon no other foundation than a MS. note of Lady Winchilsea.6 Mr. Gosse, in a most valuable article (_Athenæum_, 6 September, 1884), was the first to correct the statement repeatedly made that Mrs. Behn came from ‘the City of Canterbury in Kent’. He tells how he acquired a folio volume containing the MS. poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea,7 ‘copied about 1695 under her eye and with innumerable notes and corrections in her autograph’. In a certain poem entitled _The Circuit of Apollo_8 the following lines occur:— xviii And standing where sadly he now might descry From the banks of the Stowre the desolate Wye, He lamented for Behn, o’er that place of her birth, And said amongst Women there was not on the earth, Her superior in fancy, in language, or witt, Yet own’d that a little too loosely she writt. To these is appended this note: ‘Mrs. Behn was Daughter to a Barber, who liv’d formerly in Wye, a little Market Town (now much decay’d) in Kent. Though the account of her life before her Works pretends otherwise; some Persons now alive Do testify upon their Knowledge that to be her Original.’ It is a pity that whilst the one error concerning Aphra’s birthplace is thus remedied, the mistake as to the nature of her father’s calling should have been initiated.