with whom the lady deceives the monarch, Jack Churchill. It is a wanton little book, and at the time must have been irresistibly piquant. Beyond the likeness between the characters of Mirtilla and Hattigé the novel has, however, little in common with Mrs. Behn’s play. Gildon’s comment is, of course, founded upon the passage in _Oroonoko_ which says: ‘We met on the river with Colonel Martin, a man of great gallantry, wit and goodness, and whom I have celebrated in a character of my new comedy by his own name in memory of so brave a man.’ In D’Urfey’s _The Royalist_, an excellent comedy produced at Dorset Garden, 1682 (4to, 1682), the author introduces a certain damsel Philippa, who, disguised as a page, follows the loyal Sir Charles Kinglove with whom she is enamoured. At the end of the second Act her boy’s clothes involve her in the same predicament as befalls Olivia in Act IV of _The Younger Brother_. Although Genest prefers Mrs. Behn’s treatment of the situation, it must, I think, be allowed that D’Urfey has managed the jest with far greater verve and spirit. Honest Tom D’Urfey is in fact one of the least read and most maligned of all our dramatists. He had the merriest comic gifts, and perhaps when the critics and literary historians deign to read his plays he will attain a higher position in our theatrical libraries. Some critics have suggested that D’Urfey, in his _The Intrigues at Versailles_, produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1697, may have taken a hint from Mrs. Behn’s Mirtilla, and Wycherley’s Olivia (_The Plain Dealer_) for his ‘Madame de Vandosme a right jilt in all humours’, a rôle created by Mrs. Barry. There is indeed some resemblance between all these three characters, base heartless coquettes; and D’Urfey, in making his jilt prefer Sir Blunder Bosse, ‘a dull sordid brute and mongrel, whose humour is to call everybody by clownish names’, to all her other gallants, seems not to have forgotten Mirtilla’s marriage with Sir Morgan Blunder. The very names call attention to the plagiarism. _The Intrigues at Versailles_ is none the less a clever and witty comedy, but a little overcrowded with incident and business. THEATRICAL HISTORY.