We abandon all ale And beer that is stale Rosa-solis and damnable hum, But we will rack In the praise of sack ’Gainst Omne quod exit in um. --_Witts Recreation_ (1654). _The Accomplished Female Instructor_ gives the following recipe: ‘Rossa Solis; Take of clean spirits, not too strong, two quarts and a quart of spring-water; let them seethe gently over a soft fire till about a pint is evaporated; then put in four spoonfuls of orange-flower-water, and as much of very good cinnamon-water; crush 3 eggs in pieces, and throw them in shell and all; stir it well, and when it boiles up a little take it off.’ This drink was so great a favourite with Louis XIV that a particular sort was named Rossolis du Roi. p. 51 _The Cheats, Mother, the Cheats._ John Wilson’s excellent comedy, _The Cheats_, which was written and produced in 1662, attained great popularity. It ran into four editions (‘imprimatur, 5 November, 1663’); 4to, 1664; 1671; 1684; 1693. Caustically satirizing the Puritans, it became a stock piece, and was acted as late as May, 1721, when Griffin, Harper, Diggs, and Mrs. Gifford sustained the parts which had been created by Lacy, Mohun, Hart, and Mrs. Corey. * * * * * * * * * THE FAIR JILT. INTRODUCTION. Although _The Fair Jilt_ was published in 1688, it is interesting to note that ten years earlier, Michaelmas Term, 1678, there is advertised for R. Tonson _The Amorous Convert; being a true Relation of what happened in Holland_, which may very well be the first sketch of Mrs. Behn’s maturer novel. The fact that she does not ‘pretend here to entertain you with a feign’d story,’ but on the contrary, ‘every circumstance to a tittle is truth’, and that she expressly asserts, ‘To a great part of the main I myself was an eye-witness’, aroused considerable suspicion in Bernbaum as to the veracity of her narration, a suspicion which, when he gravely discovers history to know no such person as her ‘Prince Tarpuin of the race of the last Kings of Rome’, is resolved into a certainty that she is romancing fully and freely throughout. It is surely obvious that such a point does not so much demonstrate Mrs. Behn’s untruthfulness as her consummate art. With all the nice skill of a born novelist she has so mingled fact and fancy, what did occur and what might have been, that any attempt to disentangle the twain would be idle indeed. The passages where she is most insistent upon the due sequence of events, most detailed in observation are not impossibly purely fictional, the incidents related without stress or emphatic assertions are probably enough the plain unvarnished happenings as she witnessed them. That the history is mainly true admits of little question; that Mrs. Behn has heightened and coloured the interest is equally certain.