[Illustration: Mrs. Barry and Mr Garrick in "The Wonder."] FOOTNOTES: [58] Brady was in no sense a professional dramatic author. [59] I doubt if Dilke is correctly included in this category. [60] A grocer. (Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_.) [61] Southerne is said to have been at Oxford and Dublin Universities. [62] This is a quotation from Rymer's second work, "A Short View of Tragedy," published in 1693. [63] Whether Davenant altered "Julius Cæsar" is somewhat doubtful. [64] Congreve (ed. 1774) merely says that it was _regular_. [65] "_Steal_ me another such." [Illustration: MRS. CENTLIVRE.] CHAPTER XI. THE DRAMATIC AUTHORESSES. During this half century, there were seven ladies who were more or less distinguished as writers for the stage. These were the virtuous Mrs. Philips, the audacious Aphra Behn, the not less notorious Mrs. Manley, the gentle and learned Mrs. Cockburn, the rather aristocratic Mrs. Boothby (of whom nothing is known but that she wrote one play, called "Marcatia,"[66] in 1669), fat Mrs. Pix, and that thorough Whig, Mrs. Centlivre. The last four also belong to the beginning of the eighteenth century; and three at least apologised that they, women as they were, should have ventured to become dramatists. The "virtuous Mrs. Philips," of Evelyn, the "matchless Orinda," of Cowley and other poets, translated the "Pompey" and "Horace" of Corneille. In those grave pieces, represented at court in the early years of the Restoration, the poetess endeavoured to direct the popular taste, and to correct it also. Had she not died (of small-pox, and in the thirty-third year of her age), she might have set such example to the playwrights as the Bettertons did to the actors; but her good intentions were frustrated, and her place was unhappily occupied by the most shameless woman who ever took pen in hand, designedly to corrupt the public. Aphra Behn was a Kentish woman, whose early years were passed at Surinam, where her father, Johnson, had resided, as lieutenant-general.[67] After a wild training in that fervid school, she repaired to London, married a Dutchman, named Behn, who seems to have straightway disappeared,--penetrated, by means of her beauty, to the court of Charles II.,--and obtained, by means of her wit, an irregular employment at Antwerp,--that of a spy. The letters of her Dutch lovers belong to romance; but there is warrant for the easy freedom of this woman's life. In other respects she was unfortunate. On her return to England, her political reports and prophecies were no more credited than the monitions of old, by Cassandra; so she abandoned England to its fate, and herself "to pleasure and the muses."