Her opportunities for good were great, but she abused them all. She might have been an honour to womanhood;--she was its disgrace. She might have gained glory by her labours;--but she chose to reap infamy. Her pleasures were not those which became an honest woman; and as for her "Muses," she sat not with them on the slopes of Helicon, but dragged them down to her level, where the Nine and their unclean votary wallowed together in the mire. There is no one that equals this woman in downright nastiness, save Ravenscroft and Wycherley; but the latter of these had more originality of invention and grace of expression. To these writers, and to those of their detestable school, she set a revolting example. Dryden preceded her, by a little, on the stage; but Mrs. Behn's trolloping muse appeared there before the other two writers I have mentioned, and was still making unseemly exhibition there after the coming of Congreve. With Dryden she vied in indecency, and was not overcome. To all other male writers of her day she served as a provocation and an apology. Intellectually, she was qualified to have led them through pure and bright ways; but she was a mere harlot, who danced through uncleanness, and dared or lured them to follow. Remonstrance was useless with this wanton hussey. As for her private life, it has found a champion in a female friend, whose precious balsam breaks the head it would anoint. According to this friend, Mrs. Behn had numerous good qualities; but "she was a woman of sense, and consequently loved pleasure;" and she was "more gay and free than the modesty of the precise will allow." Of Aphra Behn's eighteen plays, produced between 1671 and 1696,--before which last year, however, she had died,--but few are original. They are adaptations from Marlowe, from Wilkins, from Killigrew, from Brome, from Tatham, from Shirley, from the Italian comedy, from Molière, and more legitimately from the old romances. She adapted skilfully; and she was never dull. But then, all her vivacity is wasted on filth. When the public sent forth a cry of horror at some of the scenes in her play of "The Lucky Chance," she vindicated herself by asking, "was she not loyal?"--"Tory to the back bone;"--had she not made the King's enemies ridiculous, in her five-act farces;--and had she not done homage to the King, by dedicating her "Feigned Courtezans" to Nell Gwyn, and styling that worthy sister of hers in vice and good nature so perfect a creature as to be something akin to divinity?