Pray send me ye loose papers to put to these I have, and let me know wch you will go about first, ye songs and verses or that. Send me an answer to-day.

It is probable that about this date, 1683-4, she penned her little novel The Adventure of the Black Lady, and also that excellent extravaganza The King of Bantam.[42] Both these and The Unfortunate Happy Lady are written as if they had certainly been completed before the death of Charles II, in which case they must have lain by, MSS, in Mrs. Behn’s desk.

The King, at the height of his power, after a short illness, died 6 February, 1685, an event that together with the accession of James naturally evoked a plethora of State Poems, to which flood Mrs. Behn contributed. Her Pindarics rank high amongst the semi-official, complimentary, threnodic or pastoral pseudo-Dithyrambs, of which the age was so bounteous; but it needed the supreme genius of a Dryden sustainedly to instil lyric fire and true poetry into these hybrid forms.[43] The nadir is sounded by the plumbeous productions of Shadwell, Nahum Tate, and ‘Persons of Quality’. Aphra’s Pindarick on the Death of Charles II ran through two editions in 1685, and her Poem to the Queen Dowager Catherine was published the same year. James II was crowned on St. George’s Day, and she greeted her new monarch and old patron with a Poem on the Happy Coronation of His Sacred Majesty. A little later she published a Miscellany of poems by various hands: amongst whom were Etheredge, Edmund Arwaker, Henry Crisp, and Otway, including not a few from her own pen, ‘Together with Reflections on Morality, or Seneca Unmasqued. Translated from the Maximes of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld’, a number of clever apophthegms tersely turned.

The following note,[44] however, affords ample evidence that at this juncture, maugre her diligence and unremitting toils, she was far from being in easy circumstances:—

’Where as I am indebted to Mr. Bags the sum of six pownd for the payment of which Mr. Tonson has obleged him self. Now I do here by impowre Mr. Zachary Baggs, in case the said debt is not fully discharged before Michaelmas next, to stop what money he shall hereafter have in his hands of mine, upon the playing my first play till this aforesaid debt of six pownd be discharged. Witness my hand this 1st August, —85.

A. Behn.’

Early in 1686 a frolicksome comedy of great merit, The Lucky Chance, was produced by her at the Theatre Royal, the home of the United Companies. A Whiggish clique, unable to harm her in any other way, banded together to damn the play and so endeavoured to raise a pudic hubbub, that happily proved quite ineffective. The Lucky Chance, which contends with The Rover (I), and The Feign’d Courtezans for the honour of being Mrs. Behn’s highest flight of comic genius, has scenes admittedly wantoning beyond the bounds of niggard propriety, but all are alive with a careless wit and a brilliant humour that prove quite irresistible. Next appeared those graceful translations from de Bonnecorse’s La Montre ... seconde partie contenant La Boëte et Le Miroir, which she termed The Lover’s Watch and The Lady’s Looking-Glass.

In 1687 the Duke of Albemarle’s voyage to Jamaica[45] to take up the government in the West Indies gave occasion for a Pindaric, but we only have one dramatic piece from Mrs. Behn, The Emperor of the Moon, a capital three act farce, Italian in sentiment and origin. For some little time past her health had begun to trouble her.[46] Her three years of privation and cares had told upon her physically, and since then, ‘forced to write for bread and not ashamed to own it,’ she had spared neither mind nor bodily strength. Graver symptoms appeared, but yet she found time to translate from Fontenelle his version of Van Dale’s De Oraculis Ethnicorum as The History of Oracles and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests, a book of great interest. There was also published in 1687 an edition in stately folio of Æesop’s Fables with his Life in English, French and Latin, ‘illustrated with One hundred and twelve Sculptures’ and ‘Thirty One New Figures representing his Life’, by Francis Barlow, the celebrated draughtsman of birds and animals. Each plate to the Life has a quatrain appended, and each fable with its moral is versified beneath the accompanying picture. In his brief address to the Reader Barlow writes: ‘The Ingenious Mrs. A. Behn has been so obliging as to perform the English Poetry, which in short comprehends the Sense of the Fable and Moral; Whereof to say much were needless, since it may sufficiently recommend it self to all Persons of Understanding.’ To this year we further assign the composition of no fewer than four novels, The Unfortunate Bride, The Dumb Virgin, The Wandering Beauty, The Unhappy Mistake. She was working at high pressure, and 1688 still saw a tremendous literary output. Waller had died 21 October, 1687, at the great age of eighty-one, and her Elegiac Ode to his Memory begins:—

How to thy Sacred Memory, shall I bring
(Worthy thy Fame) a grateful Offering?
I, who by Toils of Sickness, am become
Almost as near as thou art to a Tomb?
While every soft and every tender strain
Is ruffl’d, and ill-natur’d grown with Pain.

This she sent to his daughter-in-law with the following letter[47]:—