It is grievous to me, dear Bobus, a man of notorious gallantry, to find that the ladies, after consenting to smirch their rosy fingers with Erebean ink, are among the first who are discarded.  If you will go into the College Library, Mr. Sibley will show you a charming copy of the works of Mrs. Behn, with a roguish, rakish, tempting little portrait of the writer prefixed.  Poor Mrs. Behn was a notability as well as a notoriety in her day; and when I have great leisure for the work, I mean to write her life and do her justice.  The task would have been worthy of De Foe; but, with a little help from you, I hope to do it passably.  Poor Aphra! poet, dramatist, intriguant strumpet!  Worthy of no better fate, take my benison of light laughter and of tears!  Then there is Mrs. Elizabeth Singer, who was living in 1723, who selected as the subject of her work nothing less than the Creation, and who was a woman of great religion.  Her poem commences patronizingly thus:—­

“Hail! mighty Maker of the Universe! My song shall still thy glorious deeds rehearse. Thy praise, whatever subject others choose, Shall be the lofty theme of my aspiring Muse.”

Elizabeth was a Somersetshire woman, a clothier’s daughter; and if she had thrown away her lyre and gone back to the distaff, I do not think Parnassus would have broken its heart.  Then there is our fair friend, Mrs. Molesworth.  Her father was a Right Honorable Irish peer of the same name, who had some acquaintance, if not a friendlier connection, with John Locke.  Her Muse was rather high-skirted, as you may believe, when you read this epitaph:—­

  “O’er this marble drop a tear! 
    Here lies fair Rosalinde;
  All mankind was pleased with her,
    And she with all mankind.”

Let me introduce you to one more lady.  This is Mrs. Wiseman, dear Don!  She was of “poor, but honest” parentage; and if she did wash the dishes of Mr. Recorder Wright of Oxford, she did better than my Lady Hamilton or my Lady Blessington of later times.  Mrs. Wiseman read novels and plays, and, of course, during the intervals of domestic drudgery, began to write a drama, which she finished after she went to London.  It was of high-sounding title, for it was called, “Antiochus the Great; or, the Fatal Relapse.”  Who relapsed so fatally—­whether Antiochus with his confidant, or his wife with her confidante, or Ptolemy Pater with his confidant, or Epiphanes with his confidant—­is more than I can tell.  Indeed, I am not sure that I know which Antiochus was honored by Mrs. Wiseman’s Muse.  Whether it was Antiochus Soter, or Antiochus Theos, or Antiochus the Great, or Antiochus the Epiphanous or Illustrious, or Antiochus Eupator, or Antiochus Eutheus, or Antiochus Sidetes, or Antiochus Grypus, or Antiochus Cyzenicus, or Antiochus Pius,—­the greatest rogue of the whole dynasty,—­or Antiochus Asiaticus, who “used up” the family entirely in Syria—­is more than I