The Ten Pleasures, apart from its intrinsic interest, is exceptionally important from a book-collector’s point of view.  It is of the utmost rarity.  There is no copy in the British Museum and none in the Cambridge University Library.  In fact, there are only two copies known of the whole work—­one in the Bodleian (wanting one plate), and that from which the present text is taken.  The Huth Collection had a copy of the first part only.  Both the fuller copies contain the second part—­The Confession—­and evidently the two parts, though they have separate title pages, and were published at different times, were intended to form a complete work.

Who wrote the book?  “A.  Marsh, Typogr. [apher],” says the title page.  A. Marsh cannot be traced, nor is the work included in the Stationers’ Registers for the period.  It may be that Marsh thought it too licentious for registration (an improbable supposition), and so, as Hazlitt suggests, printed it abroad.

But the initials A.B. at the end of the Letter in the first part may be a clue, though a perplexing one.  It is a plausible guess that they are those of Aphra or Aphara Behn, the dramatist and poet, the first woman to earn her living by her pen.  It is true that she was, so to speak, a feminist:  the preface and epilogue to her Sir Patient Fancy speak bitterly of those who would not go to her plays because they were by a woman.  On the other hand, she had a free pen, to say the least of it, and often a witty one.  And she had Dutch associations.  Her husband was a Dutch merchant living in London.  She had herself been on secret service in the Netherlands.  She translated a Dutch book on oracles.  If the book was printed in Holland, she of all people could get the work done.  And she knew the city of London intimately.

There are, too, some odd details in her plays, especially in Sir Patient Fancy, which recall touches in The Ten Pleasures.  She introduces a Padua doctor on the stage.  She shows, in several of her plays, a curious interest in medicine, especially quack medicine.  Sir Patient, a hypochondriac, thinks he is swelling up like the “pipsy” husband.  Isabella, in the same play, says “keeping begins to be as ridiculous as matrimony....  The insolence and expense of their mistresses has almost tired out all but the old and doting part of mankind.”  It is not inconceivable that in a freakish or embittered moment this singular woman threw herself with malicious joy into an attack on her own sex.

“Love in fantastic triumph sat....”  Aphra Behn’s great lyric deservedly lives.  If she wrote The Ten Pleasures, the sort of love she describes in it still lives, but hardly in fantastic triumph.  Yet if we want to know our fellow-men, we must know something of it.  Apart from the curious interest of its rarity, The Ten Pleasures is a sturdy piece of human nature.

JOHN HARVEY.

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