Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of.  It is true that—­since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a “fie-fie!” which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits—­there has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too highly, but in reference to these novels. Oroonoko or The Royal Slave, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the public.  But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the “lunatic, lover, and poet” order of vision.  Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed, had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello had caught her fresh imagination.  On the other hand, there was the heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage:  and a much less nimble intellect than Afra’s, with a much less cosmopolitan experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.  Still, there is no doubt that The Royal Slave and even its companions are far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of The English Rogue.  Oroonoko is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere “coney-catching” jest.  To say that it wants either contraction or expansion; less “talk about it” and more actual conversation; a stronger projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets already divulged.  It certainly is the first prose story in English which can be ranked with things that already existed in foreign literatures.  Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen.  “The King of Bantam,” for instance, is the account of an “extravagant,” though not quite a fool, who is “coney-catched” in the old manner.  But it opens in a fashion very different indeed from the old manner.  “This money is certainly a most devilish thing!  I’m sure the want of it had been like to ruin my dear Philibella!” and the succeeding adventures are pretty freshly told.  The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra.  “The Adventure of the Black Lady” begins, “About the beginning of last June, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire.”  It is a trick of course:  and here probably borrowed from the French:  but the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly narrow and winding one.  At any rate, this plunging into the middle of things wakes up the reader’s attention, and does not permit him to doze.  “The Lucky Mistake,” on the other hand, opens with a little landscape, “The river Loire has on its delightful