From this very accurate description of the condition of virtue at the end of the seventeenth century, it might be supposed that Mrs. Manley deplored her neglected state.  But such is far from being the case.  Astraea and Virtue meet with a personage called Intelligence, who furnishes them with a detailed account of current scandal calculated to still further depress the dejected Virtue.  The trio are soon joined by Mrs. Nightwork, a midwife, who never breaks an oath of secrecy unless it be to her interest, and the character of whose contributions to the general fund of gossip may be easily imagined.  This semi-allegorical method of narration is kept up during the first two volumes; in the third and fourth Mrs. Manley tells her story in her own way.  In the course of these four volumes is unrolled an extraordinary series of crimes, some unnatural, and all gross in highest degree.  The details which Mrs. Manley could not obtain from authentic sources are supplied by her vivid and heated imagination.  She gloats over each incident with a horrible relish, and adds, with no unsparing brush, a heightened color to each picture.  Only a society whose conduct could afford material for this composition could possibly have read it.  Mrs. Manley no doubt invented and exaggerated without scruple, but the fact that her work was widely read and even popular is a sufficient commentary on the taste of the time.  The reader of to-day is sickened by the multiplication of repulsive scenes, and the absence from the book of any good qualities or actions whatever.  The style in which the “Atalantis” is written is so mean, that no person could have derived any pleasure from its pages other than the gratification of a depraved taste.

A writer of fiction of much greater importance appeared in the person of Aphra Johnson, more generally known as Mrs. Behn, or “the divine Astraea”; “a gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of Canterbury.”  Her father was appointed to a colonial office in the West Indies, where he took his family while Mrs. Behn was yet a young girl.  There the future authoress began a chequered life by living on a plantation among rough and lawless colonists, and there she made the acquaintance of the slave Oroonoko, whose sad story she afterward made known to the world.  On her return to England, she married Behn, a merchant of Dutch extraction, and went to live in the Netherlands, where she acted as a British spy.  By working upon the feelings of her lovers, she was able to convey information to the English government of the intention of the Dutch to enter the Thames to destroy the English fleet.  Her warnings were disregarded, and giving up her patriotic occupation, she returned to London, and devoted herself to literature.  She died in 1689, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey:—­“Covered only with a marble stone, with two wretched verses on it.”  Although Mrs. Behn is now almost forgotten, her position in her own time was not inconsiderable.