in tone, is the “Lucky Mistake.”  It is without the grossness characteristic of Mrs. Behn’s works, and gives quite a pretty account of the loves of a young French nobleman and an unusually modest young woman named Atlante.  Mrs. Behn’s notion of love is contained in the opening lines of the “Fair Jilt,” the most licentious of her tales.  “As Love is the most noble and divine Passion of the Soul, so it is that to which we may justly attribute all the real Satisfactions of Life; and without it Man is Unfinished and unhappy.  There are a thousand Things to be said of the Advantages this generous Passion brings to those whose Hearts are capable of receiving its soft Impressions; for ’tis not Every one that can be sensible of its tender Touches.  How many Examples from History and Observation could I give of its wondrous Power; nay, even to a degree of Transmigration!  How many Idiots has it made wise!  How many Fools eloquent!  How many home-bred Squires accomplished!  How many cowards brave!” There is no doubt that Mrs. Behn was fully alive to the strength of the passion she describes, but as Sir Richard Steele said, she “understood the practic part of love better than the speculative.”  In accordance with the views general amidst the society of her own time, she represented love merely as a physical passion, and made the interest of her stories depend on its gratification, and not on the ennobling effects or subtle manifestations of which it is capable.

There is a great deal in that well-known anecdote of Sir Walter Scott’s, in which he relates that he “was acquainted with an old lady of family, who assured him that, in her younger days, Mrs. Behn’s novels were as currently upon the toilette as the works of Miss Edgeworth at present; and described with some humor her own surprise, when the book falling into her hands after a long interval of years, and when its contents were quite forgotten, she found it impossible to endure, at the age of fourscore, what at fifteen, she, like all the fashionable world of the time, had perused without an idea of impropriety.”  This is a striking illustration of the mere relativeness of such words as “morality,” “refinement,” and their opposites.  If this old lady could have lived over her early youth embued with the refinement of taste which surrounded her declining years, she would have been still more shocked at the coarseness of language, and the looseness of conduct and morals which prevailed among the highest ranks.  At the same time she would have observed, that the society which appeared to her coarse and corrupt was far from so considering itself.  What is gross to one age may have been the refinement of the last.  A young girl considered modest and discreet at the end of the seventeenth century, if transferred unchanged to the end of the eighteenth, would have shocked the women she met with by talking of subjects unmentioned in society with a freedom and broadness unusual among the men.  In judging a literary work from the point of view of morality or refinement, we must compare it with the standard of the age to which it belongs, and not with our own.  Pope’s graphic lines, in which he describes Mrs. Behn’s position as a dramatist,