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law to write, or rather compile plays, for he thoroughly understood the art of borrowing ideas from others. Partly through his influence, Aphra Behn got her play of “The Forced Marriage, or the Jealous Bridegroom,' brought out at the Duke's Theatre in 1671. The cast was a very good one. Betterton took the principal part of Alcippus, and Mrs. Betterton that of Erminia, who is supposed to be strangled by Alcippus's garter, but comes to life again in the last act. This is one of the least objectionable of the 'ingenious Mrs. Behn's plays,' and the Echo song shows her lyric capacity :

Amintas, that true-hearted swain,
Upon a river's bank was laid,
Where to the pitying streams he did complain
Of Sylvia, that false charming maid ;
But she was still regardless of his pain.
Oh, faithless Sylvia ! would he cry,
And what he said the Echoes would reply :
Be kind or else I die, E. I die,
Be kind or else I die, E. I die ! &c., &c.

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Otway, who was then a boy from college, took the part of the king, and made his first and last appearance on the stage.

One of the best of Aphra Behn's plays, 'Abdalazer, or the Moor's Revenge,' was acted at the Duke's Theatre late in the year 1676, and published in 1677. It may indeed be called a tragedy, as four of the principal characters meet with violent deaths. This play opens with what Swinburne calls that melodious and magnificent song,' 'Love in fantastic triumph sat.' In 1676 another play, 'The Rover,' was brought out and patronised by the Duke of York. It was supposed to be written by a man, and awakened much curiosity. At the present day it is dull reading. Aphra Behn has none of Susanna Centlivre's faculty for inventing amusing situations, and even her dialogue sometimes drags. "The Dutch Lover,' one of her earlier plays, is elaborately feeble, and 'Sir Patient Fancy' is coarse without being amusing. She had little sense of true comedy-her characters are either licentious rakes or pompous

fools. Some of her scenes were too revolting to be acted, even in the days of the Second Charles. Her political comedies, 'The Roundheads' and 'The City Heiress,' were well received by packed Tory audiences, but “The Amorous Prince' and · The Town Fop'were never acted; it was fortunate

! that they were not, both for Aphra Bebn and the play-going world. What Aphra Behn, the real woman, actually was, we see better by her love letters to a certain Lycidas than by any of her published

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works. She seems to have been frantically in love with him. She calls him · her soul's delight,'' her only dear delight and joy of her life,'' her charming unkind.' 'My soul is formed of no other material than love,' she writes, and all that soul of love was formed for my dear faithless Lycidas. I know not to what degree I love you, let it suffice I do most passionately, and have no thoughts of any other man while I have life. No! reproach me, defame me, lampoon me, curse me, and kill me when I do, and let heaven do so, too!' Lycidas does not seem to be all that "Astrea' wishes. He fails to come when she expects him, and she reproaches him bitterly for his faithlessness and inconstancy.

In her poems we see many traces of that strong vein of sentiment which ran through her intellect like a streak of silver. Her life was not a long one. She died at the age of 49. Her death was brought on, it is said, through want of skill on the part of her physicians. On the grey marble slab over her grave in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey is the following inscription :

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MRS. APHRA BEHN
Died April 16

1689.
Here lies a proof that wit can never be
Defence enough against mortalitie.

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Aphra Behn is said to have introduced milk-punch into England. She brought the secret of making it with her from Holland, and probably regaled Dryden, Southerne, and other wits and poets on it when they went to supper at her house. Her plays are much more objectionable than her novels. The drift of her earlier novels is not against morality, though they often offend from want of taste.

The Fair Jilt’ is a portrait, probably drawn from life, of an unprincipled woman who stops at nothing to gain her ends. She is held up, not as a pattern, but as an object of contempt. The style of The Fair Jilt' is much less stilted than that of Oroonoko,' and some passages rise to eloquence. For instance: * 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 satisfaction 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

impressions, for 'tis not every one that can be sensible of its

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tender touches. How many examples from history and observation could I give of its wondrous power! How many idiots has it made wise ! How many home-bred 'squires accomplished ! How many cowards brave! There is no sort of mankind on whom it cannot work some change and miracle, if it be a noble, wellgrounded passion, except on the fop of fashion, the hardened fop, so often wounded but never reclaimed.'

* The Lover's Watch, or the Art of Making Love,' is a curious specimen of Aphra Behn's writings. At each hour of the day and night Iris writes to Damon, and Damon to Iris. Very prettily expressed some of these letters are. In one of them Charles II. is addressed in terms before which all other panegyrics must pale their ineffectual fires. He is called 'the darling of Mars, the delight of heaven and the joy of earth, great, pious, stedfast, just and brave, dispensing mercy all around, soft and forgiving as a god.' lle is invoked as a “saving angel who preserved the land, stopped the dire plague, and calmed the wild fears of a distracted world !'

Injustice to the weak rouses Aphra Behn's fiercest indignation. She has a womanly compassion for anyone that is oppressed. As Mr. Swinburne has pointed out, ' Oroonoko’ is one feverish and impassioned protest against cruelty and tyranny. Her friend,

one of her own sex,' says, 'she was of a generous, humane disposition, very serviceable to her friends in all that was in her power, and would sooner forgive an injury than do one. She had wit, humour, good nature, and judgment. She was mistress of all the pleasing arts of conversation. She was a woman of sense, and consequently a lover of pleasure (!) For my own part I knew her intimately, and never saw anything unbecoming the modesty of her sex, though more gay and free than the folly of the precise will allow.'

Such was a contemporary verdict on Aphra Behn. The whirligig of time soon revolved, and for two centuries her name has been a byword of reproach. Few readers, even well versed in English literature, have ever glanced at one of her books. Had she lived in the present day, she would probably have met with an enthusiastic reception. Her coarseness would have been pruned down to suit the taste of the age, she would have been interviewed and imitated, and her portrait would have adorned every society journal. As it is, she is dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders, and the exclamation · Who was she?'

C. J. HAMILTON. VOL. V.-NO, 28, N.S.

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ROSAS.

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FOR extraordinary, incredible, diabolical wickedness the name of Rosas has become a proverb in South America. It is barely twenty years since he died; yet when the people of the River Plate speak of him, we seem to be hearing of some half-mad Ethiopian sultan, or hero of the Arabian Nights'; a creature of other clay than ordinary men ; a being half-devilish, half-divine, slavishly worshipped by all, capricious, vindictive, ruthless, slaying in the dark by some mysterious power his enemies, his refractory slaves, and even those who dreaded and hated in silence; not to be caught unawares, proof against plots, free from ordinary human infirmities, knowing neither fatigue nor fear; violent too, and fantastic, striking astonishment and a kind of superstitious dread by his mad freaks, his dangerous banter, and his fits of savage generosity or cruelty.

Such is the Rosas of popular tradition; nor does the picture so drawn seem exaggerated in the light of authentic records. But Rosas was more than this; he it was who gave the first real solid Government to a young nation which numbers to-day four million souls, and has the largest city of the Southern Hemisphere for its capital. He practically secured internal peacewith brief interruptions-to a country torn by incessant revolution and civil war. He was the creator of the Argentine Confederation by force, perhaps; but force was the order of the day; and he arose from among a crowd of caudillos, party-chiefs, halfsoldiers, half-brigands, mostly as despotic in spirit, as regardless of law and restraint, as contemptuous of human life as Rosas himself. To him more than to anyone it is due that Argentina is one country instead of containing half-a-dozen rival and discordant Republics.

Juan Manuel Rosas was born in 1797-just a century ago-of an old Spanish stock on both sides. He was a mere child when the English attacked and took Buenos Aires; yet he seems to have earned credit in the fight which ended in the defeat and capitulation of the British.

In 1808, in order to learncamp' business, he went to live on the immense estancias or stock farms which his parents

possessed to the south of Buenos Aires ; here he threw himself into the rough life of the campo, and speedily became the darling of the rude Gauchos and even the Indians of the whole district. An indomitable domador or horse-tamer, he was the best rider in the country, and beat the centaur-gauchos themselves at their own feats. With a gold ounce placed under each knee, he would let a colt buck under him without displacing the coins; or, going at full gallop, he would allow any man to bolear the hind legs of his horse, which thereupon fell as if struck dead, while the rider, shooting forward over the beast's head, alighted safely on his feet; or, perched on the post above, he would drop on the back of an unbroken stallion escaping from the corral, and ride the terrified horse, unsaddled and unbridled, in spite of bucking and plunging, until the beast stopped from sheer exhaustion; or sometimes he would check the horse in mid-career, bringing him to the ground by a stunning blow between the ears from the butt end of his rebenque or silver-mounted riding-thong, himself, of course, dropping on his feet.

By this kind of fame, Rosas became a power in the land while still a mere boy ; from far and near, the paisanos came to be employed on the estancia Atalaya (“The Watch-tower') under the 'patroncito’—the young master--and Rosas sowed wheat in order to give employment, thus being the first real tillage farmer on a large scale in South America. He was a remarkably handsome youth of the fair type sometimes seen among northern Spaniards, but rare in the River Plate; in fact this half-Indian Gaucho seemed to revert physically to his Gothic ancestors. Although from childhood upwards he occasionally indulged in uncontrollable fits of savage violence, he seems to have been a person of singular personal charm and power of captivating. He even acquired great influence over the Indians, and made a treaty of friendship with the famous Cacique Negro, who called himself the brother of Rosas, and gave to the latter the title of Cacique Blanco or White Chief on account of the number of his peons and followers, and his influence over them. Assassins and other fugitives from justice were received and protected by Rosas, nor did any judge or official dare to claim them. Meantime he ruled like a little

| The Señora Manuela Rosas de Terrero, Rosas' daughter, said to a friend of mine, pointing to her father's portrait : « They say my father was bad, but how could he be bad, with that face?' It was often said that he looked like an Englishman.

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