women and baby-linen and medical apparatus, and you will have all the anxieties of a father added to the discomforts of a neglected husband. For the rest, your wife will know how "to cuckold, jilt, and sham" as well as any gay lady of Covent Garden. And so on.

Much of the satire is acute and well-turned, often novel in expression if not in thought. But it is, as has been suggested, in the picture of English middle-class life under James II. that the importance of the book lies. Here is the domestic side of what the great diarists and the great poets hint at, and the excess of which municipal records, those treasuries of private appearances in public, chronicle with the severity of judgment. You have the young couple going (alas that the river for this purpose has, so to speak, been moved farther up its own course!) for a row on the Thames, with Lambeth, Bankside and Southwark echoing to their laughter. They might visit the New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall; but they would probably avoid the old (second) Globe Theatre on Bankside, for it was a meeting-house at which the formidable Baxter preached. Or they might go into Kent and pick fruit, even as "beanfeasters" do to this day; or to Hereford for its cider and perry, the drinking of which is a custom not yet extinct. Or maybe only for an outing to the pleasant village of Hackney. They would see the streets gay with signs which (outside Lombard Street) few houses but taverns wear to-day—the sign of the Silkworm or the Sheep, or that fantastic schoolmaster's emblem, the Troubled Pate with a crown upon it. And when they stopped for rest at the sign of a bush upon a pole, how they would fall to upon the Martinmas beef, the neats-tongues, the cheesecakes! It is true they might find prices high and crops poor; but such things must be.... "This is the use, custom, and fruits of war. If the impositions and taxes run high, the country farmer can't help that; you know that the war costs money, and it must be given, or else we should lose all." Had they learnt that as long ago as 1682?

As a genre work the book is not unique; rather is it typical. The gradual social settlement after the Civil War, destined to develop into stagnation under the first Georges, caused didactic works, guides to manners, housewifery and sport, society handbooks, to proliferate. The Ten Pleasures mentions some standard works, which every good housewife would probably possess—Nicholas Culpepper's medical handbooks, for instance, and The Complete Cook, which indeed, as part of The Queen's Closet Opened, had reappeared in its natal year 1682-1683. The same year saw the birth of such works as The Complete Courtier, The Complete Compting House, The Gentleman Jockey, The Accomplished Ladies' Delight. Life was being scheduled, tabulated, in readiness for the complacent century about to open. It was also being explored, not only in such works as The Ten Pleasures and The Woman's Advocate, but in others (entered as published, but in many cases not known to be now extant) like The Wonders of the Female World, The Swaggering Damsel, or Several New Curtain Lectures, and Venus in ye smoake, or, the nunn in her smock, in curious dialogues addressed to the lady abbesse of love's parradice—all produced in that same annus mirabilis of outspoken domesticity.

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.

Publisher's Preface

"Of the making of many books there is no end," nor is there an end to the Romance of books, as the little volume here, privately reprinted by the Navarre Society, is surely proof most positive. The original is a small thick volume; it bears the imprint "London, Printed in the year 1683," and but one perfect copy is known; that copy lay unappreciated in the heart of London in an antiquarian bookseller's shop.

Fortunately, however, for our literature and for students of the manners of the commonality of the period it was seen by a colleague, who wondered why he did not know it. After purchasing it he found the reason why—the Bodleian Library alone possessed a copy of the work (imperfect); later a copy of the first part (only) appeared in the last portion of the sale of the great Huth Collection. The present text is taken from the perfect copy mentioned above.

The curious title rather damns the literary interest of the book, which presents pictures of the cit and his wife at work and play which Fielding, had he lived in the seventeenth century, might have written. It is thought that the book was printed in Holland, and if so, it may well be that the ship carrying the printed sheets to England foundered in the North Sea, or was sunk by enemy craft. There can be no doubt that such a work would not have escaped the wits of the time; if it had survived for ordinary circulation, mention would have been made of it, however small an edition had been sold. No other so likely reason for its extreme rarity presents itself.

It is reprinted, as