Note 15 — Two Novelists of the English Restoration.

How vast was the change in taste between, say, the opening and the close of the eighteenth century, is shown by Sir Walter Scott, in an anecdote which has special interest for us here, as bearing directly upon the woman now in question. A grand-aunt of his, Mrs. Keith, of Ravelstone, towards the close of a very long life, asked Scott if he had ever seen Mrs. Behn’s novels. “I confessed the charge. Whether I could get her a sight of them?—I said, with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners or the language, which approached too near that of Charles the Second’s time to be quite proper reading. ‘Nevertheless,’ said the good old lady, ‘I remember them being so much admired, and being so interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.’ To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with ‘private and confidential’ on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with merely these words: ‘Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,’ she said, ‘a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London!’” (See Lockhart’s Scott, chap. liv.)