Note 1 — APHRA BEHN (continued 6)

This has nothing to do with Scarron’s novel, L’ Innocent Adultère which translated was so popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bellmour carried it in his pocket when he went a-courting Laetitia, to the horror of old Fondlewife who discovered the tome, (The Old Batchelor, 1693), and Lydia Languish was partial to its perusal in 1775.

2 Hamelius used the collected edition of 1705.

3 It is interesting to note that the book originally belonged to Scott’s friend and critic, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.

4 Reproduced by Celio Malespini Ducento Novelle, No. 9 (Venice, 4to, 1609, but probably written about thirty years before).

5 A French prose translation of Southerne is to be found in Vol. VIII of Le Theâtre Anglois, Londres, 1746. It is entitled L’Adultère Innocent; but the comic underplot is very sketchily analyzed, scene by scene, and the whole is very mediocre withal.