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