like this; and there is one passage which deserves to be remembered. Nelly, he says, was so readily and frequently doing good, "as if" he observes, "doing good were not her nature, but her business." The person who wrote thus happily had been a milliner in the New Exchange before he took to literature as a profession.
Whitcombe inscribes his book "To the illustrious Madam Ellen Gwyn;" but Aphra Behn, the Astrea of the stage, is still stronger; "Your permission has enlightened me, and I with shame look back on my past ignorance which suffered me not to pay an adoration long since where there was so very much due; yet even now, though secure in my opinion, I make this sacrifice with infinite fear and trembling, well knowing that so excellent and perfect a creature as yourself differs only from the divine powers in this—the offerings made to you ought to be worthy of you, whilst they accept the will alone." Well might Johnson observe, that in the meanness and servility of hyperbolical adulation, Dryden had never been equalled, except by Aphra Behn in an address to Eleanor Gwyn. But the arrow of adulation is not yet drawn to the head, and Mrs. Behn goes on to say, "Besides all the charms, and attractions, and powers of your sex, you have
