‘Take away your bonny Afra Behn,’ said the old lady who, about 1810, borrowed, and vainly tried to read, the novels that had been the delight of her youth. Very few persons now peruse ‘Astraea,’ who trod the stage so loosely; very few know whether she was more indiscreet than the novelists of the eighteenth century or not. Mrs Behn died in 1689: she had been the wife of a Dutchman, and, in one of her tales, she assures us that it is quite a mistake to suppose that a Hollander cannot love. This remark, and the circumstance that she anticipated Mrs Beecher Stowe in taking a negro for her hero in one novel, are all that my memory retains of the romances of Astraea. They certainly did not leave a distinct and separate stain on my imagination.

The familiar anecdote of the old lady whose age rejected as impossible the romances which had delighted Society in her youth, supplies a text for a curious speculation. Wherefore had taste altered so radically in the space of one life-time? It is a natural but inadequate reply that taste always does alter in sixty years. Thus Lady Louisa Stuart, who was born about 1760, found, about 1820, that Richardson's novels, when read aloud, provoked inextinguishable laughter. In her youth people had wept or sighed over ‘Pamela’: now people mocked, and she mocked with them. Such changes of taste make the pathetic seem absurd, or make what Molière meant to be comic seem pathetic, at least to refined critics. But we are concerned with a change at once deeper and far more sudden – a change in morality rather than in style or sentiment. English literature had been at least as free-spoken as any other, from the time of Chaucer to the death of Smollett. Then, in twenty years at most, English literature became the most ‘pudibund,’ the most respectful of the young person's blush, that the world has ever known. Now, this revolution was something much deeper than the accustomed process which makes the style and the ideas of one generation seem antiquated and uncongenial to the readers of the next. We quite understand why Mr Guy Boothby is preferred, say, to Thackeray, and Mr Henty to Marryat, by the young.