# The Story of Nell Gwyn/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.
Pepys introduces us to Nelly—Character of Pepys—Nelly at the Duke's Theatre—Who was Duncan?—Nell's parts as Lady Wealthy, Enanthe, and Florimel—Charles Hart—Nell's lodgings in Drury Lane—Description of Drury Lane in the reign of Charles II.—The May-pole in the Strand—Nell and Lord Buckhurst—Position in society of Actors and Actresses—Character of Lord Buckhurst—Nelly at Epsom.
Our earliest introduction to Nell Gwyn we owe to Pepys. This precise and lively diarist (who makes us live in his own circle of amusements, by the truth and quaintness of his descriptions), was a constant play-goer. To see and to be seen, when the work of his office was over, were the leading objects of his thoughts. Few novelties escaped him, for he never allowed his love of money to interfere with the gratification of his wishes. His situation, as Clerk of the Acts, in the Navy-office, while the Duke of York was Lord High Admiral, gave him a taste for the entertainments which his master enjoyed. He loved to be found wherever the King and his brother were. ​He was fond of music, could prick down a few notes for himself, and when his portrait was painted by Hales, was drawn holding in his hand the music which he had composed for a favourite passage in the Siege of Rhodes. He was known to many of the players, and often asked them to dinner,—now and then not much to the satisfaction, as he tells us, of his wife. Mrs. Knep, of the King's House, and Joseph Harris of the Duke's (to both of whom I have already introduced the reader) were two of his especial favourites. The gossip and scandal of the green-room of Drury Lane and Lincoln's-Inn-Fields were in this way known to him, and what he failed to obtain behind the scenes he would learn from the orange-women at both houses.
Nell was in her sixteenth, and Mr. Pepys in his thirty-fourth year, when, on Monday, the 3rd of ​April, 1665, they would appear to have seen one another for the first time. They met at the Duke’s Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields during the performance of Mustapha, a tragedy, by the Earl of Orrery, in which Betterton played the part of Solyman, Harris that of Mustapha, and Mrs. or Miss Davis that of the Queen of Hungaria. Great care had been taken to produce this now long-forgotten tragedy with the utmost magnificence. All the parts were newly clothed, and new scenes had been painted expressly for it. Yet we are told by Pepys that "all the pleasure of the play" was in the circumstance that the King and my Lady Castlemaine were there, and that he sat next to "pretty witty Nell at the King's House" and to the younger Marshall, another actress at the same theatre—a circumstance, he adds, with his usual quaint honesty of remark, "which pleased me mightily." Yet the play was a good one in Pepys's eyes. Nine months later he calls it "a most excellent play;" and when he saw it again, after an interval of more than two years, he describes it as one he liked better the more he saw it:—"a most-admirable poem and bravely acted." His after entries therefore more than confirm the truth of his earlier impressions. The ​ ​real pleasure of the play, however, was that he sat by the side of "pretty witty Nell," whose foot has been described as the least of any woman's in England, and to Rebecca Marshall, whose handsome hand he has carefully noted in another entry in his Diary. The small feet peeping occasionally from beneath a petticoat, and the handsome hands raised now and then to check a vagrant curl, must have held the Clerk of the Acts in a continual state of torture.
There was a novelty that night which had doubtless drawn Nell and old Stephen Marshall's younger daughter to the pit of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Mrs. Betterton was playing Roxolana in place of the elder Davenport, and Moll Davis had begun to attract the notice of some of the courtiers, and, as it was whispered, of the King himself. The old Roxolana had become the mistress of the twentieth and last earl of the great race of Vere; and Nell, while she reflected on what she may have thought to have been the good fortune of her fellow actress—might have had her envy appeased could she have foreseen that she should give birth to a son (the mother an orange-girl, the father the King of England), destined to obtain a dukedom in her own ​lifetime, and afterwards to marry the heiress of the very earl who had taken the old Roxolana from a rival stage—first to deceive and afterwards to desert her.
Nell was indebted, there is reason to believe, for her introduction to the stage, or at least to another condition in life, to a person whose name is variously written as Duncan and as Dungan. Oldys, who calls him Duncan, had heard that he was a merchant, and that he had taken a fancy to her from her smart wit, fine shape, and the smallness of her feet. The information of Oldys is confirmed by the satire of Etherege, who adds, much to the credit of Nelly, that she remembered in after years the friend of her youth, and that to her interest it was he owed his appointment in the Guards. To sift and exhibit the equal mixture of truth and error in these accounts would not repay the reader for the trouble I should occasion him. I have sifted them myself, and see reason to believe that Oldys was wrong in calling him a merchant; while I suspect that the Duncan commemorated by Etherege, in his satire upon Nelly, was the Dongan described by De Grammont as a gentleman of merit who succeeded Duras, afterwards Earl of Feversham, in the post of Lieutenant in the Duke's Life Guards. That there was a ​lieutenant of this name in the Duke's Life Guards I have ascertained from official documents. He was a cadet of the house of Limerick, and his Christian name was Robert. If there is truth in De Grammont's account, he died in or before 1669. A Colonel Dungan was Governor of New York in the reign of James II.
Such, then, is all that can be ascertained, after full inquiry, of this Duncan or Dungan, by whom Nelly is said to have been lifted from her very humble condition in life. Such indeed is the whole of the information I have been able to obtain about "pretty witty Nell" from her birth to the winter of 1666, when we again hear of her through the indefatigable Pepys. How her life was passed during the fearful Plague season of 1665, or where she was during the Great Fire of London in the following year, it is now useless to conjecture. The transition from the orange-girl to the actress may easily be imagined without the intervention of any Mr. Dungan. The pert vivacity and ready wit she exhibited in later life, must have received early encouragement and cultivation from the warmth of language the men of sort and quality employed in speaking to all classes ​of females. This very readiness was her recommendation to Killigrew, to say nothing of her beauty or the merry laugh, which is said in after life to have pervaded her face till her eyes were almost indivisible.
As we owe our first introduction to Nelly to the Clerk of the Acts, so to him are we indebted for the earliest notice yet discovered of her appearance on the stage. Her part was that of the principal female character in a comedy (The English Monsieur) by the Hon. James Howard, a son of the Earl of Berkshire, the brother-in-law of Dryden, and brother of Philip, an officer in the King's Guards, and of Robert and Edward Howard, both also writers for the stage. But these, as we shall see hereafter, were not the only connexions with the stage of the Berkshire Howards. There is not much story in the English Monsieur, much force of character, or any particular vivacity in the dialogue. It is, however, very easy to see that the situations must have told with the audience for whom they were intended, and that the part of Lady Wealthy was one particularly adapted to the genius of Nell Gwyn; a part, in all probability written expressly for her. Lady Wealthy is a rich widow, with perfect knowledge of the importance of wealth and beauty, a good heart, ​and a fine full vein of humour, a woman, in short, that teases, and at last reforms and marries, the lover she is true to. The humour of the following dialogue will allow the reader to imagine much of the bye-play conducive to its success.
Lady Wealthy.—When will I marry you! When will I love ye, you should ask first.
Welbred.—Why! don't ye?
Lady W.—Why, do I? Did you ever hear me say I did?
Welbred.—I never heard you say you did not.
Lady W.—I'll say so now, then, if you long.
Welbred.—By no means. Say not a thing in haste you may repent at leisure.
Lady W.—Come, leave your fooling, or I'll swear it.
Welbred.—Don't, widow, for then you'll lie too.
Lady W.—Indeed it seems 'tis for my money you would have me.
Welbred.—For that, and something else you have.
Lady W.—Well, I'll lay a wager thou hast lost all thy money at play, for then you're always in a marrying humour. But, d'ye hear, gentleman, d'ye think to gain me with this careless way, or that I will marry one I don't think is in love with me?
Welbred.—Why, I am.
Lady W.—Then you would not be so merry. People in love are sad, and many times weep.
Welbred.—That will never do for thee, widow.
Lady W.—And why?
Welbred.—'Twould argue me a child; and I am confident if thou didst not verily believe I were a man, I should ne'er be thy husband. . . . . Weep for thee!—ha! ha! ha!—if e'er I do!
Lady W.—Go, hang yourself.
Welbred.—Thank you, for your advice.
Lady W.—When, then, shall I see you again?
Welbred.—When I have a mind to it. Come, I'll lead you to your coach for once.
Lady W.—And I'll let you for once. [Exeunt.
Nell's success on the stage was such that she was soon called to represent prominent parts in the stock plays of her company. What these parts were, is, I believe, with very few exceptions, altogether unknown. One part, however, has reached us—that of Enanthe, or Celia, in the Humorous Lieutenant of Beaumont and Fletcher, a play that was long a favourite with the public—continuing to be frequently acted, and always with applause, throughout the reign of Charles II. The wit and fine poetry of the part of Celia are known to the readers of our English drama, nor is it difficult to conceive how effectively language like the following must have come from the lips of Nell Gwyn. She is in poor attire amid a mob, when she sees the King's son:—
Was it the prince they said? How my heart trembles! [Enter Demetrius, with a javelin in his hand. 'Tis he indeed: what a sweet noble fierceness Dwells in his eyes! Young Meleager-like, When he returned from slaughter of the boar, Crown'd with the loves and honours of the people, With all the gallant youth of Greece, he looks now— Who could deny him love?
On one occasion of its performance Pepys was present, and though he calls it a silly play, his reader smiles at his bad taste, while he is grateful for the information that when the play was over he had gone with his wife behind the scenes, through the introduction of Mrs. Knep, who "brought to us Nelly, a most pretty woman, who acted the great part of Celia to-day very fine, and did it pretty well. I kissed her, and so did my wife, and a mighty pretty soul she is." Nor was his chronicle of the day concluded without a fresh expression of pleasure at what he had seen, summing up all as he does with the satisfactory words "specially kissing of Nell." The remark of Walter Scott will occur to many, "it is just as well that Mrs. Pepys was present on this occasion."
Her skill increasing with her years, other poets sought to obtain the recommendations of her wit and beauty to the success of their writings. I have ​said that Dryden was one of the principal supporters of the King's House, and ere long in one of his new plays a principal character was set apart for the popular comedian. The drama was a tragi-comedy called "Secret Love, or, the Maiden Queen" and an additional interest was attached to its production, from the King having suggested the plot to its author, and calling it "his play." The dramatis personæ consist, curiously enough, of eight female, and only three male parts. Good acting was not wanting to forward its success. Mohun, Hart, and Burt, three of the best performers then on the stage, filled the only male parts—while Mrs. Marshall, Mrs. Knep, "Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn," and Mrs. Corey, sustained the principal female characters. The tragic scenes have little to recommend them; but the reputation of the piece was thought to have been redeemed by the excellence of the alloy of comedy, as Dryden calls it, in which it was generally agreed he was seldom happier. Even here, however, his dialogue wants that easy, brisk, pert character which Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar afterwards brought to such inimitable perfection, and of which Etherege alone affords a satisfactory example in the reign of Charles II.
The first afternoon of the new play was the ​2nd of February, 1666–7. The King and the Duke of York were both present:—so too were both Mr. and Mrs. Pepys, who had heard the play mightily commended for the regularity of its story, and what Mr. Pepys is pleased to call "the strain and wit." The chief parts (its author tells us) were performed to a height of great excellence, both serious and comic; and it was well received. The King objected, indeed, to the management of the last scene, where Celadon and Florimel (Hart and Nelly) are treating too lightly of their marriage in the presence of the Queen. But Pepys would not appear to have seen any defect of this description. "The truth is," he says, "there is a comical part done by Nell, which is Florimel, that I never can hope ever to see the like done again by man or woman. . . . . So great performance of a comical part was never I believe in the world before as Nell do this, both as a mad girl, then most and best of all when she comes in like a young gallant, and hath the motion and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." Nor did the worthy critic change his opinion. He calls it, after his second visit, an "excellent play, and so done by Nell her merry part as cannot be better done in ​nature." While after his third visit he observes that it is impossible to have Florimel's part, which is the most comical that ever was made for woman, ever done better than it is by Nelly.
The support of the performance rested, it must be owned, on Hart's character of Celadon and on Nelly's part of Florimel. Nell indeed had to sustain the heavier burden of the piece. She is seldom off the stage—all the loose rattle of dialogue belongs to her, nay more, she appears in the fifth act in male attire, dances a jig in the same act, often of itself sufficient to save a play, and ultimately speaks the epilogue in defence of the author;
I left my client yonder in a rant Against the envious and the ignorant, Who are he says his only enemies; But he contemns their malice, and defies The sharpest of his censurers to say Where there is one gross fault in all his play, The language is so fitted to each part, The plot according to the rules of art; And twenty other things he bid me tell you, But I cry'd "E'en go do't yourself, for Nelly!"
There are incidents and allusions in the parts of Celadon and Florimel which must have carried a personal application to those who were, speaking technically, behind the scenes. Nelly, if not actually ​the mistress at this time of Charles Hart, was certainly looked upon by many as very little less. Their marriage in the play is more of a Fleet or May Fair mockery than a religious ceremony,—as if, to use Florimel's own language, they were married by the more agreeable names of mistress and gallant, rather than those dull old-fashioned ones of husband and wife.
Florimel, it appears to me, must have been Nelly's chef d'œuvre in her art. I can hear her exclaiming with a prophetic feeling of its truth, "I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty;" while I can picture to myself, as my readers will easily do, Nelly in boy's clothes, dressed to the admiration of Etherege and Sedley, scanned from head to foot with much surprise by Mr. Pepys and Sir William Penn, viewed with other feelings by Lord Buckhurst on one side of the house, and by the King himself on the other, while to the admiration of the author, and of the whole audience, she exclaims, with wonderful bye-play, "Yonder they are, and this way they must come. If clothes and a bonne mien will take 'm I shall do't.—Save you, Monsieur Florimel! Faith, methinks you are a very janty fellow, poudré et ​ajusté as well as the best of 'em. I can manage the little comb—set my hat, shake my garniture, toss about my empty noddle, walk with a courant slur, and at every step peck down my head:—if I should be mistaken for some courtier, now, pray where's the difference?" This was what Beau Hewit or Beau Fielding were enacting every day in their lives, and Colley Cibber lived to be the last actor who either felt or could make others feel its truth and application.
Nelly was living at this time in the fashionable part of Drury Lane, the Strand or Covent Garden end, for Drury Lane in the days of Charles II. was inhabited by a very different class of people from those who now occupy it—or, indeed, who have lived in it since the time Gay guarded us from "Drury's mazy courts and dark abodes"—since Pope described it only too truly as peopled by drabs of the lowest character, and by authors "lulled by soft zephyrs," through the broken pane of a garret window. The upper end, towards St. Giles's Pound and Montague House, had its squalid quarters, like Lewknor's Lane and the Coal Yard, in which, as we have concluded, our Nelly was born; but at the Strand end lived the Earl of Anglesey, long Lord Privy Seal, and the Earls of Clare and Craven, ​whose names are still perpetuated in Clare Market and Craven Yard. Drury Lane, when Nelly was living there, was a kind of Park Lane of the present day, made up of noblemen's mansions, small houses, inns and stable-yards. Nor need the similitude be thus restricted; for the Piazza of Covent Garden was then to Drury Lane what Grosvenor Square is at present to Park Lane. Squalid quarters indeed have always been near neighbours to lordly localities. When Nelly lodged in Drury Lane, Covent Garden had its Lewknor Lane, and Lincoln's Inn Fields their Whetstone Park. Belgravia has now its Tothill Street—Portman Square has its contaminating neighbourhood of Calmel Buildings—and one of the most infamous of alleys is within half a stone's throw of St. James's Palace!
Nelly's lodgings were near the lodgings of Lacy the actor, at the top of Maypole Alley,
Where Drury Lane descends into the Strand,
and over against the gate of Craven House. The look-out afforded a peep into a part of Wych Street, and while standing at the doorway you could see the far-famed Maypole in the Strand, at the bottom of the alley to which it had lent its name.
This Maypole, long a conspicuous ornament to ​the west-end of London, rose to a great height above the surrounding houses, and was surmounted by a
Nell at her lodgings-door in Drury Lane. The Maypole in the Strand restored. ​crown and vane, with the royal arms richly gilded. It had been set up again immediately after the Restoration. Great ceremonies attended its erection: twelve picked seamen superintending the tackle, and ancient people clapping their hands and exclaiming, "Golden days begin to appear!" Nelly must have remembered the erection of the Maypole at the bottom of the lane in which she was born; but there is little save some gable-ends and old timber-fronts near her "lodgings-door" to assist in carrying the mind back to the days of the Maypole and the merry monarch whose recall it was designed to commemorate.
Among the many little domestic incidents perpetuated by Pepys, there are few to which I would sooner have been a witness than the picture he has left us of Nelly standing at her door watching the milkmaids on May-day. The Clerk of the Acts on his way from Seething Lane in the City, met, he tells us, "many milkmaids with garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddle before them," and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings-door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and bodice looking upon one. "She seemed," he adds, "a mighty pretty creature." This was in 1667, while her recent triumphs on the stage were still fresh at Court, and ​the obscurity of her birth was a common topic of talk and banter among the less fortunate inhabitants of the lane she lived in. The scene so lightly sketched by Pepys might furnish no unfitting subject for the pencil of Leslie or Maclise—a subject indeed which would shine in their hands. That absence of all false pride, that innate love of unaffected nature, and that fondness for the simple sports of the people which the incident exhibits, are characteristics of Nelly from the first moment to the last—following her naturally, and sitting alike easily and gracefully upon her, whether at her humble lodgings in Drury Lane, at her handsome house in Pall Mall, or even under the gorgeous cornices of Whitehall.
But I have no intention of finding a model heroine in a coal-yard, or any wish either to palliate or condemn too severely the frailties of the woman whose story I have attempted to relate. It was therefore within a very few months of the May-day scene I have just described, that whispers asserted, and the news was soon published in every coffeehouse in London, how little Miss Davis of the Duke's House had become the mistress of the King, and Nell Gwyn at the other theatre the mistress of Lord Buckhurst. Whoever is at all conversant with the manners and customs of London life in ​the reign of Charles II. will confirm me in the statement that two such announcements, even at the same time, would cause but little surprise, or indeed any other feeling than that of envy at their good luck. With the single exception of Mrs. Betterton, there was not, I believe, an actress at either theatre who had not been or was not then the mistress of some person about the Court. Actors were looked upon as little better than shopmen or servants. When the Honourable Edward Howard was struck by Lacy of the King's House, a very general feeling prevailed that Howard should have run his sword through the menial body of the actor. Nor was this feeling altogether extinguished till the period of the Kembles. It was entirely owing to the exertions of the great Lord Mansfield, that Arthur Murphy, less than a century ago, was allowed to enter his name on the books of Lincoln's Inn. He had been previously refused by the Benchers of the Middle Temple, for no other reason than that he had been an actor. Nay, George Selwyn, it is well known, excluded Brinsley Sheridan from Brooks's on three occasions because his father had been upon the stage.
Nor did actresses fare better than actors. If anything, indeed, they were still worse treated. ​They were looked upon as women of the worst character, possessed of no inclination or inducement to virtue. Few, indeed, were found to share the sentiment expressed by one of Shadwell's manliest characters, "I love the stage too well to keep any of their women, to make 'em proud and insolent and despise that calling to take up a worse." The frailty of "playhouse flesh and blood" afforded a common topic for the poet in his prologue or his epilogue, and other writers than Lee might be found who complain of the practice of "keeping" as a grievance to the stage. Davenant, foreseeing their fate from an absence of any control, boarded his four principal actresses in his own house; but, with one exception (that of Mrs. Betterton before referred to), the precaution was altogether without effect. The King, Prince Rupert, the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Oxford, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Philip Howard, his brother Sir Robert Howard, were all successful in the arts of seduction or inducement. So bad indeed was the moral discipline of the times, that even Mrs. Knep, loose as were her notions of virtue, could see the necessity of parting with a pretty servant girl, as the tiring-room ​was no place for the preservation of her innocence. The virtuous life of Mrs. Bracegirdle, and her spirited rebuke to the Earl of Burlington, stand out in noble relief from the conduct of her fellow actresses. The Earl had sent her a letter, and a present of a handsome set of china. The charming actress retained the letter and informed the servant of the mistake. The letter, she said, was for her, but the china was for Lady Burlington. When the Earl returned home he found his Countess all happiness at the unexpected present from her husband.
Times, however, changed after Nelly had gone, and the Stuarts had ceased to reign, for ennobled actresses are now common enough in the English peerage. Other changes too took place. Mrs. Barry walked home in her clogs, and Mrs. Bracegirdle in her pattens; but Mrs. Oldfield went away in her chair, and Lavinia Fenton (the original Polly Peachum) rolled westward in her coroneted carriage as Duchess of Bolton.
It says little for the morality of London in the ​reign of Charles II., but something for the taste of the humble orange-girl, that the lover who had attracted her, and with whom she was now living in the lovely neighborhood of Epsom, was long looked up to as the best bred man of his age:
None ever had so strange an art His passion to convey Into a list'ning virgin's heart, And steal her soul away.
But Buckhurst had other qualities to recommend him than his youth (he was thirty at this time), his rank, his good heart, and his good breeding. He had already distinguished himself by his personal intrepidity in the war against the Dutch; had written the best song of its kind in the English language, and some of the severest and most refined satires we possess; was the friend of all the poets of eminence in his time, as he was afterwards the most munificent patron of men of genius that this country has yet seen. The most eminent masters in their several lines asked and abided by his judgment, and afterwards dedicated their works to him in grateful acknowledgment of his taste and favours. Butler owed to him that ​the Court "tasted" his Hudibras; Wycherley that the town "liked" his Plain Dealer; and the Duke of Buckingham deferred to publish his Rehearsal till he was sure, as he expressed it, that my Lord Buckhurst would not "rehearse" upon him again. Nor was this all. His table was one of the last that gave us an example of the old housekeeping of an English nobleman. A freedom reigned about it which made every one of the guests think himself at home, and an abundance which showed that the master's hospitality extended to many more than those who had the honour to sit at table with himself. Nor has he been less happy after death. Pope wrote his epitaph and Prior his panegyric—while Walpole and Macaulay (two men with so little apparently in common) have drawn his character with a warmth of approbation rather to have been expected from those who had shared his bounty or enjoyed his friendship, than from the colder judgments of historians looking back calmly upon personages who had long ceased to influence or affect society.
With such a man, and with Sedley's resistless wit to add fresh vigour to the conversation, it is easy to understand what Pepys had heard, that ​Lord Buckhurst and Nelly kept "merry house" at Epsom,—
All hearts fall a-leaping wherever she comes, And beat night and day like my Lord Craven's drums.
What this Epsom life was like shall be the subject of another Chapter.
* ↑ This hitherto unengraved portrait was bought by me at the sale, in 1848, of the pictures, &c., of the family of Pepys Cockerell. It was called by the auctioneer "portrait of a Musician," but is unquestionably the picture referred to by Pepys in the following passages of his Diary:— "1666, March 17. To Hales's, and paid him £14 for the picture, and £1 5s. for the frame. This day I began to sit, and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture. He promises it shall be as good as my wife's, and I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by. "March 30. To Hales's, and there sat till almost quite dark upon working my gowne, which I hired to be drawn in; an Indian gowne. "April 11. To Hales's, where there was nothing found to be done more to my picture, but the musique, which now pleases me mightily, it being painted true." See also The Athenæum for 1848. Lord Braybrooke (Pepys, vol. iii. p. 178) doubts the likeness, but admits that the portrait answers the description.
* ↑ Pepys, Sept. 4, 1667.
* ↑ Oldys, in Curll's History of the Stage, p. 111.
* ↑ Secret Service Expenses of Charles II. and James II., p. 195. There is in one of Etherege's MS. satires a very coarse allusion to Dungan and Nelly.
* ↑ The London Chronicle, for Aug. 15–18, 1778; Waldron's Downes, p. 19.
* ↑ Pepys, Jan. 23, 1666–7. Mr. Augustus Egg, A.R.A., has painted a clever picture from this passage.
* ↑ Pepys, March 25, 1667.
* ↑ Pepys, May 24, 1667.
* ↑ Dryden's Prologue to Marriage a la Mode.
* ↑ Epilogue to The Rival Queens.
* ↑ Pepys, April 7, 1668.
* ↑ Walpole to Mann, (Mann Letters,) iii. 254.
* ↑ Walpole, May 26, 1742.
* ↑ Mr. Murray, of Albemarle Street, possesses Hogarth's interesting picture of the first representation of the Beggar's Opera, in its original frame. Here his Grace of Bolton is gazing upon Polly from one stage-box—while in the other, Bolingbroke is seated by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
* ↑ Song by Sir C. S. [Sir Carr Scroope or Sir Charles Sedley] in Etherege's Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter.
* ↑ Prior's Dedication of his Poems to Lord Buckhurst's son, Lionel, first Duke of Dorset.
* ↑ Song by Lord Buckhurst.