You see, my Lord, how far you have push'd me: I dare not own the honour you have done me, for fear of shewing it to my own disadvantage. You are that rerum natura of your own Lucretius; Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri.4 You are above any incense I can give you, and have all the happiness of an idle life, join'd with the good-nature of an active. Your friends in town are ready to envy the leisure you have given your selfe in the country; though they know you are only their steward, and that you treasure up but so much health as you intend to spend on them in winter. In the mean time you have withdrawn your selfe from attendance, the curse of courts; you may think on what you please, and that as little as you please; for, in my opinion, thinking it selfe is a kind of pain to a witty man : he finds so much more in it to disquiet than to please him. But I hope your Lordship will not omitt the occasion of laughing at the great Duke of B[uckingham], who is so uneasy to him selfe by pursuing the honour of Lieutenant-General, which flyes him, that he can enjoy nothing he possesses; though at the same time he is so unfit to command an army, that he is the only man in the three nations, who does not know it yet he still picques himself, like his father, to find another Isle of Rhe in Zealand; thinking this disappointment an injury to him, which is indeed a favour,

4 Lucret. lib. i. Lord Rochester has translated the passage in which this line is found.

and will not be satisfied but with his own ruin and with our's. "Tis a strange quality in a man, to love idleness so well as to destroy his estate by it; and yet at the same time to pursue so violently the most toilsome and most unpleasant part of business. These observations would soon run into lampoon, if I had not forsworn that dangerous part of wit; not so much out of good-nature, but lest from the inborn vanity of poets I should shew it to others, and betray my selfe to a worse mischief than what I do to my enemy. This has been lately the case of Etherege; who translating a satyr of Boileau's, and changing the French names for English, read it so often, that it came to their ears who were con→ cern'd; and forced him to leave off the design, e're it were half finish'd. Two of the verses. I remember:

+

5

I call a spade, a spade; Eaton, a bully ;

6

Frampton, a pimp; and brother-John, a cully.

5 The person meant was, I believe, Sir John Eaton, of whom I know no more than that he was a writer of songs in the time of Charles II. One of them is preserved in Dryden's MISCELLANIES; and it is followed by another written by Lord Rochester, " In imitation of Sir John Eaton's songs." He is perhaps the person mentioned by Antony Hammond in some verses addressed to Walter Moyle in 1693:

Eyton, whom vice becomes, of vigour full, "Foe to the godly, covetous, and dull."

6 Perhaps Tregonwell Frampton, Keeper of the Royal Stud at Newmarket; who was born in 1641, and died in 1727. Concerning Brother John I can form no conjecture.

But one of his friends imagin'd those names not enough for the dignity of a satyr, and chang'd them thus:

I call a spade, a spade; Dunbar," a bully;

Brounckard, a pimp; and Aubrey Vere, a cully.

Probably the grandson of Sir George Hume, created Earl of Dunbar by James the first, in 1605. The title became extinct about the year 1689, for want of issue male; and was attempted to be revived in this century by the old Pretender, in the person of James Murray, elder brother of William, the first Earl of Mansfield.

In two MS. lampoons dated 1687, formerly among the MSS. at Bulstrode, one entitled "The Prophecy," the other "A Catalogue of our most eminent Ninnies," the Duchess of Monmouth is accused of being gallant with Lord Feversham, and also with Stamford, Cornwallis, and brawny Dunbar. In May 1688, she married Lord Cornwallis. The Catalogue of Ninnies was printed by Curll in 1714, and ascribed to Charles, Earl of Dorset.—The person in question is there called-strong Dunbar.

* Henry Brouncker, younger brother of William, Viscount Brouncker, first President of the Royal Society, was of the bedchamber to the Duke of York, notorious for having carried false orders to the master of his Royal Highness's ship, to slacken sail, after the engagement with the Dutch, in 1665;" which the Duke did not hear of till some years after, when Brouncker's ill course of life and his abominable actions had rendered him so odious, that it was taken notice of in parliament; upon which he was expelled the House of Commons, whereof he was a member, as an infamous person; though his friend Coventry adhered to him, and used many indirect arts to have protected him, and afterwards procured him to have more countenance from the King, than most men thought he deserved; being a person throughout his whole life

Because I deal not in satyr, I have sent your Lordship a Prologue and Epilogue' which I made

never notorious for any thing but the highest degree of impudence, and stooping to the most infamous offices, and playing very well at chess, which preferred him more than the most virtuous qualities could have done."-Continua tion of the Life of Clarendon, p. 270. The words in Italicks seem to be a periphrasis for the epithet here applied to this person.

9 Aubery de Vere, the twentieth and last Earl of Oxford, of that family. He was born February 7, 1627-8; (Esc. 8. Car. p. 1. n. 3.) was a Knight of the Garter; Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles II.; Chief Justice in Eyre; and Colonel of the first or royal regiment of horse-guards, which to this day is denominated from his title, the Oxford Blues. He died March 12, 1702-3, at the age of seventy-five.-It is observable that when a man has passed seventy years, his contemporaries are very apt to magnify his age. The late General Oglethorpe (who died July 1, 1785, at the age of 87,) was in the latter part of his life usually called ten years older than he was; and the twentieth Earl of Oxford has been always represented as considerably above eighty when he died; but the document referred to in the beginning of this note, which has been examined for the purpose of ascertaining the truth of the received account of his

not err.

age, can

This nobleman is said to have deluded a celebrated actress by a fictitious marriage, aided by one of his domesticks, who read the service, disguised in the habit of a clergyman. According to the author of the MEMOIRS OF GRAMMONT, the lady whom he deceived, was an actress belonging to the Duke of York's company of comedians, who, he says, was celebrated in the part of Roxana [in THE RIVAL QUEENS]; but three other authors of Scan

for our players, when they went down to Oxford. I hear they have succeeded; and by the event

dalous Chronicles, Captain Smith, Madame Dunois, and Edmund Curll, say, that the part in which she was distinguished, was Roxolana in Settle's IBRAHIM. Both these parts were represented by Mrs. Marshall in 1677, when THE RIVAL QUEENS and IBRAHIM were first performed; but if the Earl of Oxford were ever guilty of such a basé deception, Mrs. Marshall could not have been the person deluded, nor could that have been the time; for she was an actress, not at the Duke's, but at the King's, theatre; and in 1677, neither she nor any other woman could have been deceived by such a ceremony in London, Lord Oxford being then notoriously not a single man; having about the year 1674 married his second wife, Diana, the daughter of George Kirke, one of the Grooms of the Bedchamber to Charles II.-The person seduced probably was Mrs. Frances Davenport, an eminent actress in the Duke of York's company, who was celebrated for her performance of the part of Roxolana in D'Avenant's SIEGE OF RHODES, in 1662, and in another Roxolana in Lord Orrery's MUSTAPHA, in 1665. She acted in Dryden's MAIDEN QUEEN in 1668; but her name is not found in of the plays performed by the Duke of York's servants after they removed to Dorset Gardens, in 1671; and Downes, the prompter of that playhouse, mentions in his quaint language, that she was, before that time, "by force of love erept from the stage." The same writer says, Mrs. Betterton succeeded her in the part of Roxolana. - Mrs Marshall, on the other hand, continued to act at the King's theatre for several years after this period.

:

any

Mrs. Davenport having probably been taken off the stage by Lord Oxford, in 1669 or 1670, three or four years before this letter was written, (1673,) and being. then in his possession, this adventure, and his attachment