Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/176

 ‘Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub,’ of Etherege, 1664; the Queen of Hungary in ‘Mustapha,’ by the Earl of Orrery, 3 April 1664–5; Mrs. Millisent in Dryden's ‘Sir Martin Mar-all,’ 16 Aug. 1667; and Gatty in ‘She would if she could,’ by Etherege, 6 Feb. 1668. These representations were all given in the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Pepys chronicles her doings with some assiduity. He states, 7 March 1666–7, that at the Duke's playhouse (Lincoln's Inn Fields) ‘little Miss Davis did dance a jigg after the end of the play, and there telling the next day's play, so that it come in by force only to please the company to see her dance in boy's clothes; and the truth is there is no comparison between Nell's [Nell Gwynn's] dancing the other day at the King's house in boy's clothes and this, this being infinitely beyond the other.’ On 5 Aug. 1667 he saw ‘Love Tricks, or the School of Compliments,’ by Shirley, and chronicles that ‘Miss Davis dancing in a shepherd's clothes did please us mightily.’ On 11 Jan. 1667–8 he says: ‘Knipp came and sat by us. … She tells me how Miss Davis is for certain going away from the Duke's house, the king being in love with her, and a house is taken for her and furnishing; and she hath a ring given her already worth 600l.’ Mrs. Pepys says, 14 Jan. 1667–8, that she is ‘the most impertinent slut in the world;’ and on the same date quoted the opinion of Mrs. Pierce, that ‘she is a most homely jade as ever she saw, though she dances beyond anything in the world.’ Her final departure from the stage is chronicled 31 May 1668: ‘I hear that Mrs. Davis is quite gone from the Duke of York's house, and Gosnell comes in her room.’ She had danced ‘her jigg’ at a performance at court a few nights previously, when the queen, it was supposed through displeasure, ‘would not stay to see it.’ On 15 Feb. 1668–9 she was living in Suffolk Street, and was the possessor of ‘a mighty pretty fine coach.’ An indignity put upon her by Nell Gwynn, who hearing she was to visit the king asked her to supper and mixed jalap with her sweetmeats, is first mentioned in a scandalous work entitled ‘Lives of the most Celebrated Beauties,’ 1715, in which it is stated that the king in consequence dismissed Mrs. Davis with a pension of 1,000l. a year. Burnet says that her reign at court was not long. By the king she had a daughter, Lady Mary Tudor, married to Francis Ratcliffe, second earl of Derwentwater, and was thus grandmother to James, earl of Derwentwater, executed in 1716 on Tower Hill. In ‘Epigrams of All Sorts made at Divers Times, &c.,’ by Richard Flecknoe, London, 1670, p. 43, is an epigram to Mrs. Davis on her excellent dancing, which begins: Dear Mis, delight of all the nobler sort, Pride of the stage, and darling of the Court, and furnishes an exceptionally early instance of an unmarried woman being addressed, with no uncomplimentary intention, as Miss. Granger notices the existence of three portraits of Moll Davis, two of them by Lely and one by Kneller. One of these by Lely is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The head was engraved by G. Valck in 1678. In the other portrait by Lely she is represented as playing on a guitar. That by Kneller is said to be at ‘Billingbere in Berkshire, the seat of Richard Neville Neville,’ to be ‘in the painter's best manner,’ to present her with a black (attendant), and to have been ‘the property of Baptist May, who was privy purse to Charles’ (Biog. Hist. iv. 186, ed. 1775).

[Works cited; Genest's Account of the English Stage.]  DAVIS, NATHAN (1812–1882), traveller and excavator, was born in 1812. He spent many years of his life in Northern Africa, and published his experiences in: 1. ‘Tunis, or Selections from a Journal during a Residence in that Regency,’ Malta, 1841, 8vo. 2. ‘A Voice from North Africa, or a Narrative illustrative of the … Manners of the Inhabitants of that Part of the World,’ Edinburgh [1844?], 8vo; another ed. 16mo, dated 1844, Edinburgh. 3. ‘Evenings in my Tent, or Wanderings in Balad, Ejjareed, illustrating the … Conditions of various Arab Tribes of the African Sahara,’ 2 vols., London, 1854, 8vo. 4. ‘Ruined Cities within Numidian and Carthaginian Territories,’ London, 1862, 8vo. For many years he lived in an old Moorish palace, ten miles from Tunis, where he extended his hospitality to various travellers. In 1852 he edited the ‘Hebrew Christian Magazine,’ and afterwards became a nonconformist minister. From 1856 to 1858 he was engaged on behalf of the British Museum in excavations at Carthage and Utica. At the end of 1858 fifty-one cases of antiquities sent home by him were received at the museum. Other cases arrived in 1857 and 1860. The chief antiquities discovered were Roman mosaic pavements (now in the British Museum; see B. M. Guide to the Græco-Roman Sculptures, pt. ii.) and Phœnician inscriptions (see the Inscriptions in the Phœnician Character discovered … by Nathan Davis, published by the trustees of the British Museum, London, 1863, fol.) Davis describes his explorations