Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/129

Rh up, I have failed in discovering. There is reason to believe that Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, the friend of the witty Earl of Dorset, was his tutor, and that the poet Otway was in some way connected with his education. To Sheppard one of the best of the minor poems of Prior is addressed.

In the suite of followers attending the beautiful Duchess of Orleans to Dover came Louise Renée de Penencourt de Quérouaille, a girl of nineteen, of a noble but impoverished family in Brittany. She was one of the maids of honour to the Duchess, and famous for her beauty, though of a childish, simple, and somewhat baby face. Charles, whose heart was formed of tinder, grew at once enamoured of his sister's pretty maid of honour. But Louise was not to be caught without conditions affecting the interests of England. While the court stayed at Dover was signed that celebrated treaty by which England was secretly made subservient to a foreign power, and her King the pensioner of Louis XIV. When this was done, Clarendon was living in exile, and the virtuous Southampton, and the all-powerful