Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/156

140 mother, sitting lately by the water-side at her house by the Neat-Houses, near Chelsea, fell accidentally into the water and was drowned." Oldys had seen a quarto pamphlet of the time giving an account of her death. This I have never met with, but among the Luttrell Collection of ballads and broadsides sold at the Stowe sale was an elegy "Upon that never-to-be-forgotten matron Old Madam Gwyn, who died in her own fishpond, 29 July, 1679." The verse is of the lowest possible character of Grub Street elegy, nor could I, after a careful perusal, glean from it any biographical matter other than that she was very fat and fond of brandy. She was buried in the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and it is said with five gilded scutcheons to the hearse; but this could hardly be, if the ballad-monger's date of the 29th is correct, for the register of St. Martin's records her burial on the 30th, the very next day. That the old lady resided at one time with her daughter and in her house in Pall Mall, may, I think, be inferred from some curious bills for debts incurred by Nelly, accidentally discovered among the mutilated Exchequer papers: an apothecary's bill containing charges for cordial juleps with pearls