Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/208

192 of one of her fellow-players, who attended as a witness on her part. You will suppose, perhaps, that the new countess had nothing to do but appear at court according to her rank, and to display the earl's arms upon her carriage. This was far from being the case. When examination was made concerning the marriage, it was found to be a mere deception: it appeared that the pretended priest was one of my lord's trumpeters, and the witness his kettle-drummer. The parson and his companion never appeared after the ceremony was over; and as for the other witnesses, they endeavoured to persuade her that the Sultana Roxana might have supposed, in some part or other of a play, that she was really married. It was all to no purpose that the poor creature claimed the protection of the laws of God and man, both which were violated and abused, as well as herself, by this infamous imposition. In vain did she throw herself at the king's feet to demand justice: she had only to rise up again without redress; and happy might she think herself to receive an annuity of 1000 crowns, and to resume the name of Roxana, instead of Countess of Oxford."

Here is a good deal of confusion, to which further confusion has been added by the annotators. Roxana is a character in Lee's Rival Queens; but the Rival Queens was brought out at the King's Theatre, not the Duke's; and the actress seduced by the Earl of Oxford belonged, Hamilton tells us, to the Duke's Theatre. We are assured by the annotators, that the actress thus seduced was Mrs. Marshall, who acted Roxana in Lee's Rival Queens; but Malone had disposed of this belief in a note to one of Dryden's Letters; and it is very curious how Scott, who had Malone's edition of Dryden pretty well by heart, should have missed it when he was seeing his