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36 the mistress at this time of Charles Hart, was certainly looked upon by many as very little less. Their marriage in the play is more of a Fleet or May Fair mockery than a religious ceremony,—as if, to use Florimel's own language, they were married by the more agreeable names of mistress and gallant, rather than those dull old-fashioned ones of husband and wife.

Florimel, it appears to me, must have been Nelly's chef d'œuvre in her art. I can hear her exclaiming with a prophetic feeling of its truth, "I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty;" while I can picture to myself, as my readers will easily do, Nelly in boy's clothes, dressed to the admiration of Etherege and Sedley, scanned from head to foot with much surprise by Mr. Pepys and Sir William Penn, viewed with other feelings by Lord Buckhurst on one side of the house, and by the King himself on the other, while to the admiration of the author, and of the whole audience, she exclaims, with wonderful bye-play, "Yonder they are, and this way they must come. If clothes and a bonne mien will take 'm I shall do't.—Save you, Monsieur Florimel! Faith, methinks you are a very janty fellow, poudré et