Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/53

Rh ajusté as well as the best of 'em. I can manage the little comb—set my hat, shake my garniture, toss about my empty noddle, walk with a courant slur, and at every step peck down my head:—if I should be mistaken for some courtier, now, pray where's the difference?" This was what Beau Hewit or Beau Fielding were enacting every day in their lives, and Colley Cibber lived to be the last actor who either felt or could make others feel its truth and application.

Nelly was living at this time in the fashionable part of Drury Lane, the Strand or Covent Garden end, for Drury Lane in the days of Charles II. was inhabited by a very different class of people from those who now occupy it—or, indeed, who have lived in it since the time Gay guarded us from "Drury's mazy courts and dark abodes"—since Pope described it only too truly as peopled by drabs of the lowest character, and by authors "lulled by soft zephyrs," through the broken pane of a garret window. The upper end, towards St. Giles's Pound and Montague House, had its squalid quarters, like Lewknor's Lane and the Coal Yard, in which, as we have concluded, our Nelly was born; but at the Strand end lived the Earl of Anglesey, long Lord Privy Seal, and the Earls of Clare and Craven,