THE TOWN FOP.
p. 15 Mrs. Celinda Dresswell. Dresswell was obviously the original name of Friendlove, and Mrs. Behn forgot to alter her MS. at this passage. The same oversight occurs later in the act when Bellmour says ’. must rely on Dresswell’s friendship,’ (p. 20).
p. 18 Glass Coach. Coaches with glasses were a recent invention and very fashionable amongst the courtiers and ladies of the Restoration. De Grammont tells in his Memoirs how he presented a French calash with glasses to the King, and how, after the Queen and the Duchess of York, had publicly appeared in it, a battle royal took place between Lady Castlemaine and Miss Stewart as to which of the two should first be seen therein on a fine day in Hyde Park. The Ultimum Vale of John Carleton (4to, 1663) says, ‘I could wish her coach … made of the new fashion, with glass, very stately, … was come for me.’
p. 20 Tom Dove. A well-known bear so named and exhibited at the Bear Garden. Besides this passage there are four other allusions to him to be found. Dryden’s Epilogue to the King and Queen at the Union of the Two Companies, 1682, has:—
Then for your lacquies …
They roar so loud, you’d think behind the stairs,
Tom Dove, and all the brotherhood of bears.
His prologue to Vanbrugh’s alteration of The Pilgrim (1700) begins:—
How wretched is the fate of those who write!
Brought muzzled to the stage, for fear they bite;
Where, like Tom Dove, they stand the common foe.
In Southerne’s The Maid’s Last Prayer (1693) Act ii, II, Granger on receiving an invitation to dinner cries: ‘Zounds! a man had as good be ty’d to a stake and baited like Tom Dove on Easter Monday as be the necessary appurtenance of a great man’s table!’ D’Urfey in the epilogue (spoken by Verbruggen) to Robert Gould’s The Rival Sisters; or, The Violence of Love, produced at Drury Lane in 1696, writes:—
When the dull Crowd, unskilled in these Affairs,
To day wou’d laugh with us, to morrow with the Bears:
Careless which Pastime did most Witty prove,
Or who pleas’d best, Tom Poet, or Tom Dove.
Tom Dove has been wrongly described as ‘a bearward.’