[198] Perhaps General Webbe, whose “firm platoon” was afterwards celebrated by Tickell. Of the prowess of Mr Beereton no memorials have been discovered. Malone.
[199] Lord Henry Scott, second surviving son of James, Duke of Monmouth, who was born in 1676. In 1706 he was created Earl of Deloraine; and died about 1730.
[200] The Earl of Derwentwater’s poetry, which, according to Dryden, was none of the best.
[201] The famous Betterton, who, in 1695, again divided the two companies, and headed that in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
[202] Robert, third Earl of Scarsdale, a protector of Betterton’s company.
[203] Alluding to the statutes imposing the oath of allegiance and supremacy on all Catholics, under the penalty of incapacity to hold landed property. 11 and 12 William III. cap. 4.
[204] The excellent comedy entitled the “Way of the World.” It had cost Congreve much pains, and he was so much disgusted with the cold reception alluded to in the text, that he never again wrote for the stage.
[205] His Fables.
[206] King William had made large grants of land out of the forfeited estates in Ireland, to his foreign servants, Portland, Albemarle, Rochford, Galway, and Athlone, and to his favourite, Lady Orkney. The Commons, who now watched every step of their deliverer with bitter jealousy, appointed a commission to enquire into the value of these grants; and followed it with a bill for resuming and applying them to the payment of public debt; “and; in order to prevent the bill from being defeated in the House of Lords, they, by a form seldom used, and which very seldom should be used, tacked it to their bill of supply; so that the Lords could not refuse the one, without disappointing the other. The Lords, to secure themselves from that insignificancy, to which the form of the bill tended to reduce them, disputed, in some conferences with the Commons, the form of it with warmth; but the resumption which it contained with indifference. And in both Houses, even the servants of the Crown gave themselves little trouble to defeat it; partly to gain popularity, but more from national antipathy to foreigners, and envy at gifts in which themselves were no sharers. The King, making allowances for national weaknesses, and for those of human nature, passed the bill without any complaint in public, but with a generous indignation in private, which perhaps made the blow fall more heavy on his friends, when, in order to soften it, he said to them, that it was for his sake, and not for their own, they were suffering,”—Dalrymple’s Annals. William felt so deeply the unkindness offered to him, that he prorogued the Parliament without the usual ceremony of a speech from the throne.
[207] Mr Steward.