A year and a half earlier than the date of the above entry, namely, April 3, 1665, Pepys notices the same play, with some allusions to the ladies: “To a play at the Duke’s of my Lord Orrery’s, called ‘Mustapha,’ which being not good, made Betterton’s part and Ianthe’s but ordinary too. All the pleasure of the play was, the king and my Lady Castlemaine were there; and pretty witty Nell of the King’s House, and the younger Marshall sat next us, which pleased me mightily.” The play, however, is not so poor a one as Pepys describes it, and the cast was excellent. Betterton played Solyman the Magnificent. Mustapha and Zanga, the sons of Solyman, were played by Harris and Smith; and Young made a capital Cardinal. Mrs. Betterton was the Roxalana; and Mrs. Davies, one of those ladies who, like her sisters, the two Marshalls, Hughes and Nelly, exercised the fatal attraction over young noblemen and gallants, deplored by Evelyn, was the magnificent Queen of Hungary. Mustapha continued to be the favorite play until the theatre closed, when the plague began to spread. Pepys’s “Ianthe” was Mrs. Betterton, of whom he says, on the 22d October, 1662, “the players do tell me that Betterton is not married to Ianthe, as they say; but also that he is a very sober, serious man, studious and humble, following of his studies, and is rich already with what he gets and saves.” Betterton, however, married the lady, Miss Saunderson, in 1663. She had been famous for her Ianthe in Davenant’s “Siege of Rhodes;” and she played Shakespeare’s heroines with great effect. Pepys rightly designates the author of the play, Lord Orrery. Lord Broghill was made Earl of Orrery, five years before Evelyn saw his play. I may add that Mustapha has appeared in half-a-dozen different versions on the stage. Probably the worst of these was Mallet’s; the latter author created great amusement by one of his passages, in which he said:-- “_Future_ sultans _Have_ shunned the marriage tie;”-- a confusion of tenses which has been compared with a similar error in the sermons of so correct a writer as Blair (vol. v., third edition, page 224), “in _future_ periods the light _dawned_ more and more.”