daughters) falling out the other day, the latter called the other my Lord Buckhurst’s mistress. Nell answered her: "I was but one man’s mistress, though I was brought up in a disreputable house to fill strong waters to the gentlemen, and you are a mistress to three or four, though a Presbyter’s praying daughter."’ And Nell may have been right, for Beck Marshall seems to have been a trifle fast. Pepys says, on May 2, 1668: ’To the King’s (play) house, where ... the play being over, I did see Beck Marshall come dressed off the stage, and look mighty fine and pretty, and noble; and also Nell, in her boy’s clothes, mighty pretty. But, Lord! their confidence, and how many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident they are in their talk!’ Pepys, in the end, seems to have cooled in his devotion to pretty Nell, for on January 7, 1669, he wrote in his Diary: ’My wife and I to the King’s play-house.... We sat in an upper box, and the jade Nell came and sat in the next box, a bold, merry slut, who lay laughing there upon people, and with a comrade of hers, of the Duke’s house, that came in to see the play.’ Coal Yard, Drury Lane, seems to have been Nell Gwynne’s birthplace, a low, disreputable locality, and she died in a fine house on the south side of Pall Mall. Previously to that, she had lived in a house on the north side, whose site is now occupied by the Army and Navy Club. Though Drury Lane in the days of Nell Gwynne was a fashionable locality, it would seem that only to the southern division this epithet could be applied; the northern end, towards Holborn, had a low and mean character, and Coal Yard consisted of miserable tenements. It has recently been rebuilt, and is now called Goldsmith Street. Nell Gwynne died in 1691, and was pompously interred in the parish church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Dr. Tennison, the then Vicar, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, preaching her funeral sermon. This sermon was afterwards brought forward at Court to impede the doctor’s preferment; but Queen Mary, having heard the objection, answered: ’Well, what then? This I have heard before, and it is a proof that the unfortunate woman died a true penitent, who through the course of her life never let the wretched ask in vain.’ This was certainly as noble an answer to give on the part of a Queen as it was mean on the part of King Charles II. to say on his deathbed: ’Don’t let poor Nelly starve.’ Was it not in his power to make provision for her, instead of leaving her to the charity of the world?