Hortensia Mancini, the daughter of Cardinal Mazarin’s sister, had been married while very young to some Duke, who was allowed to assume the name of Mazarin on his marriage. A religious fanatic, he soon shut her up in a convent, from which she took her flight and found her way to England in boy’s costume. There, as the handsomest woman in Europe, her coming caused commotion among her rivals, all remembering the flutter she had excited in Charles II. during his exile in France. Ruvigny {91} writes: “She has entered the English court as Armida entered the camp of Godfrey.” Indeed, this one soon showed that she, too, was a sorceress; and Rochester, in his famous “Farewell,” acclaims her the “renowned Mazarine, first in the glorious Roll of Infamy.” Living luxuriously and lavishly for a while, until by the death of her royal lover she lost her pension of £4000 yearly, she came at length to this little house as her last dwelling-place; and even here, reduced to real poverty, unable to pay her butcher or her baker, written down on the Parish books of 1695, “A Defaulter of the Parish Rates:” she yet persisted in giving grand dinners—the cost of which (so old Lysons heard) was met by each guest leaving monies under his napkin! For all that, this modest mansion was the favourite resort of famous men of her day; who lounged in of an evening to discuss and speculate, to play at her basset-tables, to listen to her music, mostly dramatic, the forerunner of Italian opera in this country. Here came Sydney Godolphin, that rare man who was “never in the way, and yet never out of the way;” here the king was frequently found; here Saint Evremond was always found! How real to us is the figure of this gallant old Frenchman, as we see him in the National Portrait Gallery: his white hair flowing below his black cap; his large forehead; his dark blue eyes; the great wen that grew in his later years between them, just at the top of his nose: a shrewd, kindly, epicurean face. He came of a noble Norman family from Denis le Guast, this Charles de Saint Denys, Seigneur de Saint Evremond. Entering the army at an early age, he rose rapidly to a captaincy; his bravery and his wit—a little less than that of Voltaire, whom he helped to form, says Hallam—making him the friend of Turenne, of the great Condè, and of others of that brilliant band. Satirizing Mazarin, he was locked in the Bastille for three months; and when free, he finally fled from the cardinal’s fury, and came to England: here to end his days, waiting on this still fascinating woman, worshipping her, advising her, writing plays for her, and poetry to her. He held the rank of Governor of Duck Island, in the ornamental water of St. James’s Park—an office invented for him by Charles II., and having a fine title, a large salary, and no duties. You may throw bread to-day to the lineal descendants of those ducks of which the King was so fond. Saint Evremond died in 1703, and lies in the Poet’s Corner of