[30] In the _Lay Monastery_, No. 9 (December 4th, 1713), Blackmore dwelt on the fine touches of humanity in the part of Trusty in this play. He said this passage was too well known on the stage to need transcribing: "This is not only nature, but nature of the most beautiful kind; or, to borrow Plautus's own remark, by the representation of such plays _even good men may be made better_." [31] These lines are in the spirit of, but are not a quotation from Lee's _Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great_. [32] The object of the Act of 1678 (30 Charles II. c. 3), which obliged the dead to be buried in woollen, was to protect homespun goods against foreign linen. "'Odious! in woollen! 'twould a saint provoke,' Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke; 'No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace Wrap my cold limbs, and shade my lifeless face; One would not, sure, be frightful when one's dead-- And--Betty--give this cheek a little red.'" (POPE, _Moral Essays,_ i. 246-251.) Pope here alludes, says Carruthers, to Mrs. Oldfield, who acted Narcissa in Cibber's _Love's Last Shift_. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, the corpse being decorated with "a Brussels lace head-dress, a Holland shift, with tucker and double ruffles of the same lace, and a pair of new kid gloves."--See, too, _Tatler_, No. 118. It is evident that by making a certain payment persons of position could evade the Act; in the Overseers' Rate Books for the Parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, one or two persons in the year are often mentioned as being buried in linen: Thus in the volume for 1702 (p. 147) I found-- "Received for persons buried in linen, contrary to Act of Parliament: For ---- £2 5 0 For the Earl of Macclesfield £2 10 0." Mr. Austin Dobson has pointed out that if Anne Oldfield really gave the orders alleged by Pope she was only elaborating the words of Steele's widow, which she must have often heard on the stage, as she acted the part of Lady Sharlot in this play. [33] Genest (_Account of the English Stage_) suggests that the idea of Lady Sharlot's escape was taken from Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning Pestle_, Act V., Sc. III. [34] Eusden, in a complimentary poem "To the Author of the _Tatler_," printed in Nichols' _Collection of Poems_, iv. 152-4, thus expressed himself:-- "O Charlotte! who thy character can read, But soon must languish, sigh, and secret bleed? * * * * * To wealth, to power, I every wish resign, If only that dear Charlotte might be mine." [35] A favourite word with Steele. In the first scene of the play Sable says: "There's a what d'ye call, a crisis." In 1714, Steele wrote a famous pamphlet called _The Crisis_. "Plebian Britons," five lines below, reminds us of his four pamphlets, _The Plebeian_, on the Peerage Bill of 1719.