The English have even been reproached with paying too extravagant honors to mere merit, and censured for interring the celebrated actress Mrs. Oldfield[44] in Westminster Abbey, with almost the same pomp as Sir Isaac Newton. Some pretend that the English had paid her these great funeral honors purposely to make us more strongly sensible of the barbarity and injustice which they object to in us, for having buried Mademoiselle Le Couvreur ignominiously in the fields. [Footnote 44: Anne, or "Nance" Oldfield was born in 1683, and died in 1730. Her death occurred in the year which followed the close of Voltaire's English visit. At her funeral, the body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. She had a natural son, who married Lady Mary Walpole, a natural daughter of Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister.] But be assured from me that the English were prompted by no other principle in burying Mrs. Oldfield in Westminster Abbey than their good sense. They are far from being so ridiculous as to brand with infamy an art which has immortalized a Euripides and a Sophocles; or to exclude from the body of their citizens a set of people whose business is to set off with the utmost grace of speech and action those pieces which the nation is proud of. Under the reign of Charles I and in the beginning of the civil wars raised by a number of rigid fanatics, who at last were the victims to it, a great many pieces were published against theatrical and other shows, which were attacked with the greater virulence because that monarch and his queen, daughter to Henry I of France, were passionately fond of them.