taught her when a child (and it is clear enough from Pepys that she did), the poets did not discourage her. One of her epilogues by Dryden began in the following startling manner. It is entitled "An Epilogue spoken by Mrs. Ellen, when she was to be carried off dead by the Bearers." "Hold, are you mad, you damn'd confounded dog? I am to rise and speak the epilogue." The poet makes her say of herself, in the course of the lines, that she was "a harmless little devil," and that she was slatternly in her dress. Lely painted her with a lamb under her arm. Mr. Pegge discovered that Charles made her a lady of the chamber to his queen. Pennant seems to think this was only a title; but it is plain from Evelyn's Memoirs that she had apartments in Whitehall.[255] She died a few years after the King, at her house in Pall Mall. Nell was much libelled in her time, and among others by Sir George Etherege;[256] very likely out of some personal pique or rejection, for such revenges were quite compatible with the "loves" of that age.[257] But she was a general favourite, nevertheless, owing to a natural good-heartedness which no course of life could overcome. Burnet's character of her is well known. "Guin," says he, "the indiscreetest and wildest creature that ever was in a court, continued, to the end of that king's life, in great favour and was maintained at a vast expense. The Duke of Buckingham told me that when she was first brought to the King, she asked only five hundred pounds a year; and the King refused it. But when he told me this, about four years after, he said, she had got of the King above sixty thousand pounds. She acted all persons in so lively a manner, and was such a constant diversion to the King, that even a new mistress could not drive her away. But after all he never treated her with the decencies of a mistress."[258] Nell Gwynn is said to have suggested to her royal lover the building of Chelsea Hospital, and to have made him a present of the ground for it.