p. 114 _Some of Oliver’s Commanders at Dunkirk._ During the Flanders campaign of 1657, Reynolds, the commander of the English at Dunkirk, sought and obtained an interview with James, whom he treated with the most marked respect and honour. This was reported to Cromwell, much to the Protector’s chagrin and alarm. p. 115. _City Pope._ An allusion to the exploits of Elkanah Settle, who was so notorious at that time for violent Whiggism that in 1680 he had presided over the senseless city ceremony of ‘Pope-burning’ on 17 November. This annual piece of ridiculous pageantry is smartly described by Dryden in his Prologue to Southerne’s _The Loyal Brother_ (1682); and in the Epilogue to _Oedipus_, (1679), after enumerating the attractions of the play, he ends— We know not what you can desire or hope To please you more, but burning of a Pope. There are many contemporary references to Settle and his ‘fireworks’. Otway, in _The Poet’s Complaint_ (4to, 1680), speaks of Rebellion cockering the silly rabble with ‘November squibs and burning pasteboard Popes’, canto xi. Duke, in the Epilogue to the same author’s _The Atheist_ (1683), says that the poet never ‘made one rocket on Queen Bess’s night’. In Scott’s _Dryden_, Vol. VI (1808) is given a cut representing the tom-fool procession of 1679, in which an effigy of the murdered Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey had a chief place. There were ‘ingenious fireworks’ and a bonfire. A scurrilous broadside of the day, with regard to the shouting, says that ‘’twas believed the echo ... reached Scotland [the Duke was then residing in the North], France, and even Rome itself damping them all with a dreadfull astonishment.’ The stage at this juncture of fierce political strife had become a veritable battle-ground of parties, and some stir was caused by Settle’s blatant, but not ineffective, melodrama on the subject of that mythical dame _The Female Prelate, being the History of the Life and Death of Pope Joan_, produced at the Theatre Royal, 1680. This play itself is often referred to, and there are other allusions to Pope Joan about this time, e.g., in the Epilogue to Lee’s _Cæsar Borgia_ (1679), where the author says a certain clique could not have been more resolute to damn his play Had he the Pope’s Effigies meant to burn, ....... Nay, conjur’d up Pope Joan to please the age, And had her breeches search’d upon the stage. 444 cf. also Mrs. Behn in her own Epilogue when she speaks of ‘fat Cardinals, Pope Joans, and Fryers’; and Lord Falkland’s scoff in his Prologue to Otway’s _The Soldier’s Fortune_ (1680):— But a more pow’rful Saint enjoys ye now ....... The fairest Prelate of her time, and best. Lord Falkland of course points at the play. Prologue