Sir William, a soldier of the first Charles's fighting time, a courtier, and vice-chamberlain to the Queen, in "Rowley's" days, was the author of four or five plays, one only of which deserves any notice here,--namely, his comedy of "Pandora." The heroine of this drama, resolving to cloister herself up from marriage, allows love to be made to her in jest, and, of course, ends by becoming a wife in happy earnest. The author had, at first, made a tragedy of "Pandora." The masters of the stage objected to it in that form; and, it being all the same to the complaisant Sir William, he converted his tragedy into a comedy! Sir Robert Stapylton, himself a Douay student converted to Protestantism; a cavalier, who turned to a hanger-on at court--but who was always a scholar and a gentleman,--has received more censure than praise at the hands of a greater critic and poet than himself. Pepys took no interest in Stapylton's "Slighted Maid," even though his own wife's maid, Gosnell, had a part in it; and Dryden has remarked of it, with too much severity, that "there is nothing in the first act that might not be said or done in the second; nor anything in the middle which might not as well have been at the beginning or the end." Stapylton, like the wits of his time, generally wrote more weakly than he spoke. This was the case, too, with Tom Killigrew, of whom Scott remarks truly, in a very awkward simile (_Life of Dryden_), that "the merit of his good things _evaporated_ as soon as he attempted to _interweave_ them with comedy." But who is this jaunty personage, so noisy at a rehearsal of one of his own indifferent plays? It is "Ned Howard," one of the three sons of the dirty Earl of Berkshire, the first Howard who bore that title, and whom Pepys saw one July day of 1666, serving the King with liquor, "in that dirty pickle I never saw man in, in my life." The daughter of this Earl was the wife of Dryden. And what does Ned Howard say at rehearsal? The actors are making some objection to his piece; but he exclaims, "In fine,--it shall read, and write, and act, and print, and pit, box, and gallery it, egad, with any play in Europe!" The play fails; and then you may hear Ned in any coffee house, or wherever there is a company, proclaiming, by way of excuse, that "Mr. So-and-so the actor didn't _top his part, sir_!" It was Ned Howard's favourite phrase.