During the weeks which followed, the invalid received the untiring attentions of Mistress Saunders, who once upon a time played bouncing chambermaids, but who had, for ten years past, acted as a feminine valet de chambre and general factotum for Mrs. Oldfield.  And if ever she played well, ’twas in thus ministering to the dying wants of one who in health had been ever helpful and generous.  Pope, who hated the great comedienne in his petty, spiteful way, has immortalised the intimacy of mistress and handmaiden in these lines: 

  “’Odious! in woolen? ‘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.’"[A]

[Footnote A:  Pope’s Moral Essays.]

These ante-mortem directions had no further reality than the imagination of the poet; but it is easy to believe that the woman who had set the fashions for the town these many years would have enough of the feminine instinct left, though Death waited without, to plan a becoming funeral garb.  Woollen, forsooth!  It was a beastly law which required that all the dead should be buried in that material, and Nance shuddered when she thought of it.[A]

[Footnote A:  The dead were then buried in woolen, which was rendered compulsory by the Acts 30 Car.  II. c. 3 and 36 ejusdem c. i.  The first act was entitled “an Act for the lessening the importation of linnen from beyond the seas, and the encouragement of the woolen and paper manufactures of the kingdome.”  It prescribed that the curate of every parish, shall keep a register to be provided at the charge of the parish, wherein to enter all burials and affidavits of persons being buried in woolen; the affidavit to be taken by any justice of the peace, mayor, or such like chief officer in the parish where the body was interred....  It imposed a fine of five pounds for every infringement, one half to go to the informer, and the other half to the poor of the parish.  This Act was only repealed by 54 Geo. III. c. 108, or in the year 1815.  The material used was flannel, and such interments are frequently mentioned in the literature of the time.—­ASHTON.]

Soon there were no more thoughts of dress, no more plaintive shudders at the iniquity of the woollen act.  The eyes whose kindly light had illumined the dull soul of many a playgoer, closed for ever on the 23rd of October, 1730, and the incomparable Oldfield was no more.  Surely old Sol did not shine on London that day; surely he must have mourned behind the leaden English sky for one of his fairest daughters, that child of sunshine who brightened the world by her presence, and made her exit, as she did her entrance, with a smile.