the close of the third act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered me in my ear, ’These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world.  But pray,’ says he, ’you that are a critic, is the play according to your dramatic rules, as you call them?  Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood?  Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of.’

“The fourth act very luckily began before I had time to give the old gentleman an answer.  ‘Well,’ says the knight, sitting down with great satisfaction, ‘I suppose we are now to see Hector’s ghost,’ He then renewed his attention, and, from time to time, fell a praising the widow.  He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one of her pages, whom at his first entering he took for Astyanax; but quickly set himself right in that particular, though, at the same time he owned he should have been very glad to have seen the little boy, who, says he, must needs be a very fine child by the account that is given of him.  Upon Hermione’s going off with a menace to Pyrrhus, the audience gave a loud clap, to which Sir Roger added, ’On my word, a notable young baggage!’”

We can imagine Sir Roger going, a year later, to see Mrs. Oldfield carry all before her as Jane Shore in Nicholas Rowe’s play of that name.  The author had once been an ardent admirer of the glacierlike but lovely Bracegirdle, at whose haughty shrine he long worshipped in the hopes that the ice of her reserve might some day melt; and the wits of the coffee-house were wont to say, not without a grain of truth, that when the poet wrote dramas to fit Bracegirdle as the heroine, the lovers therein always pleaded his own passion[A].  Now that the charmer had left the stage, Rowe was forced to entrust the title character of Jane Shore to Nance, who vowed, no doubt, she was thoroughly bored at having to walk once again through a vale of tears.  But she made another triumph (the author himself coached her in the part), and helped to give the production all manner of success.

[Footnote A:  As Cibber says, Mrs. Bracegirdle “inspired the best authors to write for her, and two of them [Rowe and Congreve] when they gave her a lover in a play, seem’d palpably to plead their own passions, and make their private court to her in fictitious characters.”]

It is a curious fact that the writing of the tragedy was indirectly due to political disappointment.  Rowe had set himself assiduously to the study of Spanish with the idea of securing from Lord Halifax a diplomatic position, and his reward for this energy was so intangible that he soon gave up hopes of foreign travel and turned his attention to the tribulations of Jane.  In other words, the noble Halifax merely expressed his satisfaction that Mr. Rowe could now read “Don Quixote” in the original.

Thus Nance played on, sometimes in comedy, and again in tragedy, when, despite her customary objections, the pages had to drag her train about.  It was a train that swept all before it.