We hear from the Hague, that a person of the first quality is arrived in the Low Countries from France, in order to be a plenipotentiary in an ensuing treaty of peace.

Letters from France acknowledge, that Monsieur Bernard has made no higher offers of satisfaction to his creditors than of L35 per cent.

These advices add, that the Marshal Boufflers, Monsieur Torcy (who distinguished himself formerly, by advising the Court of France to adhere to the treaty of partition), and Monsieur d’Harcourt (who negotiated with Cardinal Portocarrero for the succession of the crown of Spain in the House of Bourbon), are all three joined in a commission for a treaty of peace.  The Marshal is come to Ghent:  the other two are arrived at the Hague.

It is confidently reported here that the Right Honourable the Lord Townshend is to go with his Grace the Duke of Marlborough into Holland.[162]

[Footnote 152:  Congreve’s first play, produced in 1693.  See also No. 193.  This piece is attacked in Jeremy Collier’s “Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage,” 1698.]

[Footnote 153:  Swift.]

[Footnote 154:  A Scotch physician in the reigns of Charles I. and Charles II.  An advertisement of his “famous Scots Pills” requested the public to beware of counterfeits, especially an ignorant pretender, one Muffen, who kept a china-shop.]

[Footnote 155:  “Henley would fain have me to go with Steele and Rowe, &c., to an invitation at Sir William Read’s.  Surely you have heard of him.  He has been a mountebank, and is the Queen’s oculist; he makes admirable punch, and treats you in gold vessels.  But I am engaged, and won’t go; neither indeed am I fond of the jaunt” (Swift’s “Journal,” April 11, 1711).  Read was knighted in 1705, for services done in curing soldiers and sailors of blindness gratis.  Beginning life as a tailor, he became Queen Anne’s oculist in ordinary, and died in 1715.  See Spectator, No. 547.]

[Footnote 156:  Rozelli, the inventor of a specific for the gout, died at the Hague.  In No. 33 was an advertisement of the “Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of Signior Rozelli, at the Hague, giving a particular account of his birth, education, slavery, monastic state, imprisonment in the Inquisition at Rome, and the different figures he has since made, as well in Italy, as in France and Holland....  Done into English from the second edition of the French.”  This work, like the continuation of 1724, has been wrongly attributed to Defoe.  Rozelli advertised in the London Gazette, for July 19, 1709, that the book was entirely fictitious, and a libel upon his character.]

[Footnote 157:  We learn from Ben Jonson, that Scoggan, or Skogan, was M.A., and lived in the time of Henry IV.  “He made disguises for the King’s sons, writ in ballad-royal daintily well, and was regarded and rewarded.”  Jonson calls him the moral Skogan; and introduces him with Skelton, the poet laureate of Henry VIII., into his Masque, entitled “The Fortunate Isles,” where he keeps them in character, and makes them rhyme in their own manner.]