When Mr. Esmond came home, his health was still shattered; and he took a lodging near to his mistresses, at Kensington, glad enough to be served by them, and to see them day after day.  He was enabled to see a little company—­and of the sort he liked best.  Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison both did him the honor to visit him; and drank many a glass of good claret at his lodging, whilst their entertainer, through his wound, was kept to diet drink and gruel.  These gentlemen were Whigs, and great admirers of my Lord Duke of Marlborough; and Esmond was entirely of the other party.  But their different views of politics did not prevent the gentlemen from agreeing in private, nor from allowing, on one evening when Esmond’s kind old patron, Lieutenant-General Webb, with a stick and a crutch, hobbled up to the Colonel’s lodging (which was prettily situate at Knightsbridge, between London and Kensington, and looking over the Gardens), that the Lieutenant-General was a noble and gallant soldier—­and even that he had been hardly used in the Wynendael affair.  He took his revenge in talk, that must be confessed; and if Mr. Addison had had a mind to write a poem about Wynendael, he might have heard from the commander’s own lips the story a hundred times over.

Mr. Esmond, forced to be quiet, betook himself to literature for a relaxation, and composed his comedy, whereof the prompter’s copy lieth in my walnut escritoire, sealed up and docketed, “The Faithful Fool, a Comedy, as it was performed by her Majesty’s Servants.”  ’Twas a very sentimental piece; and Mr. Steele, who had more of that kind of sentiment than Mr. Addison, admired it, whilst the other rather sneered at the performance; though he owned that, here and there, it contained some pretty strokes.  He was bringing out his own play of “Cato” at the time, the blaze of which quite extinguished Esmond’s farthing candle; and his name was never put to the piece, which was printed as by a Person of Quality.  Only nine copies were sold, though Mr. Dennis, the great critic, praised it, and said ’twas a work of great merit; and Colonel Esmond had the whole impression burned one day in a rage, by Jack Lockwood, his man.

All this comedy was full of bitter satiric strokes against a certain young lady.  The plot of the piece was quite a new one.  A young woman was represented with a great number of suitors, selecting a pert fribble of a peer, in place of the hero (but ill-acted, I think, by Mr. Wilks, the Faithful Fool,) who persisted in admiring her.  In the fifth act, Teraminta was made to discover the merits of Eugenio (the F. F.), and to feel a partiality for him too late; for he announced that he had bestowed his hand and estate upon Rosaria, a country lass, endowed with every virtue.  But it must be owned that the audience yawned through the play; and that it perished on the third night, with only half a dozen persons to behold its agonies.  Esmond and his two mistresses came to the first night, and Miss Beatrix fell asleep; whilst her mother, who had not been to a play since King James the Second’s time, thought the piece, though not brilliant, had a very pretty moral.