as equally divided between this child, its mother and his
sister.--"Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons Comprising the Kit-Kat
Club."]

When General Churchill, a nephew of the great Duke of Marlborough,
suggested to the disconsolate widow-by-brevet that she should share
his home, the proposal was accepted, and the actress entered for
a second time into a free-and-easy compact, and for a second time
remained faithful thereto until her new admirer went the way of Mr.
Maynwaring. It was even rumoured--scandalous gossip!--that the two
were married; and one day the Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen
Caroline, asked the "incomparable sweet girl," who was attending a
royal levee, whether such were indeed the case. "So it is said, may
it please your Royal Highness," diplomatically replied Nance, "but we
have not owned it yet."

To Churchill our unsteady heroine presented one son, and it was
through the marriage of the latter that the swift-running blood of
Oldfield now courses through the veins of the first Earl of Cadogan's
descendants.[A] This son and the one who bore the name of Maynwaring
were the only two children credited, or discredited, to the actress,
but there appears to have been a mysterious daughter, a Miss Dye
Bertie, who became, as Mrs. Delany tells us, "the pink of fashion
in the _beau monde_, and married a nobleman." It would not be wise,
however, to peer too closely into the dim vista of the past. The
picture might prove unpleasant.

[Footnote A: Her son, Colonel Churchill, once, unconsciously, saved
Sir Robert Walpole from assassination, through the latter riding home
from the House in the Colonel's chariot instead of alone in his own.
Unstable Churchill married a natural daughter of Sir Robert, and
their daughter Mary married, in 1777, Charles Sloane, first Earl of
Cadogan.... When Churchill and his wife were travelling in France, a
Frenchman, knowing he was connected with poets or players, asked him
if he was Churchill the famous poet. "I am not," said Mrs. Oldfield's
son. "Ma foi!" rejoined the polite Frenchman, "so much the worse for
you."--DR. DORAN.]

Surely we may have charity for Oldfield, when she dispensed the same
virtue to those around her. Towards none did she show it more sweetly
than to that disreputable fraud and alleged man of genius, Richard
Savage. In his own feverish day Dick Savage cut a literary swath more
wide than enviable, but when he is viewed from the unsympathetic light
of the