it with her august
presence, which forthwith called up verses of the old adulatory style,
though with less point and neatness than those addressed to the Virgin
Queen:

'Wit is again the care of majesty,'

said the poet, and

'Thus flourished wit in our forefathers' age,
And thus the Roman and Athenian stage.
Whose wit is best, we'll not presume to tell,
But this we know, our audience will excell;
For never was in Rome, nor Athens seen
So fair a circle, and so bright a queen.'

But this was not enough, for when Her Majesty departed for another realm
in the same year, Congreve put her into a highly eulogistic pastoral,
under the name of Pastora, and made some compliments on her, which were
considered the finest strokes of poetry and flattery combined, that an
age of addresses and eulogies could produce.

'As lofty pines o'ertop the lowly steed,
So did her graceful height all nymphs exceed,
To which excelling height she bore a mind
Humble as osiers, bending to the wind.

* * * * *

I mourn Pastora dead; let Albion mourn,
And sable clouds her chalkie cliffs adorn.'

This play was dedicated to Lord Halifax, of whom we have spoken, and who
continued to be Congreve's patron.

The fame of the young man was now made; but in the following year it was
destined to shine out more brilliantly still. Old Betterton--one of the
best Hamlets that ever trod the stage, and of whom Booth declared that
when he was playing the Ghost to his Hamlet, his look of surprise and
horror was so natural, that Booth could not for some minutes recover
himself--was now a veteran in his sixtieth year. For forty years he had
walked the boards, and made a fortune for the patentees of Drury. It was
very shabby of them, therefore, to give some of his best parts to
younger actors. Betterton was disgusted, and determined to set up for
himself, to which end he managed to procure another patent, turned the
Queen's Court in Portugal Row, Lincoln's Inn, into a theatre, and opened
it on the 30th of April, 1695. The building had been before used as a
theatre in the days of the Merry Monarch, and Tom Killegrew had acted
here some twenty years before; but it had again become a 'tennis-quatre
of the lesser sort,' says Cibber, and the new theatre was not very
grand in fabric. But Betterton drew to it all the best actors and
actresses of his former company; and Mrs.