Moll Davis: a comedy

Somewhere about the western angle now formed by the junction of Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road, there stood in the year 1661 “The Mischief” Inn. It was a substantial b...

In a fine panelled room which gave, through two large windows, upon the privy gardens of Whitehall Palace, a lady and a gentleman were seated as far apart as the limits of the c...

Men of pleasure, and of roguery to boot, were not, in King Charles’s time, much concerned as a rule over the logical consequences of their pranks. They took the day improvidentl...

Running north from Storey’s Gate, the backs of its western houses abutting on the network of conduits which fed what is now in St. James’s Park called the Ornamental Water, but...

The Earl of Chesterfield, entering his apartments one afternoon, was informed by the porter that a young person, lately arrived, waited on his convenience in the audience-room,...

It must be explained at this point that the comedy with which we are especially concerned formed only one of innumerable kindred sideshows in the endless junketing fair at White...

“The same: three days later.” So, in theatrical parlance, we lift the curtain on a scene the replica of that introduced in the second chapter of this Comedy of Errors. It was al...

Mr. Pepys--to mention him once again--kept, as we know, a commonplace book, in which he was accustomed to jot down (in shorthand, let us hope) the good stories, post-prandial an...

And so the musician and the dying boy were made friends--a quaint, brief intimacy which the former could never recall in after-years without a pang, half pitiful, half humorous,...

It may appear to some people that Hamilton was taking a prodigious amount of trouble to reach by a roundabout way a conclusion at least as presumptively attainable by direct mea...

To the Duke of York’s chambers in Whitehall came a mincing exquisite, with a guitar slung from his neck by a broad silver ribbon. He was dressed in silvered white from chin to t...

Little Lady Chesterfield sat in her private boudoir, looking out on a glowing section of the palace gardens. Thirty feet away a marble basin, shaped like a tazza, bubbled with a...

The Earl of Chesterfield entered his drawing-room in a very morose frame of mind, which was scarcely improved by his discovery of a young lady already seated there before him. S...

The tormented nobleman, craving for advice and sympathy, lost little time before he sought out his friend and kinsman, Mr. George Hamilton. He found that gentleman, who had just...

Hamilton, making moodily for his quarters, took a somewhat deserted by-way, which led him shortly under a long covered passage connected with the stables. He had but entered thi...

Mrs. Davis, conscious that her position was no longer a tenable one, and driven to naughty extremities by the three-sided investment which left her no alternative but to retreat...

_An assignation (vizards) with Kit is arranged for 8.30 this evening in the Mulberry Garden. The parties to it will be distinguished by, in the gentleman’s case, a green scarf a...

Where the grounds of Buckingham Palace now extend, there stood in the seventeenth century the old flowery pleasaunce known as Mulberry Garden, a place long appropriated, like it...