it was even feared that the Dutch would go to Newcastle and burn the colliers' ships there. So scarce had coal become in London that on the 26th of June, 1667, it rose to about £4 per ton. This would be equivalent to from £12 to 16 of our money.

There is no record of Rochester's having accompanied Spragge upon the occasion just mentioned, and it may be pretty safely supposed that the dissolute youth was only too glad to break off his connection with wars, warriors and weapons, in order to devote his whole attention to wit, wine, and women, in spite of his own lines:

Women and men of wit are dangerous tools,

And ever fatal to admiring fools.1

A very important event in his life was about to take place. La donna e mobile and, although that match-making mother, Lady Sandwich, thought she had reasons for believing Miss Mallet to be relenting and intending to bestow herself and her thousands upon Lord Hinchingbroke, the rich heiress had her own ideas on the subject. To the astonishment of everybody, within two years of her ill-treatment by Rochester, she married him. Of how all this was brought about there are unhappily no records. Possibly he may have appeared to her eyes in a new light when he returned home in the character of a hero from the wars.

Pepys thus describes her appearance at a London

1 Satire against Mankind.

theatre after her marriage: "Soon as dined, my wife and I out to the Duke's playhouse, and there Heraclius,' an excellent play, to my extraordinary content; and the more from the house being very full, and great company: among others, Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with puffes, as my wife calls them and several other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily-but it is only because she sees it is the fashion. Here I saw my Lord Rochester and his lady, Mrs. Mallett, who hath after all this ado married him, and as I hear some say in the pit, it is a great act of charity, for he hath no estate. But it was pleasant to see how everybody rose up when my Lord John Butler, the Duke of Ormond's son, came into the pit towards the end of the play, who was a servant [i.e., suitor] to Mrs. Mallett, and now smiled upon her, and she on him."

Whether her smiling upon men with whom she had formerly flirted awakened the jealousy of her husband does not appear; but it is pretty clear that her husband did much to awaken the jealousy of his wife, and it is unquestionable that their unhappiness was to a great extent owing to the misdemeanours of Rochester. Few things are more certain than that he was a faithless husband.

La triste héritière," however, must have been changeable, uncertain and unstable. As we have seen, she was on and off with one admirer after

1 Diary, 4th February, 1667.

another then she refused to have anything to do with Rochester, and was furious at his attempt to run away with her, yet eventually she married him ; and, after becoming a Catholic, she left the Catholic Church and again became an Anglican.

In his Life of Rochester Burnet states that "during his whole [last] sickness, he expressed so much tenderness and true kindness to his lady, that, as it easily effaced the remembrance of everything wherein he had been in fault formerly, so it drew from her the most passionate care and concern for him that was possible".

We may as well dispose of Rochester's family life here by saying that he had four children, a son who died young and unmarried, and three daughters, one of whom married a son of her mother's old flame, Lord Hinchingbroke, and is said to have inherited a large share of her father's wit.

One disagreeable habit of Rochester's may have added to the prevailing discord between himself and his wife, namely that of swearing. It is improbable that the ladies of those times liked being sworn at any better than the ladies of these.1 During his fatal illness, Bishop Burnet congratulated him on having so far overcome this habit as to use no

1" Frank and I have been playing at husband and wife," said a little girl.

"How did you do that?" inquired a friend.

"I told him that his conduct was disgraceful. Then he said 'Damn,' and I left the room."

-Punch (but quotation unverified).

damn ".

worse word than "

Evelyn corroborates Burnet's account of this blasphemy, by describing him in his Diary as "A very profane wit".

Besides Bishop Burnet, another clergyman made gentle mention of Rochester's imperfections. His chaplain, in his funeral sermon, after admitting that he had occasionally deviated from the strait and narrow path, and that he had been, in short, a great sinner, proceeded to say :

And truly none but one so great in parts could be so. His sins were like his parts, from which they sprang, all of them high and extraordinary. He seemed to affect something singular and paradoxical in his impieties, as well as in his writings, above the reach and thought of other men."

It is something to be distinguished for anything -even for high and extraordinary sins; and any celebrity may be better than none—even a celebrity for paradoxical impieties above the reach and thought of other men!

Rochester appears to have occasionally regretted his evil life; but, says Burnet, he "was very much ashamed of his former practices, rather because he had made himself a beast, and had brought pain and sickness on his body, and had suffered much in his reputation, than from any deep sense of a Supreme Being or another state". Now and then he endeavoured to overcome his bad habits "by the study of philosophy, and he had not a few no less solid than pleasant notions concerning the folly and mad