om all sordid ends and unworthy tricks.
The little lady in the mourning mantua soon fell in love with our
gallant spark, and when he made court to her, she represented herself
as very wealthy. The deed accomplished, Mrs. Farquhar turned out to be
penniless; and the poet, like a gentleman as he was, never reproached
her, but sat down cheerfully to a double poverty. In _Love and
Business_ the story does not proceed so far. He receives Miss Penelope
V----'s timid advances, describes himself to her, is soon as much in
love with his little lady as she with him, and is making broad demands
and rich-blooded confidences in fine style, no offence taken where
no harm is meant. In one of the letters to Penelope we get a very
interesting glance at a famous, and, as it happens, rather obscure,
event--the funeral of the great Dryden, in May 1700. Farquhar says:

"I come now from Mr. Dryden's Funeral, where we had an Ode in Horace
sung, instead of David's Psalms; whence you may find that we don't
think a Poet worth Christian Burial; the Pomp of the Ceremony was a
kind of Rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras than him; because
the Cavalcade was mostly Burlesque; but he was an extraordinary Man,
and bury'd after an extraordinary Fashion; for I believe there was
never such another Burial seen; the Oration indeed was great and
ingenious, worthy the Subject, and like the Author [Dr. Garth], whose
Prescriptions can restore the Living, and his Pen embalm the Dead.
And so much for Mr. Dryden, whose Burial was the same with his
Life,--Variety, and not of a Piece. The Quality and Mob, Farce and
Heroicks, the Sublime and Ridicule mixt in a Piece, great Cleopatra in
a Hackney Coach."

WHAT ANN LANG READ

Who was Ann Lang? Alas! I am not sure; but she flourished one hundred
and sixty years ago, under his glorious Majesty, George I., and I have
become the happy possessor of a portion of her library. It consists
of a number of cheap novels, all published in 1723 and 1724, when Ann
Lang probably bought them; and each carries, written on the back of
the title, "ann Lang book 1727," which is doubtless the date of her
lending them to some younger female friend. The letters of this
inscription are round and laboriously shaped, while the form is always
the same, and never "Ann Lang, her book," which is what one would
expect. It is not the hand of a person of quality: I venture to
conclude that she who wrote it was a milliner's apprentice