her
these great funeral honors purposely to make us more strongly sensible
of the barbarity and injustice which they object to in us, for having
buried Mademoiselle Le Couvreur ignominiously in the fields.

[Footnote 44: Anne, or "Nance" Oldfield was born in 1683, and died in
1730. Her death occurred in the year which followed the close of
Voltaire's English visit. At her funeral, the body lay in state in the
Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. She had a natural son, who
married Lady Mary Walpole, a natural daughter of Sir Robert Walpole,
the Prime Minister.]

But be assured from me that the English were prompted by no other
principle in burying Mrs. Oldfield in Westminster Abbey than their
good sense. They are far from being so ridiculous as to brand with
infamy an art which has immortalized a Euripides and a Sophocles; or
to exclude from the body of their citizens a set of people whose
business is to set off with the utmost grace of speech and action
those pieces which the nation is proud of.

Under the reign of Charles I and in the beginning of the civil wars
raised by a number of rigid fanatics, who at last were the victims to
it, a great many pieces were published against theatrical and other
shows, which were attacked with the greater virulence because that
monarch and his queen, daughter to Henry I of France, were
passionately fond of them.

One Mr. Prynne, a man of most furiously scrupulous principles, who
would have thought himself damned had he worn a cassock instead of a
short cloak, and have been glad to see one-half of mankind cut the
other to pieces for the glory of God and the _Propaganda Fide_, took
it into his head to write a most wretched satire against some pretty
good comedies, which were exhibited very innocently every night before
their majesties. He quoted the authority of the Rabbis, and some
passages from St. Bonaventura, to prove that the "Oedipus" of
Sophocles was the work of the evil spirit; that Terence was
excommunicated _ipso facto_; and added that doubtless Brutus, who was
a very severe Jansenist, assassinated Julius Caesar for no other reason
but because he, who was Pontifex Maximus, presumed to write a tragedy
the subject of which was "Oepidus." Lastly, he declared that all who
frequented the theater were excommunicated, as they thereby renounced
their baptism. This was casting the highest insult on the king and all
the royal family; and as the English loved their prince at tha