Commons. Pepys calls him "a pestilent rogue, an atheist, that would have sold his King and country for 6d. almost ".

Brouncker was valiant towards women, if not towards men, as Miss Price was well aware; therefore when she recognised his well-known and, at that moment, somewhat vinous features leering in at the carriage window, she looked another way, and called out to the coachman to drive on quickly. In about another thirty yards they stopped again and got out of the carriage, as they were close to their destination. Brouncker, Love's squire," as Andrew Marvel calls him, had followed them, and at once perceived the cloven foot, for he noticed, as the orange girls stepped out of the carriage, that their shoes and stockings were very different from those usually worn by women of that class.

Miss Price and Miss Jennings were in the act of handing their baskets of oranges to the coachman, and asking him to take care of them during their interview with the doctor, when to their consternation Brouncker thrust himself between them and addressed them in a very free and easy tone. Although he suspected them to be ladies in disguise, he did not at first recognise them; but, disconcerted by his sudden and undesired appearance, they forgot for the moment to make any attempt to conceal their identity by assumed voices or manners,

1 Poems, vol. ii, p. 94.

and Brouncker very soon discovered who they were. He gave them, however, no sign whatever of recognition. As Hamilton puts it, "the old fox possessed a wonderful command of temper on such occasions, and, having teased them a little longer to remove all suspicions, he quitted them".

Much unnerved by their adventures, the two maids-of-honour now thought that nothing further could frustrate their visit to the doctor and astrologer. In this they were mistaken. Brouncker had scarcely disappeared when they with their hackney-coach were surrounded by a crowd of boys who stormed the carriage in order to possess themselves of the oranges. The coachman showed fight, and, hearing the uproar, people came running from all directions to see the fun. This was the last straw. The two ladies could hold out no longer. Having ordered the coachman to throw all the oranges among the rabble, and thus rid them of their persecutors, they scrambled back into their hackney-coach and told the man to drive off as fast as he could to St. James's Palace.

Thus the wished-for consultation with the quack doctor was denied them just as they had seemed to be on the very point of obtaining it; and thereby Rochester lost an opportunity from which he would not only have derived an immense amount of amusement but would have worked out a scandal for the entertainment of many future generations. In short, the world had a loss when Miss Price and Miss

Jennings ordered that hackney-coachman to drive back to St. James's Palace.

For a time Brouncker kept his knowledge of this escapade a secret; and with an object. Fully expecting, as did many others, that Miss Jennings would be married to his great friend Jermyn, he had the amiable intention of allowing the marriage to take place, and of afterwards telling Jermyn all about an adventure of his wife's which had, to say the least of it, a very ugly look. Indeed the charitable Brouncker had put the very worst possible construction upon Miss Jennings's visit in disguise to a low part of the city.

Before long, however, Miss Jennings gave Jermyn his dismissal, emphasising it by addressing to him a satirical parody of one of Ovid's Epistles, which was circulated about the court and made Jermyn the laughing-stock of Whitehall. After that Brouncker had no longer any need to withhold his good story.

When repeated it naturally lost nothing by the telling, and, after being still further exaggerated by other mouths, it became a wondrous piece of scandal. In due course the Duchess of York heard of it; but she good-naturedly forgave the delinquents, and Miss Jennings had the sense to join in the laugh at her own discomfiture. The adventure was a very trivial one in her very adventurous life. When it presently leaked out that Rochester had been the quack doctor, to see whom the two maids-of-honour

had gone through so many vicissitudes, the joke was prodigiously improved, and Rochester was practically the only person connected with the affair who came out of it with flying colours.

It would appear from Pepys' diary that this prank was played in February, 1665. About three months later Rochester's name was again in everybody's mouth, though for a very different reason.

CHAPTER XII.

ROCHESTER was far from rich, for an earl, and the court of Charles II. cannot have been a place well suited for the saving of money by a poor peer. To say nothing of the gambling there prevalent, the cost of the wardrobe necessary for a courtier must have been enormous, with the then extravagant and constantly changing fashions.

And to give some idea of the cost of male attire, it may be worthy of mention that, although Mrs. Pepys was a woman of good family, while her husband was the son of a tailor, her dress seems, at least during one month, to have cost less than her husband's; and dangerous as it would be to infer too much from a single instance such as this, it is quite possible that the clothes of men may have cost more than those of ladies at the court of Charles II. On 30th November, 1663, Pepys lamented that his monthly balance was unsatisfactory. "It hath chiefly arisen," he writes, "from layings-out in clothes for myself and wife; viz., for her about 12 and for myself £55 or thereabouts." And no wonder, since he writes about his silver-laced coat, his silk suit, his white suit, his black camlet coat with silver buttons,