new one is very much needed), I hope to see no more confusion in this matter.[1]
Chapter X. of the Memoirs is equally true to the chronology of history. Here we have the story of Lord Rochester's residence as a German doctor in Tower Street, and that famous adventure of Miss Jennings and Miss Price disguised as orange-girls. No one has told us when Rochester assumed the part of Alexander Bendo, and issued his bill detailing what he had done and what he could do; but there is reason to believe that it was before the 26th May, 1665, when he ran off with the heiress he subsequently married. Rochester was at the attack on Bergen on the 2nd August, 1665, at the great fight at sea in 1666, and married to Elizabeth Mallet, "the melancholy heiress," as Hamilton calls her, before the 4th February, 1666-7, when Pepys records his seeing them at court as man and wife. Hamilton connects the two events,—Rochester's City residence, and Miss Jennings and Miss Price's disguise as orange-girls. Pepys is silent about the German doctor, but Miss Jennings' adventure did not escape him:—
- ↑ I may add, that the next editor will do well to refer to Malone's note about the age of the Earl of Oxford, proving from indisputable evidence that Lord Oxford was seventy-five instead of being, as the annotators inform us, upwards of eighty at his death.
