between his sister and his mistress, Mrs. Oldfield, and his son by the
latter. Mrs. Oldfield must have grown rich in her sinful career, for she
could afford, when ill, to refuse to take her salary from the theatre,
though entitled to it. She acted best in Vanbrugh's 'Provoked Husband,'
so well, in fact, that the manager gave her an extra fifty pounds by way
of acknowledgment.

Poetising seems to have been as much a polite accomplishment of that age
as letter-writing was of a later, and a smattering of science is of the
present day. Gentlemen tried to be poets, and poets gentlemen. The
consequence was, that both made fools of themselves. Among the
poetasters who belonged to the Kit-kat, we must mention Walsh, a country
gentleman, member of Parliament, and very tolerable scholar. He dabbled
in odes, elegies, epitaphs, and all that small fry of the muse which was
then so plentiful. He wrote critical essays on Virgil, in which he tried
to make out that the shepherds in the days of the Roman poet were very
well-bred gentlemen of good education! He was a devoted admirer and
friend of Dryden, and he encouraged Pope in his earlier career so kindly
that the little viper actually praised him! Walsh died somewhere about
1709 in middle life.

We have not nearly done with the poets of the Kit-kat. A still smaller
one than Walsh was Stepney, who, like Garth, had begun life as a violent
Tory and turned coat when he found his interest lay the other way. He
was well repaid, for from 1692 to 1706 he was sent on no less than eight
diplomatic missions, chiefly to German courts. He owed this preferment
to the good luck of having been a schoolfellow of Charles Montagu,
afterwards Earl of Halifax. He died about 1707, and had as grand a
monument and epitaph in Westminster Abbey as if he had been a Milton or
Dryden.