However, Mrs.
Oldfield (perhaps for want of fresh parts) seem'd to come but slowly forward 'till the year 1703." So slowly had she come forward indeed, that in 1702, Gildon, a now forgotten critic and dramatist, included her among the "meer Rubbish that ought to be swept off the stage with the Filth and Dust."[A] Time has avenged the actress for this slight; who, excepting the student of theatrical history, remembers Gildon?
[Footnote A: From the "Comparison Between the Two Stages."] What is more to the purpose, Nance was able to avenge herself in the flesh, only a few months after these contemptuous lines had been penned.

It happened at Bath, in the summer of 1703, and the story of her triumph, brief as it is, sounds quaint and pretty, as it comes down to us laden with a thousand suggestions of fashionable life in the reign of Queen Anne--a life made up of gossip and cards, drinking, gaming, patches and powder, fine clothes, full perriwigs and empty heads.

What a picturesque lot of people there must have been at the great English spa that season, all anxious to get a glimpse of her plump majesty, who was staying there, and all willing enough to do anything except to test the waters or the baths from which the place first acquired fame.

They were all there, the pretty maids and wrinkled matrons, the young rakes of twenty, ready for a frolic, and the old rakes of thirty too weary to do much more than go to the theatre and cry out, "Damme, this is a damn'd play." Then the children, who were always in the way, and the aged fathers of families who liked to swear at the dandified airs and newly imported French manners of their sons.

And such sons as some of them were too--smart fellows, of whom the beau described in "The Careless Husband," may be taken as an example: one "that's just come to a small estate, and a great perriwig--he that sings himself among the women--he won't speak to a gentleman when a lord's in company.