Note 490 — Chapter V · SATIRIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE LEARNED LADY IN COMEDY

This scene may refer both to Lady Winchilsea and the Duchess of Newcastle. Cibber, in his Lives of the Poets, vol. II, p. 164, says: "The Duchess kept a great many young ladies about her person, who occasionally wrote what she dictated. Some of them slept in a room contiguous to that in which her Grace lay, and ever ready, at the call of her bell to rise any hour of the night, to write down her conceptions, lest they should escape her memory."