1658, and was only eleven years old in 1669, the date of the last event related in the De Grammont Memoirs. Now Mrs. Barry came first upon the stage, there is every reason to believe, in 1674;[1] and the events in the De Grammont Memoirs may all be said to have taken place (as I have shown) prior to October, 1669. Mrs. Barry's name was Elizabeth, not Sarah. "Miss Sarah" therefore was not Mrs. Barry. Who, then, was she? Unquestionably Sarah Cooke, an actress at the King's House, who spoke the prologue on the first night of Rochester's Valentinian, and the new prologue on the second night. She seems to have been but an indifferent actress, and her parts were generally restricted to prologues and epilogues. She is mentioned in the State Poems;[2] by Dryden in a letter to Tonson;[3] and by Sir George Etherege, not very decently, in a MS. letter now before me.[4] Count Hamilton is not inexact in his chronology: it is his annotators who are wrong.
The eleventh and last chapter preserves the same historical consistency to the seven years over which the events recorded in the Memoirs may safely be confined;—the marriage of the Duke of Monmouth
