Chapter V: Part 5

Nothing so concrete, Mrs. Wetherell. Only, you see, I honestly like the rogue; people don't understand him. If I had your husband's leisure, I should never rest until I had moused in the archives at first hand, and said the authentic last good word for him. There would be no end of fun in it, and fun and justice are a fine pair.

WETHERELL

That green bird on your boot will choke himself. It is wonderful how tame they are!--I thought you knew more than anybody alive, on that subject, these ten years.

CLAY

I might say with Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: "I have thought more than I have read, and read more than I have written."

MRS. WETHERELL

Do you really mean to make people like him? They taught us in the school-books that he was a bad good-for-nothing king.

WETHERELL

Perhaps, as Mark Twain might allege, he did not choose to consider himself as being in "the king business." He was a choice wag, at any rate.

CLAY

Yes: though not much worse than you. And he was the last Mind we have seen, or shall ever see, on the throne.

WETHERELL

Owch! Treason! She is all she should be, God bless her.

CLAY

[_Laughing._] Allowed. I was contending that Charles the Second had wit, and a keen survey of men and things: he had the literary-philosophic turn, in short. He wasn't good, he wasn't beautiful, he wasn't much of a Protestant, or a Constitutional Sovereign; but it is my long-standing theory that he was an indolent original genius of the first water, and a fine character spoiled. Here, billy, quack, quack, quack!

WETHERELL

Your indolent original point of view! I don't deny we have some pretty valuable bequests from that bacchanalian reign: the Habeas Corpus Act, for instance. But Charles himself! Who is a neater Pocket Compendium of all the vices? How are you going to excuse him? Because he was weak?

CLAY

Why do you think he must be excused? My pious intention is only to extra-illustrate him: "naught extenuate, and naught set down in malice." I mean to provide the ordinary listener at the Institute with a little dispassionate extra acquaintanceship, pleasant in its nature, with the gentleman in question; and I distinctly mean not to tamper with what knowledge of him he may have acquired on other themes, and from other sources. You see how sly a plan of campaign it is. But your adjective, Wetherell, will never do. Weak? Where did you hear that fiddle-faddle? He had the most tremendous will. Repeatedly, and with the greatest severity and despatch, he took matters over into his own hands; and very often he was right, and ahead of contemporary policy. Look at the way he prorogued Parliament, in the May of 1679, after the famous quarrel over the trial of the five lords; the way he rejected the application of the Roos divorce bill, shaped so as to give himself latitude and precedent; his speech in the Upper House, insisting on holding to the terms of pardon which he had offered from Breda; his letters to the young Duke of Gloucester, when there was rumor of a change of religion; or, to come to smaller and uglier matters, look at his obstinate maintenance of his right to appoint the ladies of the Queen's bedchamber, his whole inexcusable treatment of the great Chancellor. Weak! Haven't you read Green? Green, who comes down hard on him, would sooner have you think him an accomplished tyrant, and so should I.

WETHERELL

Ungrateful, then. He was ungrateful to the very people who brought about the Restoration, wasn't he?--Rhoda, these swans are actually fatter than Lord Whidbourne's. (Do you like to hear Clay talk? I am egging him on; it does me good.)

MRS. WETHERELL

I shall ask him to dinner, Percy, to atone for you. Yes: it is great to find so much animation expended on dead issues.

CLAY

Never wilfully ungrateful, that I can see. Think of the times, think of the hue and cry after indemnities and offices; think of the million million services, little and great, reported, invented, exaggerated, and real, all being urged together, on the day when fortune first smiled on the King. Could any one man satisfy such greed? Might not any one man get confused in such a muddle of beseeching hungry hands, and despair of ever dealing justly, save with the few he knew and remembered? And those he never forgot: not the least Penderell among them.

WETHERELL

How about the epigram,--Barrow's, wasn't it? A very good hit: let me see. _Te magis_, that's it:

_Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole, nemo:
Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus._

CLAY

That is just the sort of dig Charles enjoyed. It isn't malicious. He was immensely amused by the protestations of the realm which, according to its own tale, had prayed for him, longed for him, and labored to bring him to his own again. He said ironically: "The fault is plainly mine that I came not before." How did he keep his patience through the incessant begging? He must have suffered more than a newly-elected president in America. As it was, he granted innumerable pardons, and restitutions, and awards, "hearing anybody against anybody," and sure to be of propitious bent when petitions forced their way into his own hand. But he kept no memoranda. Or, as his apologist, Roger North, put it in capital plain Saxon, "he never would break his Head with Business." Long before there was much chance of his securing his succession to the crown, the hints of his adherents fell about him as thick as snow-flakes. Hasn't he told us how the country innkeeper, alone with him a moment, during his fugitive days, read him through his disguise? "He kissed my hand that was upon the back of the chair, and said to me: 'God bless you wherever you go, for I do not doubt, before I die, to be a lord, and my wife a lady.' So I laughed and went away.... He proved very honest." That same innkeeper must have turned up, two hundred strong at least, at Whitehall. Again, you know how poor the King was, and how estates and emoluments had been parcelled out, and tied up, during the Protectorate. He had actually nothing, at first, to give.

WETHERELL

Except scandal.

CLAY

Irrelevant!

WETHERELL

And, of course, the immortal house-warming: a gift to the imaginations of all Englishmen forever. I am sorry I wasn't there myself.

CLAY

O that day! What a wonderful procession it must have been, from London Bridge to Whitehall, through what Evelyn, in his Diary, so beautifully calls "a lane of happy faces," and troops pressing to their lips the hilts of their weapons, and waving them overhead, in a unique salutation; the King, whom the Speaker of the House of Commons was about to address as King of Hearts, riding, on his thirtieth birthday, between his brothers of York and Gloucester, past the long waving of scarfs and glitter of rapiers, bowing to left and right, like a dark pine in the wind; the saddle-cloths of purple and gold, the salvos, the tears, "the ways strewn all with flowers, bells ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, fountains running with wine, trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking; and two hundred thousand horse and foot brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy."

WETHERELL

Yes; joy with a bill of expenses. England clamored against the Judges, and for the King; and, like Saul, he came: tall, robust, keen, suave, comely, with the curse of retrogression behind him.

MRS. WETHERELL

Hear the magnificent phrases!

CLAY

But they are true.

WETHERELL

Our collaborated Prose Works, specimen sheets.

MRS. WETHERELL

And to think you are all out of practice!

WETHERELL

Of what, shepherdess? Of truth?

MRS. WETHERELL

Mr. Clay, haven't you some more nice Charles-Secondy things to tell me? I am so interested.

WETHERELL

More of your ingenious charities, Clay, by all means. Those faithless ducks of yours are seceding to the children, and Rhoda and I are out for a walk. Come, let us sink to the occasion. We might pace up and down awhile, under the trees beyond, at the edge of the old tilt-yard. Then let us all go together to the Abbey. We have promised to meet two American relatives of Rhoda's, at half after three. They wrote us that they arrived only yesterday; but your homing pigeon of a Yankee always must make straight for the Abbey. Meanwhile, can't you give us a sort of rehearsal of that lecture?

MRS. WETHERELL

He will, he will!

CLAY

I haven't all my notes with me. You are sure it won't tire you?

WETHERELL

Never. I love the æsthetic point of view. If any man remind me now that my father was a Whig, I will bray at him.

CLAY

Well, well, nice of you, I'm sure. You know my idea is just to present a special plea. How will you have me begin? I can't go on automatically, as if you were the Public Eye.

WETHERELL

Oh, anecdotes: or his witticisms. There must be scores of them running wild. Leave out the done-to-death ones. Cut me no sirloin, sirrah; starve me no Nellies.

CLAY

I believe "Sir Loin" to be spurious. It belongs with ever so many Charles Lamb puns, sayable enough, only not said by the sayer.

WETHERELL

There isn't much chance for a king who has a genius for concise conversation.

CLAY

No. He doesn't get reported correctly, for one thing. How could Sir Walter, weighted as he was, as writers of his time were, by the heavy-artillery ideas of diction, reproduce, in _Peveril_ or _Woodstock_, this light super-civilized fashion of speech, supple and stinging as a whip? And no writer of fiction since, has quite captured it, except Mr. Marriott Watson. You remember that episode in _Galloping Dick_? Exquisite! Charles the Second's talk is altogether the most admirable thing about him: though courtly, it had none of the circumlocutions of courtliness; it was exclusive and pertinent. "All this," as Walton sweetly says of Donne, "with a most particular grace, and an inexpressible addition of comeliness." The King's only long story, which for years he was always ready to tell from the beginning, "ever embellished," says mischievous Buckingham, "with some new circumstance," and which was wont to gather a knot of listeners old and new, was the story of his adventures after the battle of Worcester, in 1650. No heartier romance exists of pluck and patience, save the later record, so like it, of Prince Charlie's hardships, and his heroism under them; and its author's attachment to his only novel is simply a connoisseurship, a piece of esoteric appreciation: he took and gave delight with such thrilling biographical details as might have come from the mouth of Odysseus himself. His short sayings are all sterling, and his nicknames stuck like burs. Mr. Henry Bennet, afterwards Earl of Arlington, the grave and too inductive gentleman who so moved the mirth of Miss Frances Stuart, was "Whereas" to his royal master; the yacht named after the stout Duchess of Portsmouth, the yacht to whose great sheets the King and the Duke of York sprang "like common seamen," in a terrible storm once, off the Kentish coast, was known far and wide as "The Fubbs." Another joke about "Hans in Keldar," patronizing the ice-fair on the Thames, and inscribing his name there among the visitors, one need not recall too circumstantially. The Queen Dowager, Henrietta Maria, was always "Mam," to her perfectly respectful and solicitous eldest son; in an alliteration like an early English poet's, he congratulated his sister on her recovery from a grave illness, "between Mam's Masses, and M. de Mayerne's pills." His little portraitures of people, his given reason for a human like or dislike, his insight into character, and his gently sarcastic turn of phrase in expressing it,--are they not all superior things of their kind? He felt it impossible to marry a princess out of Germany: she would be "so dull and foggy." Of Isaac Vossius, the imperfect sceptic, Charles said: "Voss refuses to believe nothing, save the Bible." A celebrated man of affairs, then a deft page at court, won this neat encomium: "Sidney Godolphin is never in the way, and never out of the way." Sedley, shining Sedley, whom Charles greatly liked, he dubbed "Apollo's viceroy." His "Save the Earl of Burford!" when riding under the window whence Mistress Eleanor Gwynne ironically offered to throw her small son, since she had no name to call him by, is like the very finest _coup de théâtre_, and too like him not to be true. This climate he rated as the best climate, "because it gives the greatest number of out-of-door days." Not so thought Charles of Orleans, long before him, arraigning English weather from the standpoint of its unwilling guest, as at all times "prejudicial to the human frame." And every one knows the inimitable apology of Charles to his watchers, for "being so unconscionably long a-dying."

Unlike most wits, he preferred dialogue to monologue. His gravity and authority were so fixed, his merriment so obviously local and temporal, that repartee was part of his game; he winced at nothing, and often accepted, with excellent grace, sharper thrusts than his own. It is sometimes repeated that he was angered by Rochester's incomparable epigram, pinned to his chamber door:

"Here lies our sovereign lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one."

But we have on record his amusing and sufficient footnote, that his sayings were his own, and his doings were his ministers'. (This answer, by the way, must have been made to fit the occasion, and the gay exigency of it, for he was exceedingly jealous of his unused prerogative. "I assure you," he writes to one of his family, about 1668, "that my lord of Buckingham does not govern affairs here." And Clarendon attests later, that "he abhorred to be thought to be governed by any single person.") At Whitehall, as the gentlemen-in-waiting laid the plates before the King, they bent a knee. "You see how they serve me," Charles said pleasantly to his guest, the Chevalier de Grammont. "I thank your Majesty for the explanation," that accomplished wag replied, "for I thought they were begging your Majesty's pardon for so bad a dinner." No reply at all, were it but pungent, offended him. "Shaftesbury, Shaftesbury, I do believe thou art the wickedest fellow in my dominions!" "Of a subject, Sire, mayhap I am." "Killigrew, whither goest thou, booted and spurred?" "To Hell, to fetch up Oliver to look after the welfare of the English." As a monitor, this same lewd, lying, scribbling, kindly, music-loving Killigrew was almost as successful with Charles as was Nell Gwynne. For sharp sensible comment went home to him; he saw a point none the less because it told against him. "Such ability and understanding has Charles Stuart," growled the man who was called his jester, "that I do long to see him employed as King of England." Libels and satires had small sting for him. Mistress Holford, a young lady of the court, seated in her own apartment, warbles _Old Rowley_, the ballad of close but inelegant libel, at the top of her silvery voice. A rap comes at the outer door, from one strolling by. "Who's there?" she asks, with unconcern. "Old Rowley himself, Madam!" in the "plump bass" of Carolus Secundus. Nothing much more diverting ever happened to him than the inverted salute of a worthy citizen, who once ran along in the street, beside his coach, with a half-formed fervent "God bless your Majesty!" upon his lips: the spaniel pup on his Majesty's knee, suddenly reaching out, gave the man a nip, and caused the ready benison to blurt forth incontinently as "God bl--amn your dogs!" The well-worn tradition of Master Busby of Westminster School reversing conditions with the King, is characteristic on both sides: Charles all humor and toleration, the little man stiffened with conscious reputation, to be upheld at all costs, and heroically wearing his cap before the face of visiting royalty, "lest the boys should think there lived a greater than myself." And was it not a prettier pass yet, between the monarch and his impregnable Quaker who wanted a charter? Penn came to his first audience with his hat, on the principle of unconvention and equality, firmly fixed upon his brows. Presently the King, having moved apart from the attendants, in his gleaming dress, slowly and ceremoniously bared his head. Penn interrupted his own plea. "Friend Charles, why hast taken off thy hat?" "Because it has so long been the custom here," said the other, with that peculiar lenient smile of his, "for but one person to remain covered at a time." (It strikes one that a little of this humor would have saved his father from much woe on a not dissimilar occasion in the Commons; and, indeed, throughout.) Equally charming was his behavior, on being laid hold of, by the hiccoughing Lord Mayor,--Vyner, wasn't that his name?--who insisted that he should come back and "finish t'other bottle." Charles, instead of glowering, hummed a line of an old song, a synopsis of the difficult situation to the company, which none other but he could have given with any grace:

"The man that is Drunke is as good as a King!"

and sat again. He never became, as his tutor, the loyal Duke of Newcastle, feared, "seared with majestie."

The Lord's Anointed liked to forego his authority, and come as a mere spectator into a session of Parliament. "'Tis as good as a play," the provoking creature said. He would get down from his throne in the Lords, to stand with folded arms by the hearth, drawing a group around him, and breaking up the order and impressiveness of the place. Those really interested in statecraft, whose fond incubations he so overturned, must have found him an _enfant terrible_ to an incorrigible degree. A memorandum-book, to be seen in one of the cases at the Bodleian, lies open at a bit of scribbled correspondence between himself and his Chancellor, passed from one to the other in the middle of debate. The King's share is as wayward and roguish as Sterne could have made it.

--"I would willingly make a visite to my sister at tunbridge, for a night or two at farthest. When do you thinke I can best spare that time?"

--"I know no reason why you may not, for such a tyme (two nights) go the next weeke about Wednsday or Thursday, and return tyme enough for the adiournement, which you ought to do the weeke following. I suppose you will goe with a light Trayne."

--"I intend to take nothing but my night-bag."

--"God, you will not go without forty or fifty horses?"

--"I counte that part of my night-bag."

The young fugitive at Boscobel, a more willing Alfred, insisted on preparing supper, and produced "Scots collops," with Colonel Careless for under-cook. His minute solicitude for others, at this time and after, in the stress of his own troubles, left indelible impress on many hearts. He was at his bravest on the open road, and in the secret manor and the oak tree: the odd situations became him as if he were King of the Romany. For ceremony and trammels of all kinds he had a thorough disrelish, and passed his time but resignedly amid "the pomp of music and a host of bowing heads." Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Tuscany, relates, in his book of travels, that at a state banquet at Whitehall, the host privily requested that his chair be removed and changed, because it was conspicuously the most comfortable in the room. Could informality farther go? But Charles maintained his gay grace and easy simplicity deliberately, and in conjunction with decisive dignity. With mere standoffishness he had nothing to do. Sir Walter Besant tells us in his _London_: "The palace was accessible to all; the guard stood at the gate, but everybody was admitted, as to a town; the King moved freely about the courts, in the mall, in the parks, sometimes unattended. The people drove their packhorses or their waggons up and down the road, and hardly noticed the swarthy-faced man who stood under the shade of a tree, watching the players along the mall. This easy and fearless familiarity vanished with the Stuarts." Whosoever wished it, might see his sovereign dance the brantle, perhaps with the young delicate-footed Italian Duchess, his brother's wife; or hear him tell over the "grouse-in-the-gunroom" stories of his Scotch captivity. Here at home he went his way, with a nod, a smile, and a word for all: "a far more successful kingcraft," says Macaulay, "than any his father or grandfather had practised." In the beginning, Charles had a beggarly income, and whimsically complained of it. "What troubles me most, is to see so many of you come to me to Whitehall, and to think that you must go somewhere else to seek your dinner!" He was hostile only to "fuss and feathers," the dry husk of social laws. He had his father's instinct for what was beautiful and imposing. At his coronation, he revived for the last time, and with its most august splendors, the ancient custom of procession from the Tower to the Abbey: a personal revelation, moreover, of that generous kindness towards the common people, which made them adore him. He also endeavored, though in vain, to re-establish the masque, the most charming form of court entertainment, intertwined with all manner of old fragrant poetic associations. At his coming, he found the Maypoles down, the shows over, races, dances, and merry-hearted sports cut short; the theatres were dismantled, and the sole appreciation that actors got, or hoped for, was at the whipping-post. His first thought was for the London parks and drives; his second, for the London stage. The way was soon cleared for those dramas which managers must now handle, as Thoreau handled a certain newspaper, "with cuffs turned up"; but these, despite their build and basis, have never been surpassed for wit, vitality, and mastery of incident. The plays seen by our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pepys from the middle gallery, were nearly all equipped at the expense of the King and gentry, and were brought out with nice details of costly scenery and costuming. Charles, Queen Catherine, and the Duke of York even gave their coronation suits to the actors. When Nokes played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670, before the beautiful Duchess of Orleans, young Monmouth, beautiful as she, loosened the jewelled sword and belt which he wore, and enthusiastically clasped them upon the comedian, proud of both to his dying day. Charles originated the plot of Crowne's sprightly production, _Sir Courtly Nice_ (the King died the night of its final rehearsal), and also that of Dryden's _Secret Love_: he was very vain of the latter when it was nobly cast, in 1666, and always delighted to have it called his play. He was responsible, in the same degree, for _Oronokoo_: for it was he who first discerned, in the affecting tale of the West Indian insurrection of slaves, led by an enslaved prince, choice material for a tragedy.

He was no reader, no student, in the usual sense: he read folk, and not folios. Newcastle had written him, then the child Prince of Wales: "Whensoever you are too studious, your contemplation will spoil your government; for you cannot be a good contemplative man, and a good commonwealth's man. Therefore take heed of too much book." Never was tutor eventually better obeyed. Charles was a shrewd observer; he could sift ambassadors, ministers, and "persons of quality," as ably as Elizabeth herself; and remain, the while, impervious as rock. His early education was neglected: he was forced too soon into active life. Fortunately, he had the æsthetic bent of his race: thought and travel taught this Oxonian, by easy processes, all he knew. He became a good mathematician, and a good draughtsman; he was something of an expert in anatomy; he perfectly understood the sciences of fortification and shipping. He once invited his beloved Prince Rupert to race "the two sloopes builte at Woolidge, which have my invention in them." (It is to be hoped the landsman Rupert of the Rhine did not command his crew, as Monk did, to wheel to the left!) Charles was as thorough a sailor as his brother, and would have made as fair a record on deck, had his lines been cast there. Aboard "The Surprise" Tattersal averred that he directed the course better than himself. It was this King who gave the charter to the Royal Society, and founded the Observatory at Greenwich, as well as the Mathematical School at Christ Hospital. Nor were these things done perfunctorily, but from close personal interest. Charles could gossip in several languages. His taste for chemistry was almost as marked as his cousin Rupert's; and in the month he died, he was running a process for fixing mercury. Cowley, before that period, had lapsed into a pretty conceit about his liege lord in the laboratory.

"Where, dreaming chemics, are your pain and cost?
How is your toil, how is your labor lost!
Our Charles, blest alchemist, (tho' strange,
Believe it, future times!) did change
The Iron Age of old
Into this Age of Gold."

Dr. Burney remarks, and almost with justice, that the King seems never to have considered music as anything but an incentive to gayety. Catherine of Braganza had a genuine passion for the art, and was its munificent patron so long as she remained in England. It is well to remember, when Charles is accused of developing only the newly-imported French music, that in his day cathedral organs were re-established, and the way was opened for the return of those beautiful choral services which had a potent successive influence over Purcell, Croft, Bennet, Barnby, and which have forever enriched themselves through association with these dedicated talents. The King had examined the principles of Romanesque architecture with some enthusiasm. No one followed Wren's great labor, after the Fire, especially in S. Paul's, with closer attention; and when he had a practical suggestion in mind, no one could have offered it more modestly. It was not Charles the Second who hampered that great man, and vexed his heart with mean conditions. He had a rational admiration for Wren; it did not prevent him, however, from jesting on occasion. The architect was a very little man, and the King a very tall one. They had an amiable dispute at Winchester. "I think the middle vault not high enough." "It is high enough, your Majesty." With the same air, no doubt, the young Mozart contradicted his Archduke: "The number of notes is not at all too many, but exactly sufficient." In this case, the critic looked at the roof, and then he looked at Wren. Presently, he crumpled himself up, and brought his anointed person erect, within four feet of the floor, as if from the other's illiberal point of view. "High enough, then, Sir Christopher!" he said.

His relation to literary men was one of ample appreciation and no pay. He is reported to have wished to buy the favor of George Wither, and especially of Andrew Marvell: yet he never approximately endeavored to discharge his long-standing debts to his own choir. Sedley, Edmund Waller, Rochester, and the Roscommon of "unspotted lays," were in no need of encouragement; but it would have befitted Charles to do something for the others, before it was too late. It seems to have been his purpose to make Wycherley tutor to the Duke of Richmond, at fifteen hundred pounds a year, had not Wycherley, in the nick of time, snubbed the King by marrying Lady Drogheda, and drifted into the Fleet prison. The poets always returned his liking. Though he was an entrancingly pat subject for pasquinades, even Marvell touched him gently.

"I'll wholly abandon all public affairs,
And pass all my time with buffoons and with players,
And saunter to Nelly when I should be at prayers.

I'll have a fine pond, with a pretty decoy,
Where many strange fowl shall feed and enjoy,
And still in their language quack _Vive le roy_."

Charles, at his birth, came into the poetic atmosphere of his more poetic father. When the latter set out, at the head of a triumphant train, to return thanks at the Cathedral for his heir, the planet Venus (_abstit omen!_) was clearly shining in the May-noon sky. The people saw it, and were wild with superstitious delight; and they recalled it at the Restoration. Festal lyres, because of it, were struck with redoubled zest. "Bright Charles," Crashaw began; and old Ben Jonson's voice arose in greeting:

"Blest be thy birth
That hath so crowned our hopes, our spring, our earth."

And Francis Quarles, not long after, quaintly offered his _Divine Fancies_ to the "royall budde," "acknowledging myself thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself my Prince." Again, no sooner was Charles the Second laid in his grave, than the flood of seventeenth-century panegyric, which he had never invited, but held back considerably while he lived, burst forth over England: unstemmed by any compensating welcomes for the ascendant Duke of York. Dryden, in his _Threnodia Augustalis_, Otway, Montagu, Earl of Halifax, and a hundred lesser bards, intoned the requiem. Most of this prosody is pretty flat: but it has feeling. One of Richard Duke's stanzas is questionable enough; only the shortsightedness of genuine grief can save it from worse than audacity. Following Dryden in his quasi-invocation, he named the dead King as "Charles the Saint"; and wherever the poor ghost chanced to be, that surely hurt him like an arrow.

If he was not so protective as he might have been to his poets, it was not owing to any parsimony on his part. He was by nature a giver. The thrifty Teutons who inherited the throne and the royal bric-à-brac have long begrudged divers treasures scattered by Charles among persons and corporations of his individual fancy. While in exile, he had sold his favorite horses, to provide comforts for his suite; and in 1666, when he was in need of all he had, he allowed nothing to interfere with his lavish and wisely-placed donations to the houseless City. Perhaps he neglected the fees of literature, as he neglected to put up a monument to his father's memory: not because he failed to know his duties, but because he must have held your true procrastinator's creed, and discovered, in the end, that what can be done at any time gets done at no time. Dryden helps us to think, however, that the King was not wholly oblivious of his bookmen:

"Tho' little was their hive and light their gain,
Yet somewhat to their share he threw."

Perhaps he was almost as liberal as his gaping pocket allowed. Long-headed sirens, too, were battening on the national revenues, and Charles had no strength of purpose left to withstand them. He had bartered that for rose-leaves and musk and mandragora: eternal quackeries which had never for an instant eased him of his sore conscience. For downright hypocrisy (to which, with whatever wry faces, he had to come), nothing in the snuffling deeps of Puritanism can beat the wording of a clause in the grant made to Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, in 1670, when she received her magnificent domains, titles, and pensions, "in consideration," as the patent states, "of her noble descent, her father's death in the service of the crown, and by reason of her personal virtues." This lady "hectored the King's wits out of him." The reason is not far to seek why Butler went hungry, and _deliciæ decus desiderium ævi sui_, otherwise Abraham Cowley, Esquire, felt that his fidelity was at a discount. Royalty occasionally tossed gold to its admired Dryden, in the shape of several capital suggestions, which availed, as we know. "Now, were I a poet (and I think I am poor enough to be one), I should make a satire upon sedition." The parenthesis is sympathetic. The knights of the ink-bottle were very welcome to Whitehall; there was no class with which Charles, who was not a promiscuous friend, liked better to surround himself. It is a pity he did not have illustrious opportunity to associate with the best of these altogether and forever, as his cousin of France did, as he himself seemed born to do; for he had the patronal temperament. There is a beautiful expression in Montesquieu, which might be applied as sanctioning as a virtue the passive intellectual perception of the Stuarts: "Que le prince ne craint point ses rivaux qu'on appelle les hommes de mérite: il est leur égal dès qu'il les aime." This is the principle of faith without good works. Charles the Second, interpreted by it, ought to cut a rather fair figure before posterity.

He was no stranger to a pen. How well he could employ it, his speeches, letters, and despatches show. Grace and point are in every line. He had, in fact, a curious neat mastery of words, not to be excelled by most trained hands. Good pithy prose came easy to him: which is a phenomenon, since nobody expects King's English from a king. He had much to write, "and often in odd situations," as Mr. Disraeli the elder amicably adds. His performances in rhyme seem to have been discredited by himself, and are, perhaps happily, irrecoverable. Excellent David Lloyd, of Oriel, mentions "several majestick Poems" of Charles's youth. He does not quote them. "Majestick" reminds one of the reputed Muse paternal, pontificating from Carisbrooke:

"And teach my soul, that ever did confine
Her faculties in Truth's seraphic line,
To track the treason of Thy foes and mine."

The son's productions were not quite of this order, if we may judge from a specimen given by Burney, in the appendix to his _History of Music_. It is an artificial pastoral, in singable numbers, which Pelham Humphrey took pains to set in D major.

Humphrey was an ex-chorister boy then newly come back from over seas, to be "mighty thick with the King"; bringing with him French heresies of time and tune. Charles had musical theories of his own; and would sit absently in chapel, swaying his head to Master Humphrey's rhythm, and laughing at a dissonance in the anthem before the singers themselves were half-conscious of the slip. When he was not sleeping there, he seems to have done a deal of laughing in chapel. On one classic occasion, his father felt called upon to "hit him over the head with his staff," in S. Mary the Virgin's, Oxford, "for laughing at sermon-time upon the ladies that sat against him." He sang tenor to Gostling's great bass: the Duke of York (afterwards James the Second) accompanying them upon the guitar. His favorite song was an English one, and a very grave one: Shirley's beautiful dirge in _The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses_:

"The glories of our birth and state
Are shadows, not substantial things."

Many a time young Bowman was bidden to the solitary king, and chanted those austere measures. The true semblance of the Merry Monarch, undreamed-of by Gibbons or Lely, would be his portrait as he sat listening, in a tapestried alcove, to the touching text on the vanity of mortal pride, and the ever-during fragrance of "the actions of the just": his little dogs at his feet, his dark eyes fixed on the unconscious lad; the motley somehow fallen from him, and a momentary truce set up between him and his defrauded thinking soul. How the court which he had taught, the court with its sarcasms and sallies, would have laughed at the preposterous situation! Yet, if he had any outstanding spiritual characteristic, it was precisely this love for serious and worthy things. His perception of human excellence was never clouded. We all know his famous saying, which must have been more than half in jest, and unallowable even so, that the "honor" of every man and of every woman has its price. Yet this furious cynic was a tender believer in disinterestedness, wherever he found it. Not once or twice alone did he yield applause to a life which followed virtue "higher than the sphery chime," though his cue lay not in that part, though he went back on the morrow to the Hörselberg. From the middle of the revelry which filled his opening years in London, he stole away privately to Richmond, to kneel beside the dying Bishop Duppa, and beg a blessing. He had a most deferent regard for Sir William Coventry. Towards the close of his life, he was troubled with memories of the fate of Sidney and Russell. He was not thinking of intellectual achievement when he said: "I hear that Mr. Cowley is dead. He hath left no better man behind him." He appreciated something else beside the comeliness of the sweet Duchess of Grammont (la belle Hamilton), when he wrote to his favorite sister in Paris: "Be kinde to her: for besides the meritt her family has, she is as good a creature as ever lived." That young lily of perfection, Mistress Godolphin, observed a rule of her own in never speaking to the King. How prudent, to be sure, and how obtuse! And it will be admitted by every reader of historical gossip that, to whatever humiliations Charles subjected his poor queen (who ceased not to love him, and to love his memory) he would at no time hear her disparaged, were she even so disparaged ostensibly for his own political advantage. For he respected in her the abstract unprofanable woman. He wrote to his Chancellor, on his first sight of Catherine, who had been described to him as an ugly princess: "Her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty, though her eyes are excellent good; and not anything on her face that can in the least shoque one. On the contrary, she has as much agreeableness altogether in her look as ever I saw, and if I have any skill in Physiognomy (which I think I have!) she must be as good a woman as ever was born." And again: "I must be the worst man living, (which I hope I am not,) if I be not a good husband." In Edward Lake's diary, we are told that to the patron who recommended Dr. Sudbury to the Deanery of Durham, and Dr. Sandcroft to that of S. Paul, the King said, after some years of that attentive observation of his saints which no one would suspect in him: "My lord, recommend two more such to me, and I will return you any four I have for them." Most pertinent of all such cases, was that of the beloved Bishop Ken. When the King went to Winchester, in 1681, to superintend Wren's building of his palace, he put up at the Deanery, and sent word to Ken, then one of the Prebendaries, to resign his house to Nell Gwynne. Ken stoutly refused, to the fear and amazement of the time-servers. Three years later, the last year of the King's life, there was a great scramble for a rich vacant see. Charles did not lack a dramatic inspiration. "Od's fish!" he cried: "who shall have Bath and Wells but the little fellow that would not give poor Nelly a lodging!" In 1679, the King did his best to keep in their high offices the many useful and loyal magistrates whom his councillors voted to supplant on account of their being "favourable to Popery." His more general plea having been passed by, he read the list of names over again, before placing the signature which he could no longer refuse; and since his opposition was then as strenuous as ever, took leave of the subject in some remembered oblique remarks. Why depose Such-a-one? He had peerless beef in his larder, and no kickshaws. What had So-and-so done, that he should be removed? Surely, no man kept better foxhounds! And he could not only thus discern and prefer goodness, but he submitted himself to it, and bore reproofs from it with boyish humbleness. There is no reminiscence of the Prince's comic catechumen experiences in Scotland, in the accents of "your affectionate friend, Charles Rex," addressed to the admonishing Mr. James Hamilton, a minister of Edinburgh, from Saint Germain. "Yours of the 26th May was very welcome to me, and I give you hearty thanks for all your good counsel, which I hope God will enable me the better to follow through your prayers: and I conjure you still to use the same old freedom with me, which I shall always love." But his instinct was sharp: his sarcasms were forth in a moment against mere bullies and meddlers. Checked once for employing a light oath, he had ready a shockingly brusque though legitimate retaliation: "Your Martyr swore twice more than ever I did!"

As we have seen, he had no appetite whatever for compliments. He probably thought quite as Pepys did, regarding the silly adulations lavished on a certain January tennis-playing. "Indeed, he did play very well, and deserved to be commended; but such open flattery is beastly." Charles _fils_ habitually "kept his head," as we say in one of the most telling of our English idioms. It was difficult indeed so to do, through the highest known fever of national enthusiasm, while he was fed every hour of every day with praises out of all proportion to the deeds of an Alexander. Virtuous men like Cowley went into frenzies of approbation at the outset of the reign; sensible men like Evelyn thanked Heaven with seraphic devotion for each execution and exhumation wherewith the King, or rather the wild popular will, to which he was no breakwater, signalized his entry. Hear the same temperate Evelyn, in a dedication: "Your Majesty was designed of God for a blessing to this nation in all that can render it happy; if we can have the grace but to discover it, and be thankful for it." Genuine toadies had small countenance from this acute Majesty. When he propounded his celebrated joke to The Royal Society, concerning a dead fish, _i.e._, that a pail of water receiving one would weigh no more than before, and when he watched the wiseacres all solemnly conferring, it cannot have been that they were unanimously caught by the impish query he had put upon them, but rather that they would avoid correcting the Crown: fain would they humor it with an acquiescent reason why. But one little hero of science, far down the table, greatly daring, spake: "I--I--I do believe the pail _would_ weigh heavier!" and was acquitted by a peal of the royal laughter: "You are right, my honest man." Waller's clever excuse, when rallied on his fine Cromwellian strophes, and on their superiority to those written for the King's home-coming, that "poets succeed better in fiction than in truth," must have been met with the appreciative smile due to so exquisite a casuistry. Persons chosen to preach before Charles, bored him, long after his accession, with superfluous abuse of the Regicides and of the mighty Protectorate in general. One bishop, squarely asked why he read his sermons instead of delivering them impromptu, made the elegant response to his questioner, that it was for awe of such august assemblies, and of so wise a prince. Charles instantly rejoined that it was a monstrous pity no such consideration weighed with himself, in reading his speeches in the House: for the truth was, he had prayed for money so often, he could no longer look his hearers in the face! To the Earls of Carlisle and Shaftesbury, unduly anxious for the Protestant succession, who announced themselves as able to prove Monmouth's legitimacy, to the satisfaction of the nation, the King replied: "Dearly as I love the Duke, rather than acknowledge him will I see him hanged on Tyburn tree." Plain-speaking at a crisis was the hallmark of the loose and conniving time. When a clergyman of the Establishment was called to see the Duke of Buckingham, and inquired, by way of the usual preliminary, in what religion he had lived, the dying firefly answered gallantly: "In none, I am well pleased to say; for I should have been a disgrace to any. Can you do me any good now, bestir yourself." It was this engaging reprobate, (remembered rather through Pope and Dryden than through his own extraordinary talent) to whom the King once gave a kindly but authoritative rebuke for his atheistic talk. It is possible that on that occasion fastidiousness, and not reverence, was the motive power in Charles.

For it was his humor to disarm all moral questions by applying to them the measure of mere good taste. We know the characteristic exception he took to Nonconformity, as being "no religion for a gentleman." He had, in the perfect degree, what Mr. James Russell Lowell calls "that urbane discipline of manners, which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline of mind." As in Prince Charlie, (whose career was so closely to resemble his own, much in its heyday, and more in its decline), winning courtesy was founded on genuine sweetness of nature. He brought back into storm-beaten England the vision of the Cavalier: a vision like a rainbow, which made beholders giddy. The very first things he did, on his triumphant entry into London, on May 29th, 1660, were gracious grand-opera things: he singled out the pink-cheeked hostess of The Rose, in the Poultry, kissing his hand to her, as he passed; and he brought the tears to the eyes of Edmund Lovell, riding at the head of his troop of horse raised for the Restoration, by drawing off his rich leather gauntlets then and there, as a memento of thanks for one loyal welcome. Such a carriage was sure to establish him in the popular heart: he might light his fire with Magna Charta! His tact and his evenness of deportment stood forth like moral perfections. Addison, who, as a child, had seen the King humming lyrics over D'Urfey's shoulder, and knew all the folk-tales of his twenty-five years' reign, must surely have been thinking of him, when he painted this picture of "one of Sir Roger's ancestors." "He was a man of no justice, but great good manners. He ruined everybody that had anything to do with him, but never said a rude thing in his life; the most indolent person in the world, he would sign a deed that passed away half his estate, with his gloves on, but would not put on his hat before a lady, if it were to save his country." All this enchanting punctilio was but the velvet sheathing of uncommon power and purpose. Charles was never off his guard. No contingency ever got the better of him. He had reasons for being gentle and affable, for being, as the peerless Lady Derby thought him, on her own staircase, "the most charming prince in the world," for keeping his extremely happy chivalry of speech, equal to that of his cousin Louis the Fourteenth: the speech "which gives delight and hurts not." "Civility cannot unprince you," was another saying of the Newcastle beloved of his childhood, who seems to have had a strong influence over him. The gay address and gentle bearing, deliberate as we now perceive them to have been, had the highest extrinsic value in that severe masculine personality. "These advantages," says a contemporary writer, "were not born with him, for he was too reserved in his youth." It is ludicrous that we should speak of him as The Merry Monarch. He was, in sober truth, under his beautiful mask of manners, a morose, tormented, unhappy man. It was part of his perfect courage that he had learned small talk, banter, puns, games, and dances: they were so many weapons to keep the blue devils at bay. He had to beguile the thing he was with perpetual cap and bells. Before he became a distinguished actor, he was not "merry." The gilded courtiers of France, during his exile, found him a serious and awkward figure of a lad; his admired Mademoiselle Montpensier, the great prime-ministerial Mademoiselle, trailing her new satin gowns back and forth under Henrietta Maria's knowing eye, looked on Henrietta Maria's son, standing reticent the while, lamp in hand, with girlish derision.

Nothing in human history is plainer, I think, than this double personality of Charles the Second, evoked by the inescapable situation in which he lived and died. He had the benefit of parental example, and he started life as a good, slow, attractive, thoughtful child, the sad-eyed child of Vandyck's tender portraits between 1632 and 1642. He was not strong of frame then. "His Highness' particular grief," we smile to read in the pages of the good Lloyd, "is thought to be a consumption." From that house where all the children were fondly measured and painted and chronicled from year to year, his mother wrote of him to Madame Saint George, and to Marie de Medicis. "He has no ordinary mien ... he is so full of gravity." Prince James, however, was her favorite. At four years old, Charles staggered some Oxford dons with a display of infant philosophy. A twelvemonth before that, as we learn from a pretty passage in the Harleian MSS., he had been condemned to take a certain drug; and his attempts to get off, his retaliating talk afterward, are already very much of a piece with the makeshifts of the Charles the Second we know. But in general, he cannot be said to have been in the bud what he was in the flower. Besides his seriousness, he had other apparently exotic qualities: piety and candor among them. Lord Capell declared on the scaffold: "For certainly, I have been a counsellor to him, and have lived long with him, and in a time when discovery is easily enough made; (he was about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years of age, those years I was with him,) and truly I never saw greater hopes of virtue in any young person than in him: great judgment, great understanding, great apprehension; much honor in his nature, and truly a very perfect Englishman in his inclination. And I pray God restore him to this kingdom." Montrose, on the scaffold, in his turn, "exceedingly commended," says Clarendon, in his _History_, "the understanding of the present King." The glorious Marquis bore no testimony to Charles's ethic make-up: but that could have lacked no lustre in his eyes, since the January of the preceding year, when the heir to the crown twice offered his life, or the acceptance of any conditions imposed upon himself, in exchange for his father's safety. Madame de Motteville assures us that "the greatest heroes and sages of antiquity did not rule their lives by higher principles than this young Prince at the opening of his career."