burlesque. To read those long details | pared, and that he inade use of these of the kitchen, those servile and crude fatherly expressions on the spur of the jokes, people might fancy themselves moment. He added, "that he had in the company of a common buffoon much rather his daughter should be in the market-place; it is the talk of the duke's whore than his wife." Is the quacks on the bridges, adapting this not heroical? But let Clarendor their imagination and language to the speak for himself. Only such a tru manners of the beer-shop and the monarchical heart can surpass itse' : hovel. There is filth to be met with there; indeed, the rabble will laugh when the mountebank alludes to the disgusting acts of private life. Such is the grotesque stuff in which the courtiers of the Restoration delighted; their spite and their coarseness took a pleasure in the spectacle of these bawling puppets; even now, after two centuries, we hear the ribald laughter of this audience of lackeys. IV. Charles II., when at his meals, ostentatiously drew Grammont's attention to the fact that his officers served him on their knees. They were in the right; it was their fit attitude. Lord Chancellor Clarendon, one of the most horored and honest men of the Court, learns suddenly and in full council that his daughter Anne is enceinte by the Duke of York, and that the Duke, the king's brother, has promised her marriage. Listen to the words of this tender father; he has himself taken care to hand them down: "The Chancellor broke out into a very immoderate passion against the wickedness of his daughter, and said with all imaginable earnestness, that as soon as he came home, he would turn her (his daughter) out of his house as a strumpet to shift for herself, and would never see her again.""† "He was ready to give a positive judgmen in which he hoped their lordships would con cur with him; that the king should immediate ly cause the woman to be sent to the Tower and to be cast into a dungeon under so strict s guard, that no person living should be ad mitted to come to her; and then that an act of Parliament should be immediately passed for the cutting off her head, to which he would not only give his consent, but would very Wil lingly be the first man that should propose it." * What Roman virtue! Afraid of not being believed he insists; whoever knew the man, will believe that all this came from the very bottom of his heart. He is not yet satisfied; he repeats his advice; he addresses to the king different conclusive reasonings, in order that they might cut off the head of his daughter: "I had rather submit and bear it (this disgrace) with all humility, than that it should be repaired by making her his wife, the thought whereof I do so much abominate, that I had much rather see her dead, with all the infamy that is due to her presumption." t In this manner, a man, who is in difficulty, can keep his salary and his Chancellor's robes. Sir Charles Berkley, captain of the Duke of York's guards, did better still; he solemnly swore "that he had lain with the young lady," and declared himself ready to marry her "for the sake of the duke, though he knew well the familiarity the duke had with her." Then, shortly unpre-afterwards, he confessed that he had lied, but with a good intention, in all honor, in order to save the royal family from such a mésalliance. This admira ble self-sacrifice was rewarded; he soon had a pension from the privy purse, and was created Earl of Fai mouth. From the first, the baseness of the public corporations rivalled that of individuals. The House of Com mons, but recently naster of the coun try, still full of Presbyterians, rebels, and conquerors, voted "that neither The Life of Clarendon, i. 379↑ Ibid. i. 380. Observe that this great man had received the news from the king "Quoth Hudibras, I smell a rat. For if by sly homœosis, Tussis pro crepitu, an art Thou wouldst sophistically imply, Part i. canto i. l. 821-834. themselves nor the people of England could be free from the horrid guilt of the late unnatural rebellion, or from the punishment which that guilt merited, unless they formally availed themselves of his majesty's grace and pardon, as set forth in the declaration of Breda." Then all these heroes went in a body and threw themselves with contrit on at the sacred feet of their monarch. In this universal prostration it seemed that no one had any courage left. The king became the hireling of Louis XIV., and sold his country for a large pension. Ministers, members of Parliament, ambassadors, all received French money. The contagion spread even to patriots, to men noted for their purity, to martyrs. Lord William Russell intrigued with Versailles; Algernon Sidney accepted 500 guineas. They had not discrimination enough to retain a show of spirit; they had not spirit enough to retain a show of honor.* In men thus laid bare, the first thing that strikes you is the bloodthirsty instinct of brute beasts. Sir John Coventry, a member of Parliament, let some word escape him, which was construed into a reproach of the royal amours. His friend, the Duke of Monmouth, contrived that he should be treacherously assaulted under the king's command, by respectable men devoted to his service, who slit his nose to the bone. A vile wretch of the name of Blood tried to assassinate the Duke of Ormond, and to stab the keeper of the Tower, in order to steal the crown jewels. Charles II., considering that this was an interesting "Mr. Evelyn tells me of several of the menial servants of the Court lacking bread, that have not received a farthing wages since the King's coming in."-Pepys Diary, ed. Lord Braybrooke, 3d ed., 1848, 5 vols., iv. April 26, 1667. "Mr. Povy says that to this day the King do follow the women as much as he ever did; that the Duke of York.... hath come out of his wife's bed, and gone to others laid in bed for him; . that the family (of the Duke) is in horrible disorder by being in debt by spending above £60,000 per annum, when he hath not £40,000" (Ibid. iv. June 23, 1667). It is certain that, as it now is, the seamen of England, in my conscience, would, if they could, go over and serve the king of France or Holland rather than us" (Ibid. iv. June 25, 1667). and distinguished man of his kind pardoned him, gave him an estate in Ireland, and admitted him to his pres ence, side by side with the Duke of Ormond, so that Blood became a sort of hero, and was received in good so. ciety. After such splendid examples, men dared every thing. The Duke of Buckingham, a lover of the Countess of Shrewsbury, slew the Earl in a duel; the Countess, disguised as a page, held Buckingham's horse, while she em.. braced him, covered as he was with her husband's blood; and the mur derer and adulteress returned publicly, and as triumphantly, to the house of the dead man. We can no longer wonder at hearing Count Königsmark describe as a "peccadillo an assas sination which he had committed by waylaying his victim. I transcribe a duel out of Pepys, to give a notion of the manners of these bloodthirsty cut throats. Sir H. Bellassis and Ton Porter, the greatest friends in the world were talking together: ,, 46 and Sir H. Bellassis talked a little louder than ordinary to Tom Porter, giving of him some advice. Some of the company standing by said, 'What! are they quarrelling, that they talk so high? Sir H. Bellassis, hearing it, said, 'No! says he: 'I would have you know I never quarrel, but I strike and take that as a rule of mine! How?' says Tom Porter, strike! I would I could see the man in England that durst give me a blow!' with that Sir H. Bellassis did give him a box of the eare; and so they were going to fight there, but were hindered. Tom Porter, being in. formed that Sir H. Bellassis' coach was com he staid for the tidings, and stopped the coach, ing, went down out of the coffee-house where and bade Sir H. Bellassis come out. Why, says H. Bellassis, you will not hurt me comSo out he went, and both drew.... They ing out, will you?' 'No,' says Tom Porter. wounded one another, and Sir H. Bellassis sc much that it is feared he will die "-* which he did ten days after. Bull-dogs like these took no pity or their enemies. The Restoration open ed with a butchery. The Lords conducted the trials of the republicans with a shamelessness of cruelty and an excess of rancor that were extraordi. nary. A sheriff struggled with Sir Harry Vane on the scaffold, rummag ing his pockets, and taking from him a paper which he attempted to read During the trial of Major-General Har * Pepys Diary, vol. iv,, 29th July, 1667. rison, the hangman was placed by his | robbed him of his wife, and passed her side, in a black dress, with a rope in on to Buckingham. The husband his hand; they sought to give him a hanged himself; they made very merry full enjoyment of the foretaste of over the affair. At another time he death. He was cut down alive from disguised himself as a chairman, then the gibbet, and disembowelled; he as a beggar, and paid court to the saw his entrails cast into the fire; he gutter-girls. He ended by turning a was then quartered, and his still beat- quack astrologer, and vendor of drugs ing heart was torn out and shown to for procuring abortion, in the suburbs the people. The cavaliers gathered It was the licentiousness of a fervið round for amusement. Here and there imagination, which fouled itself as an one of them would do worse even than other would have adorned it, which this. Colonel Turner, seeing them forced its way into lewdness and folly quarter John Coke, the lawyer, told as another would have done into sense the sheriff's men to bring Hugh Peters, and beauty. What can come of love another of the condemned, nearer; in hands like these? We cannot copy the executioner came up, and rubbing even the titles of his poems; they were his bloody hands, asked the unfortu- written only for the haunts of vice. nate man if the work pleased him. The Stendhal said that love is like a dried rotting bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and up bough cast into a mine; the crys Bradshaw were dug up in the night, tals cover it, spread out into filagree and their heads fixed on poles over work, and end by converting the worth Westminster Hall. Ladies went to less stick into a sparkling tuft of the see these disgusting sights; the good purest diamonds. Rochester begins by Evelyn applauded them; the courtiers depriving love of all its adornment, and made songs on them. These people to make sure of grasping it, converts it were fallen so low, that they did not into a stick. Every refined sentiment, even turn sick at it. Sight and smell every fancy; the enchantment, the se no longer aided humanity by producing rene, sublime glow which transforms repugnance; their senses were as dead in a moment this wretched world of as their hearts. ours; the illusion which, uniting all From carnage they threw themselves the powers of our being, shows us pernto debauchery. You should read the fection in a finite creature, and eternal ife of the Earl of Rochester, a courtier bliss in a transient emotion,-all has and a poet, who was the hero of the vanished; there remain but satiated time. His manners were those of a appetites and palled senses. The worst lawless and wretched mountebank; his of it is, that he writes without spirit delight was to haunt the stews, to de- and methodically enough. He has no bauch women, to write filthy songs and natural ardor, no picturesque sensual. lewd pamphlets; he spent his time ity; his satires prove him a disciple of between gossiping with the maids of Boileau. Nothing is more disgusting honor, broils with men of letters, the than obscenity in cold blood. We can receiving of insults, the giving of endure the obscene works of Giulio blows. By way of playing the gallant, Romano, and his Venetian voluptuous. he eloped with his wife before he mar- ness, because in them genius sets off ried her. Out of a spirit of bravado, sensuality, and the loveliness of the he declined fighting a duel, and gained splendid colored draperies transforms the na ne of a coward. For five years an orgie into a work of art. together he was said to be drunk. The pardon Rabelais, when we have entered spirit within him failing of a worthy into the deep current of manly joy and outlet, plunged him into adventures vigor, with which his feasts abound. more befitting a clown. Once with the We can hold our nose and have done Duke of Buckingham he rented an inn with it, while we follow with admira on the Newmarket road, and turned tion, and even sympathy, the torrent of innkeeper, supplying the husbands with ideas and fancies which flows through drink and defiling their wives. He his mire. But to see a man trying to introduced himself, disguised as an old be elegant and remaining obscene, en woman, into the house of a miser, deavoring to paint the sentiments of > We navvy in the language of a man of the world, who tries to find a suitable metaphor for every kind of filth, who plays the blackguard studiously and deliberately, who, excused neither by genuine feeling, nor the glow of fancy, nor knowledge, nor genius, degrades a good style of writing to such work,-it is like a rascal who sets himself to sully a set of gems in a gutter. The end of all is but disgust and illness. While La Fontaine continues to the last day capable of tenderness and happiness, this man at the age of thirty insults the weaker sex with spiteful malignity: When she is young, she whores herself for sport; And when she's old, she bawds for her sup port.. ... She is a snare, a shamble, and a stews; He public taste maintained at Ve. sailles was here dispensed with as trouble. some. Charles and his brother, in their state dress, would set off running as in a carnival. On the day when the Dutch fleet burned the English ships in the Thames, the king supped with the Duchess of Monmouth, and amused himself by chasing a moth. In council while business was being transacted he would be playing with his dog Rochester and Buckingham insulted him by insolent repartees or dissolute epigrams; he would fly into a pas sion and suffer them to go on. quarrelled with his mistress in public; she called him an idiot, and he called her a jade. He would leave her in the morning, so that the very sentrys speak of it." He suffered her to play him false before the eyes of all; at one time she received a couple of actors, one of whom was a mountebank. If need were, she would use hath declared that he did not get the abusive language to him. "The King Ichild of which she is conceived at this time. But she told him, ". . . ! but you shall own it." Whereupon he did acknowledge the child, and took to himself a couple of actresses for conWhat a confession is such a judgment ! solation. When his new wife, Cathe what an abstract of life! You see the rine of Braganza, arrived, he drove roisterer stupefied at the end of his away her attendants, used coarse career, dried up like a mummy, eaten language to her, that he might force or away by ulcers. Amid the choruses, her the familiarities of his mistress, the crude satires, the remembrance of and finished by degrading her to a The good plans miscarried, the sullied enjoyments friendship such as this. which are heaped up in his wearied Pepys, notwithstanding his loyal feelbrain as in a sink, the fear of damna-ings, ends by saying, having heard the tion is fermenting; he dies a devotee king and the duke talk, and seeing and at the age of thirty-three. observing their manner of discourse, "God forgive me! though I admire them with all the duty possible, yet the more a man considers and observes And does in laziness delight the more, Than is her stubborn and rebellious mind.... And like a fool or whore, when she be civil.. French At the head of all, the king sets the example. This "old goat," as the courtiers call him, imagines himself a man of gayety and elegance. What gayety! what elegance! manners do not suit men beyond the Channel. When they are Catholics, they fall into narrow superstition; when epicureans, into gross debauchery; when courtiers, into base servility; when skeptics, into vulgar atheism. The court of England could only imitate French furniture and dress. The regular and decent exterior which Rochester's works, edited by St. Evre mond. He them, the less he finds of difference be Pepys Diary, ii. January 1, 166 1663 V. Another day, Captain Ferrers told him "how, at a ball at Court, a child was dropped by one of the ladies in danc- Hobbes was one of those powerful ing. They took it off in a handker- limited, and, as they are called, positive chief, "and the King had it in his minds, so common in England, of the closet a week after, and did dissect it, school of Swift and Bentham, effica making great sport of it."* These cious and remorseless as an iron ma ghastly freaks and these lewd events chine. Hence we find in him a methmake us shudder. The courtiers went od and style of surprising dryness and with the stream. Miss Jennings, who vigor, most adapted to build up and became Duchess of Tyrconnel, dis- pull down; hence a philosophy which, guised herself one day as an orange by the audacity of its teaching, has girl, and cried her wares in the street.† placed in an undying light one of Pepys recounts festivities in which the indestructible phases of the human lords and ladies smeared one another's mind. In every object, every event, faces with candle-grease and soot, "till there is some primitive and constant most of us were like devils." It was fact, which forms, as it were, the nuthe fashion to swear, to relate scandal- cleus around which group themselves ous adventures, to get drunk, to prate the various developments which comagainst the preachers and Scripture, to plete it. The positive mind swoops gamble. Lady Castlemaine in one down immediately upon this nucleus, night lost £25,000. The Duke of St. crushes the brilliant growth which Albans, a blind man, eighty years old, covers it; disperses, annihilates it; went to the gambling-house with an then, concentrating upon it the full attendant at his side to tell him the force of its violent grasp, loosens it, cards. Sedley and Buckhurst stripped raises it up, shapes it, and lifts it into nearly naked, and ran through the a conspicuous position, from whence it streets after midnight. Another, in the may henceforth shine out to all men open day, stood naked at the window and for all time like a crystal. All ornato address the people I let Grammont ment, all emotions, are excluded from keep to himself his accounts of the the style of Hobbes; it is a mere agmaids of honor brought to bed, and of gregate of arguments and concise facts unnatural lusts. We must either ex-in a small space, united together by hibit or conceal them, and I have not deduction, as by iron bands. the courage lightly to insinuate them, are no tints, no fine or unusual word. after his fashion. I end by a quotation He makes use only of words most fafrom Pepys, which will serve for ex-miliar to common and lasting usage; ample: "Here I first understood by their talk the meaning of company that lately were called Ballers; Harris telling how it was by a meeting of some young blades, where he was among them, and my Lady Bennet and her ladies; and their dancing naked, and all the roguish things in the world." The marvellous thing is, that this fair is not even gay; these people were misanthropic, and became morose; they quote the gloomy Hobbes, and he is their master. In fact, the philosophy of Hobbes shall give us the last word and the last characteristics of this society. There there are not a dozen employed by him. which, during two hundred years, have grown obsolete; he pierces to the root of all sensation, removes the transient and brilliant externals, narrows the solid portion which is the permanent subject-matter of all thought, and the proper object of common intelligence. He curtails throughout in order to strengthen; he attains solidity by sup pression. Of all the bonds which con. nect ideas, he retains but one, and that the most stable; his style is only a continuous chain of reasoning of the most stubborn description, wholly made up of additions and subtractions, reduced to a combination of certain smple ideas, which added on to or diminish. ing from one another, make up, under various names, the totals or differences of which we are forever either sundy |
