infatuated people, submitted to behold and even assist in the condemnation of victims whom they knew to be falsely accused; and the king himself dared not interfere to save the innocent! When he remitted the more cruel and ignominious parts of Lord Stafford's sentence, it was plainly shown by the conduct of the factious leaders in parliament, what they would have done if he had at-tempted to use his prerogative of mercy.

I have heard,' says Roger North, of usurpations of crowns, brigues between kings and their nobles and military men, so between nobility and commonalty, and no less of open rebellions of the people against the governors: but who ever heard of a monarch in his throne obnoxious to the treacherous insults of the very scum of human kind, and the outcasts of gaols? and rebels in secret, making use of such tools openly, in mysterious scandalous practices against the sovereign person of a king, surrounding him with perpetual attempts to delude-in order to defame him?' Charles's situation would have been pitiable indeed, if a light heart had not proved as impenetrable as a hard one. He had never from the beginning believed the story of the plot, and in private had shown to demonstration that great part of the evidence was not only improbable but quite impossible.' He was extremely concerned at Lord Stafford's condemnation; yet this was but a momentary concern, and Sir John Reresby describes him as appearing altogether free from care and trouble at a time when it might have been thought that he would have been overwhelmed with them. He found the same sort of advantage in his easy temper and loose principles that a badger derives from his loose skin. Yielding to a popular delusion, which it would have been vain to oppose, he waited for the re-action which always occurs when the hot fit of such influenzas has past: the machinery was then turned against those who had first brought it into use-justice had little to do in either case,and even-handed law made no distinction between Trojan or Tyrian.

Charles understood the character of his opponents. • Those members,' said he, who boast this mighty friendship for the public, are of two sorts; either those who would actually and irretrievably subvert the government and reduce it to a commonwealth once more; or else those who seem only to join with the former, and talk loud against the court, purely in hopes to have their mouths stopped with places or preferments.' There was a third class, which he had not sufficient integrity to understand; men who sincerely loved their country, who dreaded the consequences of his profligate example, of his foreign connections, and of his brother's bigotry, and who were hostile to his government because they believed that its measures tended to the destruction of the

constitution

constitution both in church and state. Some of these persons” fåtally entangled themselves in intrigues and faction; with the intent of saving the constitution they thought it allowable to connect themselves with fanatics and desperados who would have overthrown it, and being taken in the net with them, they perished, like the stork in the fable, for the guilt of their associates.

Neither Charles, nor the most celebrated of his opponents, suspected how many of their secrets would be brought to light by time, and that both would be found seeking support and receiving money from France. Each might have pleaded in excuse the conduct of the other. The motive for the king's conduct would probably have been found in that part of his character wherein he resembled king William-a man in all other points so dissimilar, his disregard for any thing farther than as it related to himself; for William confessed, he did not care what became of the world when he was out of it. When Charles II. covenanted with Louis XIV. that he would re-establish the Catholic religion in England, it is more consistent with his temper, and his total want of principle, to suppose that his sole motive was to obtain money from France for his own wanton expenditure, than that he had the slightest intention of making so perilous an attempt. He said to Sir John Reresby, I know it is said I cim at the subversion of the government and religion; that I intend to lay aside parliaments and to raise money another way; but all men, nay those who insist the most thereon, know the thing in all its circumstances to be false. There is not a subject that lives under me whose safety and welfare I desire less than my own; and I should be as sorry to invade his liberty and property, as that another should invade mine.' None of the open measures of his government belied these protestations. In his secret treaty with France he seems to have acted upon the principle of public faith which Louis explains to his son; but so far was he from acting in observance of that treaty, that at his death (we are told) he advised James not to venture upon the dangerous and impracticable attempt of introducing the Romish religion into England. With regard to his own religion, Wellwood may be be-lieved when he says that it was deism, or rather that which is -called so;' and that' if at his death he went into that of Rome,' it is to be imputed to a lazy diffidence in all other religions, upon a review of his past life, and the near approach of an uncertain state.' The agitations of this reign were the natural effect of the convulsions in the preceding one, as the swell continues after the tempest has ceased. The public and private profligacy which had gained head during the rebellion prevailed to such a degree that did we estimate the age only from its history and its literature, it would seem almost miraculous that the nation should not have

sunk

sunk into that utter degeneracy which necessarily terminates in national ruin. What must have been the standard of honour in an age when we had Bennet and Lauderdale for ministers, Scroggs and Jefferies for judges, and Buckingham and Shaftesbury for patriots; when the French king had both the king of England and the most illustrious of the English whigs in his pay? Where would then have been the liberties of England if the monarch had been like Henry VII. or the minister like Strafford? Or where the monarchy, if among its enemies there had been men with the subtlety of Vane and St. John, the courage and eloquence of Pym, the strength of character and the self-controul of Hampden? It is an observation of Sir William Temple 'that some ages produce many great men, and few great occasions; other times, on the contrary, raise great occasions, and few or no great men. And

that sometimes happens in a country, which was said by the fool of Brederode, who going about the fields with the motions of one sowing corn, was asked what he sowed? he said, 'I sow fools :'→ t'other replied, 'why do you not sow wise men ?' why,' said the fool, c'est que la terre ne les porte pas.' They who tell us that revolutions produce great men, speak hastily and without either reflection or foresight. Produce them they do, but it is in a Scourging crop which exhausts the soil that bears it: they call forth the strong and stirring spirits which were nurtured in better times; and they train up no great men to succeed them. Great characters are brought forward in distempered times, but it is in peaceable ones that they must be formed.

Tis not in battles that from youth we train
The Governor who must be wise and good,
And temper with the sternness of the brain
Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
Books, leisure, perfect freedom and the talk
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind's business: these are the degrees

By which true sway doth mount: this is the stalk
True power doth grow on.

We have been so long together bad Englishmen,' says Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, that, we had no leisure to be good poets. The fury of a civil war, and power for twenty years together abandoned to a barbarous race of men, enemies of all good learning, had buried the muses under the ruins of monarchy.' He thought that the Restoration had immediately repaired this evil, whereas the fine literature of this country suffered more from the taste and morals which Charles and his followers imported, than it had done during all the preceding storms. It was when the thea

tres

tree were opened that Dryden fancied revived poesy' was to be seen lifting up its head and shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it. Yet in the theatre it was that the corruption of intellect and feeling was first and most apparent. A year only after the restoration, Evelyn writes in his Diary, 'I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his majesty's being so long abroad.' A few years afterwards he observes, that he went very seldom to the public theatres for many reasons now, as they were abused to an atheistical liberty; foul and indecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act, who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and to some their wives; witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, Prince Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them, who fell into their snares, to the reproach of their noble families and ruin of both body and soul.' Prynne had paid with his ears for railing against dramatic representations: how must he have pricked up their stumps in the days of his sober repentance, at hearing in every comedy enough to justify the bitterest of his invectives, and make him imagine he had been possessed by a spirit of prophecy as well as a spirit of sedition! Well indeed might such men as Evelyn cease to frequent the theatres when Shakspeare and Jonson were supplanted by Dryden and Shadwell, and when it was openly declared from the stage that the actresses were willing to practise the lessons of brothelry, which it seemed the main object of the drama to inculcate; so that the playhouses were literally, what Burnet calls them, nests of prostitution. When he adds that Dryden, the great master of dramatic poesy, was a monster of immodesty and impurity of all sorts,' the bishop betrays his own vitiated taste and his political animosity, for Dryden's plays, bad as they are, are not worse than those of his contemporaries, and his life was at least decorous. This was the case also with Shadwell, his rival; for such is the blindness of faction, that Shadwell was extolled by the Whigs as a rival to Dryden. There is a thorough profligacy in his comedies, not of expressions alone and actions, but of sentiments and opinions, deliberately delivered by his gentlemen of wit and sense,' as their principle of conduct: yet he is said to have been irreproachable in his private life, and actually took credit to himself for the morality of his writings! His executors would even have eulogized him in his epitaph as one who had employed his talents for correcting the vices of the age; but the dean and chapter refused to let such an encomium be set up in the church. Westminster Abbey was sufficiently degraded when they allowed the bust of this vile writer, crowned with laurel, a place among the tombs of the poets!

The

The opinion which Shadwell entertained of himself as a moral writer was not more preposterous than the complacency with which he advanced, his literary pretensions. It seems as if he was incapable of distinguishing between his own brass and the gold of his predecessors, when they were placed side by side. He says, in the preface to his Psyche,* I will be bold to affirm, that this is as much a play as could be made upon this subject;' whereas nothing more base and worthless than the lines in which he has berhymed it was ever sung at Vauxhall or printed in the Lady's Magazines and pocket books of former times. Borrowing a play from Mo-. lière, and of course injuring it by every alteration, he makes the modest assertion, without vanity, that Molière's part has not suf-, fered in his hands.' Shakspeare, he says, never made more masterly strokes than in Timon of Athens, 'yet,' he adds, I can truly say I have made it into a play.' This he has done by introducing two female characters, the one a mistress, whom Timon is about to cast off, in order to take a wife, the other his intended bride; the latter jilts him in his misfortunes, the former follows him in private at his death, and kills herself for grief. As a specimen of the linsey-woolsey with which this botcher has pieced the mantle of Shakspeare, the concluding speech of Alcibiades is here transcribed.

Poor Timon! I once knew thee the most flourishing man
Of all th' Athenians; and thou still hadst been so

Had not these smiling flattering knaves devoured thee
And murdered thee with base ingratitude.

His death pull'd on the poor Evandra's too,
That miracle of constancy and love..

Now all repair to their respective homes,

Their several trades, their business and diversions;
And whilst I guard you from your active foes
And fight your battles, be you secure at home.
May Athens flourish with a lasting peace,

And may its wealth and power e'er increase.'

The writer who could compose such lines as these, and be satisfied with them, would certainly be capable of thinking he had made Timon of Athens into a play! And yet that assertion exemplifies the state of public taste, as much as the presumption and obtuseness of the individual. The veriest rhymesters of the age thought themselves as competent to improve Shakspeare, as a French painter does to retouch or even paint over the compositions of the great Italian masters. And this presumption was not confined to such authors as Shadwell and his successor in the

* They who cannot read this story (the most beautiful which antiquity has left us) in the prose of Apuleius, and some of those who can also, may thank us for recommending it to them in the verse of Mr. Hudson Gurney.

laurel,