CHARLES THE SECOND

[Is entitled to have his name inscribed on the musterroll of royal authors, according to the affirmation of sir John Hawkins, and even on the negative testimony of lord Orford himself, who thought there was nothing in the following amatory song to contradict the report of its having been said in an old copy to be written by this witty prince.

"I pass all my hours in a shady old grove,
But I live not the day when I see not my love:
I survey ev'ry walk now my Phillis is gone,
And sigh when I think we were there all alone.
O then 'tis I think there's no hell
Like loving too well.

"But each shade and each conscious bow'r when I find,
Where I once have been happy, and she has been kind;
When I see the print left of her shape on the green,
And imagin the pleasure may yet come agen;

O then 'tis I think that no joys are above
The pleasures of love.

"While alone to myself I repeat all her charms, She I love may be lockt in another man's arms,

She may laugh at my cares, and so false she may be,
To say all the kind things she before said to me:

O then 'tis, O then, that I think there's no hell
Like loving too well.

"But when I consider the truth of her heart,
Such an innocent passion, so kind without art;
I fear I have wrong'd her, and hope she may be
So full of true love to be jealous of me:

And then 'tis I think that no joys are above
The pleasures of love."

Mr. Seward has printed a short but interesting letter of Charles the second to Mrs. Lane, who managed his escape after the battle of Worcester.

Another tribute of spontaneous thanks written by the hand of Charles to the earl of Sandwich, on his victory at sea, has been transcribed from the original in Sloan MS. 1512.

Whitehall, 9 June.

"My Lord Sandwich, "Though you have already done me very eminent service, yett the great part you have had in this happy victory which it hath pleased God to send us, adds very much to the former obligations I have to you. I send this bearer, my lord Hawly, on purpose to lett you know more particularly my sence of it, and will say no more my selfe till I see you, that I may take you in my armes, and give you other testimonies how truely I am

"Your affectionat frinde,

"CHARLES R."

For the Earle of Sandwich.

› Appendix to Hawkins' Hist. of Music, vol. v. p. 477.

Charles the second, though a genius, as lord Orford has pronounced him, yet acted, as Granger 5 has well stated, in direct opposition to every principle of sound policy; and without any apparent propensity to tyranny, made no scruple of embracing such measures as were destructive to the civil and religious liberties of his people. He chose rather to be a pensioner to France, than the arbiter of Europe; and to sacrifice the independence of his kingdom and the happiness of his subjects, than to remit his attachment to indolence and pleasure. Under the veil of openness and candour, he concealed the deepest and most dangerous dissimulation. Though he was a slave to appetite, he appears to have been an entire stranger to the softer sentiments of pity and compassion. He was gay, affable and polite, and knew how to win the hearts, when he could no longer gain the esteem of mankind. Rochester's epigrammatic jest, that "he never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one," forms a tolerable motto for his "picture in little."

Dryden, however, did not scruple to laud him in his Threnodia Augustalis, or funeral-pindarique, as

• See p. 158.

Biog. Hist. vol. iii. p. 169.

6 The earl of Dartmouth was told, that he had a constant maxim, which was, never to fall out with any one, let the provocation be ever so great; by which he said, he had found great benefit all his life: and the reason he gave for it was, that he did not know how soon it might be necessary for him to have them again for his best friends. Biographiana, vol. ii, p. 509.