short, William the Third, with a natural love for his Dutch home, made the palace and gardens look as much like it as he could.

And his Court, for the most part, was as gloomy as the gardens; for William was not fond of his new subjects; did not choose to converse with them; and was seldom visible but to his Dutch friends. Yet here were occasionally to be seen some of the liveliest wits and courtiers that have left a name in history, forsakers, indeed, of reserved and despotic King James, rather than enthusiasts for the equally reserved and hardly less powerloving King William, who had become, however, by the force of circumstances, the instrument for securing freedom. Here came the Earl of Dorset, Prior's friend, who had been one of the wits of the Court of Charles the Second; Prior himself, who had stirred William's Dutch phlegm so agreeably, as to

be made one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber; Congreve, whose plays Queen Mary admired; Halifax, a minor wit, but no mean statesman; Sir William Temple, who combined public with private life to so high a degree of wisdom and elegance; Swift (probably) then a young man, whom Sir William made use of in his communications with the king; Burnet, the gossiping historian, sometimes wrong-headed, but generally right-hearted, whose officious zeal for the Revolution had made him a bishop; the Earl of Devonshire, whose nobler zeal had made him a duke, one of a family remarkable for their constant and happy combination of popular politics with all the graces of their rank; Lord Monmouth, afterwards the famous, restless Earl of Peterborough, friend of Swift and Pope, conqueror of Spain, and lover, at the age of seventy, of Lady Suffolk; Sheffield,

afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire, a minor wit and poet, in love with (the rank of) the Princess Anne; and last, not least, in anything but good-breeding, and a decent command over his passions, Peter the Great, semi-barbarian, the premature forcer of Russian pseudo-civilisation, who came to England in order to import the art of ship-building into his dominions, in his own proper mechanical person, and out of the five months which he spent here, passed a good many days out of one of them in interchanging visits with King William at Kensington. The Czar had a house looking on the water in York-Buildings, where, in entertaining one day his royal host (for William supplied him with house and everything else while in the kingdom) a favourite monkey leaped angrily upon the saturnine Dutchman, and produced so much confusion, that the visit was chiefly taken

up in apologising for the animal's mis

behaviour.

Peter seems to have dined frequently at Kensington; and it has been wondered how the two sovereigns got on so well together. But they held several predilections in common; among which were unpolished manners, a dislike (in consequence) of being seen in society, and a love of Dutch habits, particularly gin and brandy drinking, the gin being chiefly on the king's side, and the brandy, as the greater stimulus, on the side of the Czar. Sometimes he put pepper into it. William took him from Kensington one day to the House of Lords, where the uncouth Russian, always shy of being seen, particularly by "lords and gentlemen," made the lords and king himself laugh by peeping strangely at them out of a window in the roof. He got the same kind of sight at the House of

Commons; and even at a ball at Kensington, on the Princess Anne's birth-day, he contrived to be invisibly present in a closet prepared for him on purpose, where he could see without being seen. This was the man who, when abroad, worked only in dockyards, and when in his own country, paraded himself on every possible occasion, serious or farcical. His virtues were at home only among workmen, and his vices among drunkards and executioners.

Another anecdote of Peter while in England, must not be omitted, it is so applicable to the present time. He was one day, to his wrath and astonishment, shouldered aside in the street, by a porter, with so much violence, as to be thrown into the kennel. He was proceeding to take personal vengeance, when Lord Carmarthen (who had been appointed his bear-leader) judiciously prevailed