her to restore her vitality and to give a chance to Nature, to which she had been so unmerciful of late, by refreshing herself with the most nourishing of foods and the most generous of wines.

With gentle protests, she consented to make this sacrifice of her desires to her duties, on condition that Etheredge would sup with her. What followed is thus described in the letter:

"We had a noble regale that evening in her chamber; and our good widow pushed the glass so strenuously about, that her comforter, meaning myself, could hardly find the way to his coach." Well! To make a long story short, "this phoenix of her sex, this pattern of conjugal fidelity, two mornings ago, was married to a smooth-chinned ensign that has not a farthing in the world but his pay. I assisted at the ceremony, though I had little imagined that the lady would act upon my advice so readily, or that it would effect such a complete and so rapid a cure."

Of poems, apart from plays, Etheredge does not appear to have published many. We will only give one specimen :—

Fly the fair sex, if bliss you prize;

The snake's beneath the flower:
Who ever gazed on beauteous eyes,
That tasted quiet more?

One more specimen shall be given of the play in which Rochester is represented.

"Dorimant.-He is a person indeed of great

acquired follies.

Medley. He is like many others, beholden to his education for making him so eminent a coxcomb; many a fool had been lost to the world had their indulgent parents wisely bestowed neither learning nor good breeding on 'em."1

Rochester wrote something much akin to this in his Artemisa in the Town to Cloe [Chloe] in the Country.

Nature's as lame in making a true Fop

As a philosopher; the very top
And dignity of folly we attain

By studious search and labour of the brain,
By observation, counsel, and deep thought:
God never made a coxcomb worth a groat.
We owe that name to industry and arts;
An eminent fool must be a fool of parts.

Etheredge died at the age of fifty-three. As to the cause of his death there is some doubt; but according to the Biographia Britannica, there is a story that, after entertaining some friends at Ratisbon, he proceeded to conduct them to his door, when he was so drunk that he tumbled downstairs and broke his neck, and "so fell a martyr to his civility".

Another literary rake of the court of Charles II. who had spent part of his youth on the Continent and had there studied law, only to relinquish it for a life of pleasure, was William Wycherley of Cleve, in Shropshire. Rochester wrote:

Of all our modern wits none seem to me
Once to have touched upon true comedy,

1"The Man of Mode."

But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley.
Shadwell's unfinished works do yet impart
Great proofs of nature's force, though none of art;
But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains,
He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains.

Wycherley's best known works were his plays, Love in a Wood and The Plain Dealer. He was a great favourite of the king and very popular at court, until he married the Countess of Drogheda, who was so jealous of him-not altogether without cause that she rarely let him go to the court, or indeed anywhere else, out of her sight. Even her death did not long restore him to the court; for he spent so much in a lawsuit about the property which she bequeathed to him, that he was kept seven years in prison for debt. Although successful as a playwright, his poetry was, as an old critic described it, "universally damned". Perhaps he is most remarkable, as a poet, for having begged Pope to revise his verses, and then quarrelling with him for doing so.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE literary rakes were not all Englishmen or even Scotchmen. At one time a very eminent rake at the court of Charles II. was Count Grammont, who was not only, to some small extent, literary himself, but also the furnisher of copious matter for letters in another. It has been more than hinted in our own times that several successful autobiographies consist of reminiscences, not written but verbally recounted by their subjects, and recorded on paper by others; and such was probably the origin of Mémoires de Comte de Grammont, par Le Comte Antoine Hamilton; one of the best known and most entertaining biographies in existence. But Grammont did more than provide stories for another to put on paper. As his Memoirs relate, when Rochester or other literary rakes wrote lampoons upon their fellow-courtiers, Grammont "never failed to produce his supplement upon the occasion". He was also credited with having written some verses to a jealous husband beginning :

Tell me, jealous pated swain,
What avail thine idle arts

To divide united hearts ?