but between the abrupt awakening from a very heavy slumber, the sudden noise of the hunting horn, within a few yards of the bed in which he lay, and the announcement that the jealous husband of his paramour was "there"-perhaps on the point of entering his room to wreak vengeance upon him— even this great warrior's nerves were momentarily shaken, and the hero of a hundred battles, to use Grammont's words, "hid his head under the bedclothes".

When, some time later, he had arisen and dressed himself, the confidential servant who had taken him to the garden door on the previous evening reappeared, and placing in his hand a letter, bowed and retired. The man having gone, Hamilton eagerly broke the seal, and read a polite note from a friend of Lady Chesterfield's, gently intimating that he had been made a fool of.

Astonishment, shame, hatred and rage "seized at once upon his heart," and ordering his carriage, he hastened to shake the dust of the place from his feet. As he did so, he saw in passing, now that it was broad daylight, the very fine house of the Chesterfields, a charming place in a pretty homelike country, on the banks of a gently flowing river, without a rock or a precipice anywhere near it.

Neither Hamilton's troubles nor Lady Chesterfield's vengeance were yet over. That amiable lady took good care that Hamilton's discomfiture should become the gossip of Whitehall. The king

heard of it and insisted upon Hamilton's giving him all the details of his adventures in the presence of a full court. To make matters worse, Grammont, who was among the hearers, said to him: "If Lady Chesterfield is to be blamed for carrying the jest so far, you are no less to be blamed for coming back so suddenly, like an ignorant novice. If you had only remained in the neighbourhood till the next day——

CHAPTER IX.

We will now notice another foreign, most popular and very remarkable courtier at the court of Charles II. A man eccentric both externally and internally; a man standing alone in the gay crowd of courtiers, yet never so much at home as when in its midst; a man of the world, worldly, yet professing a pompous philosophy and a serious cynicism, encouraging the vices of the court with the unction of a Lenten preacher, and mocking at virtue with the gravity of a priest administering the last sacraments.

Charles de Marguetel de St. Denis, or, as he was usually called, de St. Evremond, from the name of one of the smaller estates of the family, was a literary courtier who lived among rakes, if he was not a rake himself. That his moral tone cannot have been higher than theirs, whatever his actions may have been, may be inferred from his asking Mme. de Keroualle which was the "most injurious to the well being of the fair sex, either to abandon themselves wholly to their inclinations, or to follow all the dictates of Virtue,"1 and from his adding: "Do not too severely resist temptations".

1 Works of St. Evremond, vol. i., pp. lxxxiii.-iv.

In one letter he assures her that if she ever enters a convent, she will be thought very little of among the nuns, unless she has the character of a Magdalen. "The true penitent is she who afflicts and mortifies herself at the remembrance of her faults. What can a pure Virgin, who has done no wickedness, have to repent of? You will appear ridiculous to the other Nuns, who have just reason to repent, if you exhibit repentance only out of grimace."

Such sentiments as these, and the companions he chose, are enough to qualify St. Evremond for classification among the rakes, even if it were to be admitted-and it might be a large admission-that his extraordinary admiration for, and great intimacy with, the Duchess of Mazarin were purely platonic. Indeed it is pretty clear, in respect to rakishness, that if, at the age at which he figured at the court of Charles II., his flesh was weak, his spirit was willing.

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St. Evremond sneers at repentance for immorality. "There are but few conversions," he writes, "wherein is not felt a secret mixture of the pleasure of remembrance and the sorrow of repentance. Our repentance for the vices, which were dear to us, always leaves some small tenderness for them, which is mingled with our tears. There is something of the amorous kind in our repenting of an amorous passion." And he observes that a converted soul often "fixes its remembrance very agreeably upon the object of its past pleasures".

St. Evremond's estimate of the repentance in old

age of free-livers of both sexes may be found in his Letter to a Lady Who Designed to Turn Devout. Their repentance, he tells her, is not so much sorrow for their past sins, as regret that their sins are past : "wherein they are themselves deceived, amorously lamenting what they have lost, while they believe that they devoutly bewail what they have done".

St. Evremond was by no means an infidel; but whatever the differences in belief, or unbelief, between St. Evremond and Voltaire, it is certain that Voltaire in his writings was much influenced by the literary style of St. Evremond, if he did not actually copy it. As to St. Evremond's influence upon the literary rakes whose society he so much affected, it cannot be said to exhibit itself to any large extent in their writings: but it probably did much to make writing of some sort the fashion among them in spite of the then prevailing tone towards literary work expressed by Etheredge's character, Sir Fopling Flutter: "Writing, Madam, is a mechanic part of wit: gentlemen should never go beyond a song or billet. . . . Damn your authors!" Even St. Evremond does not seem to have thought it quite the part of a high-bred gentleman to publish his writings. He never could be persuaded to authorise the printing of any of his works during his own lifetime, although he empowered Des Maizeaux to publish them after his death. It is true that before it a collection of them was published by Barbin, but without his permission.