was a limit beyond which he would not tolerate liberties, and that limit Rochester not unfrequently exceeded. For his atrocious verses on the king Rochester was occasionally banished from the court; and it is likely that it was during one of these periods of exile that he revenged himself by writing his wellknown lines:

Here lives a mighty Monarch,

Whose promise none relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one,

and fastening them to the gate of the palace at Whitehall.' When the king heard of it, he is said to have replied: “That is easily accounted for: my words are my own: my actions are those of my ministers!"

It was at this gate of Whitehall that Rochester gave an exhibition of his readiness of retort. A grand carriage-for the ordinary court coaches of those days were more gorgeous than the Lord Mayor's of our own-was waiting at the gate to take the king's favourite, the Duchess of Cleveland, for a drive, and when she was on the point of entering

1 So it is stated in the Miscellaneous Works of Lords Rochester and Roscommon (1707). But Sir Walter Scott (Misc. Prose Works, xxiv., p. 171) says that the lines were the result of a playful request from the king that Rochester should write his epitaph. This version runs :—

"Here lies our sovereign Lord, the King,
Whose word no man relied on," etc.

it, her cousin, Rochester, in the presence of all the attendants and footmen, had the impudence to try to kiss her. The duchess promptly knocked him down. As he lay on his back on the road, he exclaimed :

By heavens, it was bravely done,

First to attempt the chariot of the sun,

And then to fall like Phaeton.

As to Rochester's relations to the king, St. Evremond says: "His talent of satire was admirable, and in it he spared none, not even the king himself, whose weakness for some of his mistresses he endeavoured to cure by several means: that is either by winning' them from him, in spite of the indulgence and liberality they felt for a royal gallant, or by severely lampooning them and him on various occasions which generally the King (who was a man of wit and pleasure, as well as my Lord) took for the natural sallies of his genius, and meant as sports of fancy, more than effects of malice. Yet either by too frequent repetition, or by a too close and poignant violence, he banished him the court for a satire made directly on him.”

In his "Farewell," Rochester abused Charles and his mistresses one after another, in lines of which, perhaps, the least offensive are those in which he thus apostrophises Lady Portsmouth :

But what must we expect, who daily see
Unthinking Charles ruled by unthinking thee?

If Rochester only lampooned the king with the excellent object attributed to him by St. Evremond, he deserved some praise for it. It is certain that with regard to his monarch, he was no respecter of persons: whatever his faults, he was no sycophant ; but, if on this point he was worthy of admiration, it is a question whether it is with noble courage that he should be credited or with splendid impudence.

Rochester deliberately defended his lampoons in a conversation with Burnet (Life, p. 204) on the ground that "there were some people who could not be kept in order or admonished but in this way". Burnet objected that the malice of a libel could hardly be consistent with the charity of an admonition, and that lampoons too often enriched fact with mendacious fiction. To this Rochester replied that "a man could not write with life unless he were heated by revenge; for to write a satire without resentments, upon the cold notions of philosophy, was as if a man would, in cold blood, cut men's throats who had never offended him; and he said the lies in those libels came often in as ornaments, that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the poem ". The liveliness of Rochester's libellous verses is sufficiently obvious; but their "beauty" does not yield itself quite so readily to research.

CHAPTER V.

ONE of the most noted and notable rakes at the court of Charles II. was the king's own brother, the Duke of York, afterwards James II., and if he was guiltless of libels and bad verses, he was literary to the extent of being the author of Memoirs of His Own Life and Campaigns to the Restoration. Two other books were also written under his name. Like his elder brother's his early life had been very adventurous. He was taken prisoner at the age of thirteen by Fairfax at Oxford: at fifteen he escaped to Holland, and by the time he was two and twenty he had served, not in the English army only, but also in the French and in the Spanish. At the Restoration, when he was only twenty-six, he was made Lord High Admiral: and if his victory over the Dutch in 1665 was due more to good luck than to good management, and if his drawn battle with De Ruyter brought him no great credit as an admiral, his naval career was at least free from serious disaster.

The duke was by nature candid, sincere, courageous, honourable and straightforward; he was industrious, attentive to detail, prudent in his expenses, and, in