“The good man’s share In life was gall and bitterness of soul; . . . . . . . While luxury In palaces lay straining her low thought, To form unreal wants, and heaven-born truths And moderation fair, wore the red marks Of superstition’s scourge.” Imagination, as we read the history of the later Stuarts, ever and anon places before us side by side the confessor’s dungeon and the voluptuary’s chamber. The scenes which the Count de Grammont depicts, the characters which he draws, and the intrigues which he unravels; the entire want of moral principle, the absence of common shame, the bare-aced profligacy, the devices to excite and gratify the lowest passions, which he, who had lived at Court and shared in its pleasures, so graphically and yet so complacently portrays, make us blush for our race. The reaction from the simple manners and severe virtues of the Commonwealth was tremendous. Courage, or rather an irritable sense of honour, leading the gallant to wreak revenge upon any who offended him, came to be the chief virtue of Cavalier Courtiers. Vices and crimes were treated as petty foibles: beauty, liveliness, and wit alone were counted meritorious; and “the manners of Chesterfield united with the morals of Rochefoucault.” The Count’s book is indeed a reflection of the age--elegant in style, but licentious in character--a veil of embroidered gauze cast over a putrescent corpse. [Sidenote: 1685.] In the midst of this depravity death suddenly appeared. Art has portrayed two scenes at Whitehall which point a moral never to be forgotten. The one represents the Sunday night when Evelyn saw inexpressible profaneness, gambling, and dissoluteness--the King sitting and toying with his concubines, the French boy singing love songs, and the Courtiers playing basset with a bank of 2,000 guineas piled up on the table. The other exhibits what was witnessed a few days afterwards in the anterooms of the chamber where the Royal Sybarite awaited the summons of the Almighty; noblemen and ladies, with heartless etiquette, performing their Court attendance; prelates at a distance, hoping for an opportunity to administer to him the last offices of that Church, which had called the dying man its Defender, whilst, as he is in the act of renouncing communion with it, a delicate hand is seen extended from behind a timorously opened door, to receive a glass of water to assist in swallowing the wafer, laid upon the Royal tongue by a disguised priest. These pictures[132] illustrate the mutability of earthly grandeur, and the righteous retribution of God upon a life spent in sin. Charles II. died on the 6th of February, 1685,--within three weeks of William Jenkyn. [Sidenote: DEATH OF CHARLES.]