When Charles grew suspicious of Shaftesbury, and the Earl was shorn of his power, no little of the odium fell upon his _protégé_; and for a time there was an enforced--or at least a very prudent--exile for Locke, at one time in France and at another in Holland. It was on these absences that his pen was busiest. In 1689 he returned to England in the trail of William III.; came to new honors under that monarch; published his great work, which had been simmering in his brain for ten years or more; made a great fame at home and abroad, and wrote wisely on many topics. Meanwhile his old enemy, the asthma, was afflicting him sorely. London smoke was a torture to him; but when he went only so little distance away (twenty miles northward) as the country home of his friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham, a delightful calm came to him. He was given his own apartment there; never did hosts more enjoy a guest; and never a guest enjoyed more the immunities and kindnesses which Sir Francis and Lady bestowed upon him. Twelve or fourteen years of idyllic life for the philosopher followed, in the wooded alleys and upon the charming lawns of the old manor-house of Oates, in the county of Essex; there were leisurely, coy journeys to London; there were welcoming visits from old friends; there was music indoors, and music--of the birds--without. Bachelors rarely come to those quietudes and joys of a home-life which befell the old age of Locke, and equipped all his latter days with such serenities as were a foretaste of heaven. He does not lie in Westminster Abbey: I think he would have rebelled among the poets: he sleeps more quietly in the pretty church-yard of High-Lavor, a little way off, northward, from the New Park of Epping Forest. _End of the King and Others._ The lives of these two men--Dryden and Locke--have brought us past the whole reach of Charles II.’s reign. That ignoble monarch has met his fate courageously; some days before the immediate end he knew it was coming, and had kind words for those about him. He died on a Friday,[95] and on the Sunday before had held great revel in the famous gallery of Whitehall; next day came the warnings, and then the blow--paralytic, or other such--which shrivelled his showy powers, and brought his swarthy face to a whiteness and a death-like pallor that shocked those gay people who belonged in the palace. Then came the scourging with hot iron, and the administration of I know not what foul drugs that belonged to the blind medication of that day--all in vain; there were suspicions of poison; but the poison he died of was of his own making, and he had been taking it ever since boyhood. A Catholic priest came to him stealthily and made the last promises to him he was ever to hear. To a courtier, who came again and again, he apologized--showing his courtesy to the last. “I’m an awful time in dying,” he said; and to somebody else--his brother, perhaps--“don’t let poor Nell Gwynne starve;” and so died.