“But,” says the King, “the fallacy of this argument may easily appeare, by my late preceding description of the skyey meteors. For even as the smoaky Vapors sucked up by the sunne and stay’d in the lowest and colde region of the Ayre, are there contracted into clouds, and turned into Raine, and such other watery meteors: so this nasty smoke sucked up by the Nose, and imprisoned in the cold and moist braines, is by their colde and wet faculty, turned and cast forth againe in watery distillations, and so are you made free and purged of nothing, but _that_ wherewith you wilfully burdened yourselves.” Is it any wonder people kept on smoking? He reasoned in much the same way about church matters; is it any wonder the Scotch would not have Anglicanism thrust upon them? The King died at last (1625), aged fifty-nine, at his palace of Theobalds, a little out of London, and very famous, as I have said, for its fine gardens; and these gardens this prematurely old and shattered man did greatly love; loved perhaps more than his children. I do not think Charles mourned for him very grievously; but, of a surety there was no warrant for the half-hinted allegation of Milton’s (at a later day) that the royal son was concerned in some parricidal scheme. There was, however, nowhere great mourning for James. _A New King and some Literary Survivors._ The new King, his son, was a well-built young fellow of twenty-five, of fine appearance, well taught, and just on the eve of his marriage to Henrietta of France. He had a better taste than his father, and lived a more orderly life; indeed, he was every way decorous save in an obstinate temper and in absurd notions about his kingly prerogative. He loved play-going and he loved poetry, though not so accessible as his father had been to the buffoonery of the water-poet Taylor, or the tipsy obeisance of old Ben Jonson. For Ben Jonson was still living, not yet much over fifty, though with his great bulk and reeling gait seeming nearer seventy; now, too, since Shakespeare is gone, easily at the head of all the literary workers in London; indeed, in some sense always at the head by reason of his dogged self-insistence and his braggadocio. All the street world[33] knows him, as he swaggers along the Strand to his new jolly rendezvous at the Devil Tavern, near St. Dunstan’s, in Fleet Street--not far off from the Temple Church--where he and his fellows meet in the Apollo Chamber, over whose door Ben has written: “Welcome, all who lead or follow To the oracle of Apollo! Here he speaks out of his pottle On the tripos--his tower-bottle,” etc.