In 1661 the galleries of York House were famous for the antique busts and statues that had belonged to Rubens on his visit to this country, when he painted James I. in jackboots being hauled heavenward by a flock of angels. In the riverside gardens--not far, I presume, from the water gate--stood John of Bologna’s “Cain and Abel,” which the King of Spain had given to Prince Charles on his luckless visit to Madrid, and which Charles had bestowed on his dangerous favourite.[231] The great rooms, even then emblazoned with the lions and peacocks of the Villiers and Manners families, were traversed by Evelyn, who describes the house and gardens as much ruined through neglect. Pepys also, who thrust his nose into every show-place, went to York House when the Russian ambassador was there, and rapturously and poetically vows he saw “the remains of the noble soul of the late Duke of Buckingham appearing in the house in every place, in the door-cases and the windows,”[232]--odd places for a noble soul to make its abode! The Duke of Buckingham, in King Charles’s days, had turned York House into a treasury of art. He bought Rubens’s private collection of pictures for £10,000, Sir Henry Wotten having purchased them for him at Venice. He had seventeen Tintorets, and thirteen works of Paul Veronese. For an “Ecce Homo” by Titian, containing nineteen figures as large as life, he refused £7000 from the Earl of Arundel. During the Civil Wars the pictures were removed by his son to Antwerp, and there sold by auction. Who can look down Buckingham Street in the twilight, and see the pediment of the old water gate of the duke’s house, without repeating to himself the scourging lines of Dryden when he drew Buckingham as Zimri?-- “A man so various that he seem’d to be Not one but all mankind’s epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by turns, and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”[233] In vain Settle eulogised the mercurial and licentious spendthrift. Settle’s verse is forgotten, but we all remember Pope’s ghastly but exaggerated picture of the rake’s death in “the worst inn’s worst room”-- “No wit to flatter left of all his store, No fool to laugh at, which he valued more, There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends, And fame, this lord of useless thousand ends.” The first Duke of Buckingham, to judge by Clarendon, who was the friend of all friends of absolutism, must have been a man of magnificent generosity and “flowing courtesy,” a staunch friend, and a desperate and unrelenting hater; but he was an enemy of the people; and had he survived the knife of Felton he must have been the first of a faithless king’s bad counsellors to perish on the scaffold. [Illustration: THE WATER GATE, 1860.]