Thus far had proceeded this tedious affair of state; the nation was beginning to consider its accomplishment with diminished aversion, and a few months would have brought a Spanish Princess of Wales to England, when all this goodly and fair-wrought edifice was destroyed by the temerity of the man who was the evil spirit of the age. Charles’s youth and inexperience readily lent a willing ear to the glowing description which Buckingham recounted of the celebrated journey. His young melancholy was excited into cheerfulness, when he dwelt on the hoped-for and surprised rapture with which his destined bride would receive a prince whose unusual gallantry spurned at the laws of political interest, and whose chivalric feeling had broken through state negotiation, and, despising to woo by treaty, had brought him to her feet to win her by his merits. His blood warmed at the popularity he would acquire by such a step, from a nation famed for its knightly devotion to the fair, and whose watch-word, according to one of its poets, has ever been, “love and the ladyes.” Charles would have been a dull lover, indeed, had he only, like other princes, thought his bride not worth the fetching. He would have been doubly dull and undeserving had he paused to consider the bearings, the risks, or the probable absurdity of the act. There was a certain political danger; but Charles, young, and a lover, refused to see it; he was tearing the bonds which might bind more ignoble princes, but were too weak to confine him; he rent the shackles which proxies force on their principals, and stood in his own princely strength to win a prize which has often lost the world.