The origin of some of these manias must have been whimsical enough; but our concern is with the fact that in the reign of the first Charles there became prominent as pets in England a race of small dogs known as the King Charles spaniel, and that at a later period the Blenheim spaniel came into notice. Both races were and are aristocrats of the first water, connected in the very names of the species with royal and ducal houses. I speak as an ignorant woman; but my impression is, that the King Charles is of French nationality, and that the little brute not only came to England in the train of pretty, foolish, flighty Henrietta Maria, but that it made its appearance in Scotland two generations earlier, in the suite of the beautiful and miserable Mary Stewart. Unless tradition lie, such a dog crept beside the block at Fotheringhay— “The little dog that licked her hand, the last of all the crowd Which sunned themselves beneath her glance, and round her footsteps bowed.” King Charles spaniels were at a premium in England in the reigns of the two sovereigns of that name. I don’t doubt that they were under a cloud during the Protectorate, and that stout Oliver Cromwell owned none of them; but we find one in the study of Sir Isaac Newton, in its ignorant unconsciousness working dire mischief among the philosopher’s priceless calculations, and drawing down on its empty head the mildest rebuke—“Diamond, Diamond! thou little knowest the mischief thou hast done.” However, I think the spaniels fell somewhat into disgrace, in consequence of the bad company they kept in the second Charles’ reign; and because that most unheroic of merry monarchs played with his little dogs, and fed his ducks, when he ought to have been fighting the Dutch on the Thames, or relieving the sufferers in plague-stricken London.