“Oh, but who cares what people will think two or three hundred years hence? Waller’s verses please us now. The people who come after me can please themselves, and may read _Comus_ to their hearts’ content. I know his lordship reads Milton, as he does Shakespeare, and all the cramped old play-wrights of Elizabeth’s time. Henri, sing us that song of Waller’s, ‘Go, lovely rose.’ I would give all Mr. Milton has written for that perfection.” They were sitting on the terrace above the river in the golden light of an afternoon that was fair and warm as May, though by the calendar ’twas March. The capricious climate had changed from austere winter to smiling spring. Skylarks were singing over the fields at Hampstead, and over the plague-pits at Islington, and all London was rejoicing in blue skies and sunshine. Trade was awakening from a death-like sleep. The theatres were closed; but there were plays acted now and then at Court. The New and the Middle Exchange were alive with beribboned fops and painted belles. It was Lady Fareham’s visiting-day. The tall windows of her saloon were open to the terrace, French windows that reached from ceiling to floor, like those at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and which Hyacinth had substituted for the small Jacobean casements, when she took possession of her husband’s ancestral mansion. Saloon and terrace were one on a balmy afternoon like this; and her ladyship’s guests wandered in and out at their pleasure. Her lackeys, handing chocolate and cakes on silver or gold salvers, were so many as to seem ubiquitous; and in the saloon, presided over by Angela, there was a still choicer refreshment to be obtained at a tea-table, where tiny cups of the new China drink were dispensed to those who cared for exotic novelties. “Prythee, take your guitar and sing to us, were it but to change the conversation,” cried Hyacinth; and De Malfort took up his guitar and began, in the sweetest of tenors, “Go, lovely rose.” He had all her ladyship’s visitors, chiefly feminine, round him before he had finished the first verse. That gift of song, that exquisite touch upon the Spanish guitar, were irresistible. Lord Fareham landed at the lower flight of steps as the song ended, and came slowly along the terrace, saluting his wife’s friends with a grave courtesy. He brought an atmosphere of silence and restraint with him, it seemed to some of his wife’s visitors, for the babble that usually follows the end of a song was wanting. Most of Lady Fareham’s friends affected literature, and professed familiarity with two books which had caught the public taste on opposite sides of the Channel. In London people quoted Butler, and vowed there was no wit so racy as the wit in “Hudibras.” In Paris the cultured were all striving to talk like Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims,” which had lately delighted the Gallic mind by the frank cynicism that drew everybody’s attention to somebody else’s failings.