Hers was a youth of picturesque loyalties, one of them to the lost cause of the Stuarts, a confessed congenital bias. The Irish Jacobities, of whom there were many, had “claimed the Stuarts as of the Milesian line, fondly deducing them from Fergus.” Born into that direct succession of race loyalty, she was in addition, (and this seems to be the true argument) incalculably beguiled by the sheer fascination of that luckless house. Her Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second ties you a pretty nosegay of the oak twig and the white rose. How should she not have loved Charles II., if only that he was, in her own words, “a choice wag?” “Charles might have confessed with Elia, ‘How I like to be liked, and what don’t I do to be liked!’” Certainly His ill-starred Majesty could have desired no liking more whole-hearted, albeit discriminating, more merrily tolerant than hers. He had cast his magnetic spell upon her pen and it turned to some good-natured vindicating of his varied parts. Perhaps she never took her adherence very seriously, off the printed page. She was beguiled by picturesqueness, not so much concerned with lineal rights; perhaps, also, it tickled an impish fancy to repudiate the “dull Georgian farce.” But Charles never had a more humorous apologist, one who gave him full value as an apostle of good taste and of a “wheedling charm.” The sum of her appraisement is of a captivating genius who had found himself “in the king business” and got addled and spoiled. And who knows how she must have loved him for his adaptability to portraiture of a pen like hers, and for the rush and glow of the Restoration, the very circumstances that inspired her Hazlitt to his glorious inventory of rustling silks and waving plumes, of gems and people! The time and the gay immortalities of it go to her head. “There was an astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright were in full blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away.” She adores “the sworded poets of the Civil Wars, with their scarcely exerted aptitude for the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of star-dust along the pages of the anthologies.” And it was, this star-dust of the period, immediate to one of her own dreams, a labor she delighted in: the making of a perfect anthology of the seventeenth century.