But no person should attempt to describe the life either of Charles II or Nell Gwynn who has the slightest tendency to moralise; for neither the wittiest of the Stuarts nor the clever little actress can be explained on conventional codes of morality. It is the attempt to consider Charles II as if he had been a child of Queen Victoria, and to moralise over him, that makes most books about him so repulsive. But Nell did not try to enter politics; she resisted the temptation to be queen, even if the opportunity had ever offered. She knew that her only function in life was to charm; and with the coldly realistic outlook on life that is common to all prostitutes, she knew that in the position of a queen she must come up against the harsh facts of reality, and that, like Anne Boleyn, she would probably lose her head in every sense of the word. Mere power to charm is not for a queen. Nell’s memory, owing to her wisdom and self-restraint, has been tenderly treated by the English people, in spite of that prudery which has scoffed at the real cleverness of her royal lover. Nell Gwynn, to use her own coarse words, was content to remain “the Protestant whore,” the cleverness of her tongue enabled her to keep her place at Court against all rivals, and her charm even impresses us to-day, who have never seen her dance nor heard her cockney witticisms. “Let not poor Nelly” fade from our memories. Henri Quatre The great thing about Henri Quatre, from the point of view of a medical essayist, is that no person of an anti-syphilitic fury will expect him to be classed as an awful warning of the devastations of that disease. Poor Henri died of good honest assassination, the product of an even worse disease than syphilis—sectarian intolerance. A disease which could cause the awful wars of Henri’s own life, and a few years later the most dreadful of all wars—the Thirty Years’—need not fear to be classed alongside even the most disreputable and destructive of human disorders. And the fact that nobody in these terrible wars ever had the least idea why people were killing each other only makes the marvel of sectarian intolerance even more amazing than it is. Of course, there is no such thing as _religious_ intolerance. Religion should make war impossible, and should inculcate tolerance for other people’s opinions. Did the good-natured and kindly gods of old Greece ever breed a religious war? Did anybody ever go swashbuckling in helmet and armour for Zeus or Aphrodite? Unless perhaps Aphrodite to him meant some individual woman who had been raped from her home, such as Helen of Troy; and Helen probably meant some vague abstraction of a Greek woman as opposed to a barbarian, if she did not symbolise Greek trade through the Hellespont, obstructed by Trojan robber bands. The Marxian materialist view of history grows rather attractive when it is applied to people who have been dead three thousand years.