Three years,--’97, ’98, ’99. _Ah! laissez-moi pleurer ces années mortes._ Let me linger over these three ignored years. They were a transition time. They are lost in the deeper shadow cast by the vicious bonfire that Charles’s _roués_ and beauties lighted up--a shadow shortly to be dispelled by the purer radiance of an Augustan era of literature. Pepys and Evelyn are so minute, so lifelike, that between their word-paintings, and those of the _Spectator_ and _Tatler_, there seems a great black blank. No seven-league boots are necessary for me to stride back to my subject, and to the time when my little-boy-hero is forming his earliest acquaintance with the Old Bailey stones. I said that I wanted those last three dying years of the seventeenth century. Let me take them, and endeavour to make the best of them, even when I compress some of their characteristics within the compass of a single London day. The century, then, is on its last legs. The town seems to have quite done with the Stuarts, socially speaking, although politically another Stuart will reign: a dethroned Stuart is actually at St. Germains, maundering with his confessors, and conspiring with his shabby refugee courtiers; thinking half of assassinating the abhorred Dutchman, and making Père la Chaise Archbishop of Canterbury _in partibus_, and half of slinking away to La Trappe, wearing a hair shirt, and doing grave-digging on his own account for good and all. Politically, too, this crooked-wayed, impracticable Stuart’s son and grandson will give the world some trouble till the year 1788, when, a hundred years after the Revolution, a worn-out, _blasé_ sensualist, called the Young Pretender, dies at Rome, leaving a brother, the Cardinal of York, who survived to be a pensioner of George the Third, and bequeathed to him those Stuart papers, which, had their contents been known at the Cockpit, Westminster, half a century before, would have caused the fall of many a head as noble as Derwentwater’s, as chivalrous as Charles Ratcliffe’s, and broken many a heart as loving and true as Flora Macdonald’s or Lady Nithisdale’s. But with the Restoration-Stuart period, London town has quite done. Rochester has died penitent, Buckingham bankrupt and forlorn. Archbishop Tenison has preached Nelly Gwynn’s funeral sermon; Portsmouth, Davies, are no more heard of; Will Chiffinch can procure for kings no more: the rigid Dutchman scorns such painted children of dirt; Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, has married one Fielding, a swindling caricature of a “beau;” Wycherly is old and broken, and the iron of the Fleet has entered into his soul; and poor noble old John Dryden, twitted as a renegade, neglected, unpensioned, and maligned, is savagely writing the finest “copy” that has issued yet from that grand fertile brain, writing it with a Spartan fortitude and persistence, and ever and anon giving left-legged Jacob Tonson a sound verbal trouncing, when the publisher would palm on the poet