In this hard world, whose members only see the application of parables that teach us love and mercy on Sundays, it is easier to find prodigals to repent than fathers to forgive. But for our hope and comfort, _that_ parable has another and a higher meaning. Alsatia was linked hand in glove with the Court of the Restoration. ’Twas often but a chapel of ease to the backstairs of Whitehall, and many a great courtier, ruined at basset with the king and his beauties the night before, found his level on the morrow in this vile slum-playing butt, playing cards on a broken pair of bellows. But now, 1697, Whitehall itself is gone. The major part of the enormous pile went by fire in ’91; now the rest, or all but Holbein’s Gate, and the blood-stained Banqueting-house, has fallen a prey to the “devouring element.” Whitehall, then, has gone by the board. In vain now to look for Horn Chamber, or Cabinet Room, or the stone gallery that flanked Privy Garden, where the imperious, depraved Louise de la Quérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, lived amid “French tapestry, Japan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braseners, all of massive silver, and out of number.” All these things, worthy Master Evelyn, of Sayes Court, Deptford (who about this time has let his said mansion and ground to Peter Velikè, czar of Muscovy, and thinks him but an evil tenant, with his uncouth, uncleanly Russian fashions, his driving of wheelbarrows through neatly-trimmed hedges, and spitting over polished andirons, and gorging himself with raw turnips sliced in brandy)--worthy, sententious Evelyn shall see these things no more. Nay, nor that “glorious gallery,” quoted from his description innumerable times, where was the dissolute king “sitting toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, &c.; a French boy singing love-songs, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and others were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000_l._ in gold before them. Six days after, all was in the dust.” And worse.