Shadwell writes, in his ‘Woman Captain,’ anno 1680:--“It is out of fashion now, for great men to keep fools;” but though princes and nobles began to prefer the society of witty and intellectual gentlemen to the paid-for nonsense of hirelings who were said, by periphrasis, to have been born at Little Witham, the old taste did not entirely expire either at court or in private households. Anthony à Wood mentions Dr. John Donne, son of the celebrated Donne, as “an atheistical buffoon, a banterer, and a person of over-free thought; yet valued by Charles the Second.” The court of this monarch assuredly little resembled that of his contemporary sovereign, the King of Siam, touching which, Captain Erwin told Pepys (17th August, 1666), “how the King of Syam seldom goes out without thirty or forty thousand people with him, and not a word spoke, nor a hum or a cough in the whole company to be heard.” In other respects, the difference does not seem to have been remarkable, for the Captain was assured by a native interpreter, that “our (the Siamese) King do not live by meat or drink, but by having great lies told him.” The reign of James II. is barren, as far as it is in connection with the subject I pursue; and it is tolerably certain that throughout the reign of William III., the only official court fool in England was the one who came over in the suite of the Czar Peter. His presence marked the distinction then existing between a civilized and intellectual, and an uncivilized and ignorant court.