woods the royal beeches and elms of Hampton Court bent their boughs in the summer breeze to their majesties and the courtly train in greeting and in welcome to the palace associated with memories and traditions, not all of them too fair and consolatory, of “my good Lord Cardinal” and his tyrannical lord. In reasonable pastime and amusements the average subject of King Charles’s day followed the suit of the Court. A sour forbiddance and abhorrence of amusements had not yet come to be the order of the day. If fasts were duly kept, festivals were in nowise forgotten. The “all work and no play making Jack a dull boy” observance was not yet rendered paramount by the prick-eared, aggressive spirit of Puritanism; for the master enjoyed a sober junketing and relaxation every whit as much as the ’prentice loved his turn at the quintain, or a merry round with the maid of his choice, or a stage play in an inn yard. As to the shameful “sport” of bear-baiting, to give the Puritan his due, he did excellent work indeed when he succeeded in stamping it out; though his consideration for the bear appears to have been somewhat circumscribed, if, as more than one account tells, generally the first proceeding was to kill the bear. Anything less than sweeping reform and a _tabula rasa_ savoured ill to Puritan nostrils; and while Praise-God-Barebones took away the bears, he forgot the abhorrence of nature,—human nature notably—for a vacuum, and that in a few years the lack of all rational diversions, the pulling down of maypoles, the silencing of all music but psalm-singing, would drive man and woman to try and drown care in the pottle-pot. It was small wonder that the English people so soon came to regard the Commonwealth as a not utterly unmitigated blessing. The promised millennium grew to be unsatisfactory to all but the very elect; and outside that pale, the desire for the King to have his own again was to spread fast and wide. The intrinsic worth of that King they were less concerned about; and if, after a few years’ experience of the Merry Monarch’s rule, they found it full of flaws, they endured as they might: not perhaps altogether forgetful that if the young Prince had not been hounded from his country to herd with all sorts and conditions of swashbucklers and adventurers, finding no rest for the sole of his foot, no true and sober counsel in the very years that temptations are strongest upon all men—especially men of his temperament—their restored King’s virtues might have outshone his shortcomings.