James I. was inordinately attached to the sports of the chace: it was indeed the only manly passion which our British Solomon ever manifested; his dress was of the forest-green, and his only severity was in executing the game-laws[69]. Able hunters were the bribes by which the English courtiers endeavoured to secure his favour[70], while he was yet but king of Scotland; and, in England, his perpetual hunting expeditions were censured by his prelates[71], and their oppressive duration deprecated by his subjects, who, to render their complaints more palatable, contrived, upon one occasion, to make a favourite hound convey a hint of the burthen, which his long residence at a hunting seat imposed upon the neighbourhood[72]. Even in the most advanced state of his age and imbecility, when unable to sit on horseback without assistance, he contrived to pursue the chace by being laced or tied up in his saddle! When we add to this vehement passion for hunting, the spirit of extravagant dissipation, which discharged itself "in shows, sights, and banquetings, from morn to eve[73]," where even the ladies abandoned their sobriety, the age of James might well be characterised, as in the Masque, A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time. To show how justly the middle part of the seventeenth century was characterised, as under the influence of Mars, we have only to mention the great civil war, which so long ravaged the whole kingdom. The manners of the court of Charles II., so notoriously dissolute and licentious, when, as our author says in the Epilogue, Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed, amply vindicate Dryden for placing the period in which they were fashionable under the dominion of the queen of Cyprus. The moral, by which the whole masque is winded up, was sadly true. The frivolity of James the First's sports would have been admitted by the sapient monarch himself-- His sport had a beast in view. But it is less credible, were it not a historical fact, that the wars of Charles the First "brought nothing about;" since royal prerogative, and popular encroachment, far from being adjusted by so many years bloodshed, were as much themes of mutual dissention betwixt the Court and the House of Commons in the reign of Charles II. as during that of his father. But so bloody a lesson was not entirely lost. The contending parties at the Revolution lived too near that eventful period, not to be aware of the direful consequences of civil war, and thence, by mutual concession, were determined to avoid the repetition of similar calamities. The nation gained by the compromise; for freedom is always benefited by the equal balance of contending factions, and as certainly suffers by the decided ascendancy of either. A thousand lampoons bear witness, that, during the reign of Venus, under the auspices of Charles II. her ----Lovers were all untrue.