be held blameless. Yet the hatred shewn towards Choyce Drollery far exceeded all the rancour against these bolder sinners, or the previous year's delightful miscellany of merriment and true poetry, the Wit's Interpreter of industrious J[ohn] C[otgrave]; to whom, despite multitudinous typographical errors, we owe thanks, both for Wit's Interpreter and for the wilderness of dramatic beauties, his Wit's Treasury: bearing the same date of 1655.

It was not because of sins against taste and public or private morals, (although, we admit, it has some few of these, sufficient to afford a pretext for persecutors, who would have been equally bitter had it possessed virginal purity:) but in consequence of other and more dangerous ingredients, that Choyce Drollery aroused such a storm. Not disgust, but fear of its influence in reviving loyalty, prompted the order of its extermination. Readers at this later day, might easily fail to notice all that stirred the loyal sentiments of chivalric devotion, and consequently made the fierce FifthMonarchy men hate the small volume worse than the Apocrypha or Ikon Basilike. Herein was to be found the clever "Jack of Lent's" account of loyal preparations made in London to receive the newly-wedded Queen, Henrietta Maria, when she came from France, in 1625, escorted by the Duke of Buckingham, who compromised her sister by his rash attentions: Buck

ingham, whom King Charles loved so well that the favouritism shook his throne, even after Felton's dagger in 1628 had rid the land of the despotic courtier. Here, also, a more grievous offence to the Regicides, was still recorded in austere grandeur of verse, from no common hireling pen, but of some scholar like unto Henry King, of Chichester, the loyal "New-Year's Wish" (p. 48) presented to King Charles at the beginning of 1638, when the North was already in rebellion: wherein. men read, what at that time had not been deemed profanity or blasphemy, the praise and faithful service of some hearts who held their monarch only second to their Saviour. Referring to their hope that the personal approach of the King might cure the evils of the disturbed realm, it is written :

You, like our sacred and indulgent Lord,
When the too-stout Apostle drew his sword,
When he mistooke some secrets of the cause,
And in his furious zeale disdained the Lawes,
Forgetting true Religion doth lye

On prayers, not swords against authority:
You, like our substitute of horrid fate,
That are next Him we most should imitate,
Shall like to Him rebuke with wiser breath,

Such furious zeale, but not reveng'd with death.
Like him, the wound that's giv'n you strait shall heal
Then calm by precept such mistaking zeal."

Here was a sincere, unflinching recognition of Divine Right, such as the faction in power could not possibly abide. Even the culpable weakness and ingratitude of Charles, in abandoning Strafford, Laud, and other champions to their unscrupulous destroyers, had not made true-hearted Cavaliers falter in their faith to him. As the best of moralists declares :

"Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."

These loyal sentiments being embodied in print within our Choyce Drollery, suitable to sustain the fealty of the defeated Cavaliers to the successor of the "Royal Martyr," it was evident that the Restoration must be merely a question of time. "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all !"

To more than one of those who had sat in the illconstituted and miscalled High Court of Justice, during the closing days of 1648-9, there must have been, ever and anon, as the years rolled by, a shuddering recollection of the words written anew upon the wall in characters of living fire. They had shown themselves familiar, in one sense much too familiar, with the phraseology but not the teaching of Scripture. To them the Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin needed no

b

Daniel come to judgment for interpretation. The Banquet was not yet over; the subjugated people, whom they had seduced from their allegiance by a dream of winning freedom from exactions, were still sullenly submissive; the desecrated cups and challices of the Church they had despoiled, believing it overthrown for ever, had been, in many cases, melted down for plunder, in others, sold as common merchandize : and yet no thunder heard. But, however defiantly they might bear themselves, however resolute to crush down every attempt at revolt against their own authority, the men in power could not disguise from one another that there were heavings of the earth on which they trod, coming from no reverberations of their footsteps, but telling of hollowness and insecurity below. They were already suspicious among themselves, no longer hiding personal spites and jealousies, the separate ambition of uncongenial factions, which had only united for a season against the monarchy and hierarchy, but now began to fall asunder, mutually envenomed and intolerant. Presbyterian, Independent, and Nondescript-Enthusiast, while combined together of late, had been acknowledged as a power invincible, a Three-fold Cord that bound the helpless Victim to an already bloody altar. The strands of it were now unwinding, and there scarcely needed much prophetic wisdom to discern that one by one they could soon be broken.

To us, from these considerations, there is intense attraction in the Choyce Drollery, since it so narrowly escaped from flames to which it had been judicially condemned.

§ 2. THE TWO COURTS, IN 1656.

Ar this date many a banished or self-exiled Royalist, dwelling in the Low Countries, but whose heart remained in England, drew a melancholy contrast beb tween the remembered past of Whitehall and the gloomy present. With honest Touchstone, he could. say, "Now am I in Arden! the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content."

Meanwhile, in the beloved Warwickshire glades, herds of swine were routing noisily for acorns, dropped amid withered leaves under branches of the Royal Oaks. They were watched by boys, whose chins would not be past the first callow down of promissory beards when Restoration-day should come with shouts of welcome throughout the land.

In 1656 our Charles Stuart was at Bruges, now and then making a visit to Cologne, often getting into difficulties through the misconduct of his unruly followers, and already quite enslaved by Dalilahs, syrens against whom his own shrewd sense was powerless to defend him. For amusement he read his favourite