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CHARLES THE SECOND.

AMONG all the English Sovereigns there is no instance of a popular favourite to whose memory such injustice has been done, intellectually, as it has to the so-called 'Merry Monarch.' The popular conception of Charles Stuart the Younger-and among the general English public there is no king of whom there is a more distinct conception-is of an easy, good-natured, if not good-hearted voluptuary-socially an accomplished gentleman and wit, but with neither the capacity nor the desire for government or serious affairs, who managed to saunter through a reign of a quarter of a century, getting as much pleasure and irresponsibility as he could for himself amidst the general scramble of unprincipled men for power and place; but without the enterprise or perseverance necessary to any scheme for establishing the autocracy of the Crown, and with such a wholesome dread of going again on his travels,' or renewing the fatal scene at the window in Whitehall, as to afford a sure guarantee that he would retreat from any such attempt on the first

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serious demonstration of popular resentment. might be expected, there is much in this conception of Charles which belonged to his real character; yet as a representation of that character as a whole it is defective and delusive.

Whatever may be our difficulty in ascertaining what his real character was-and there are remarkable difficulties in his case-there can be no doubt of one point, and that is that Charles was by far the ablest of the English Stuarts. This is not high praise in itself, but we have unexceptionable evidence that as an individual, as distinguished from a Ruler, there have been few men who have mounted the throne of England who can bear comparison with him in intellectual capabilities. Sir William Temple -who whatever may be his disqualifications for judging of the character of Charles as a whole, was eminently qualified for forming a correct judgment of him in this point of view-gives us the following estimate, with which I may fitly introduce the subject. Speaking of an interview which he had with the King, he says:-I never saw him in better humour, nor ever knew a more agreeable conversation when he was so, and where he was pleased to be familiar; great quickness of conception, great pleasantness of wit, with great variety of knowledge, more observation, and truer judgment of men than one would have imagined by so careless and easy a manner as was natural to him in all he did and said.

He desired nothing but that he might be easy himself, and that everybody else should be so.' The last sentence, which conveys an inference and speculation on Temple's own part, whether true or false, stands, of course, on another basis of evidence from the specific results of his own observation, recorded in the sentences which precede, and which are tolerably conclusive as to the marked capacity of Charles in matters of serious import.

The character of Charles, whatever it may have been originally, appears to me to have been influenced in its practical development by two somewhat conflicting circumstances. He was the representative of the principle of legitimacy, and he was an adventurer. Born in the purple, he had scarcely time to realise the notions of high prerogative and right divine which were in the ascendant in the Court of Charles the First, when at the age of twelve he was placed in the nominal command of a guard raised by his father, at the outbreak of a great struggle, in which the validity of those royal pretensions was subjected to the severe practical test of civil war; and from that time his life for the next four years was the wandering one of a soldier, varied only by the hollow and fleeting honours of a puppet-court. When even a remote island of his father's dominions was no longer a safe seat for this factitious royalty, he became at the age of sixteen a refugee in a foreign country; and for nearly fourteen years he led the

life of a needy adventurer and an almost hopeless Pretender, scarcely relieved by the short and doubtful interlude of his roving royalty as 'King of Scots.' When at the age of thirty-mature in body and mind-he at length acquired his long-deferred inheritance, except so far as his personal pretensions as a disinherited prince, and their occasional recognition by foreign rulers might have modified it, his character had been essentially moulded in the type of an adventurer. A certain amount of ability, or at least of adroitness, presence of mind, and self-reliance must necessarily be the result of such a school of circumstances. The amount of enterprise engendered may be a variable quantity, but the virtues of endurance, patience, and (in some form or other, and to some extent) of self-control, are necessary products of this discipline. Much, of course, must depend on the quality of the original material thus affected, and the natural temperament and intellectual capacity of Charles must form a principal and determining element in any analysis of his character; but (be these what they might) he could never escape from his recollections of half a generation as a struggling adventurer.

It might seem at first as if there could have been little more in common between Charles and the English world into which his 'Restoration' (as it was called) really first introduced him, than a recognition of those hereditary pretensions which the

country of his birth was at length proclaiming with wild and vague enthusiasm. His own past lifewhich must always have been to him the most thoroughly realised portion of his life-lay quite apart from that of England during the same period, and it might seem that there could be little sympathy between the two. Yet the life of Englishmen at home had also been, during the preceding twenty years, very much that of adventurers, full of strange vicissitudes, new and untrodden ways, and restless uncertainty and change. A desire for repose, under almost any conditions, had for the time succeeded the fever of their aspirations for the highest types of national and individual life. They too welcomed the restoration of the exiled Stuarts as an epoch not of hope but of rest, in which they might forget what they had been, in a dream of indolent pleasure. What to Charles was the realisation of his wildest hopes was with the nation really (notwithstanding the external delirium of joy) the resignation of disappointed hope. The adventures of both People and Ruler had ended, and they welcomed each other, and exchanged greetings, with a not entirely dissimilar retrospect, and with identical wishes for the present, though their feelings were really essentially different, and as such gave no security for harmony between them in the future. The public mind in England had been nearly as much affected and demoralised by the spirit of the past as