This is an instance of conjectural evidence, where an historical fact seems established on no other authority than the ingenuity of a student, exercised in his library, on a private and secret event, a century after it had occurred.  The diamond seal of Charles the First may yet be discovered in the treasures of the Persian sovereign.

Warburton, who had ranged with keen delight through the age of Charles the First, the noblest and the most humiliating in our own history, and in that of the world, perpetually instructive, has justly observed the king’s passion for the fine arts.  It was indeed such, that had the reign of Charles the First proved prosperous, that sovereign about 1640 would have anticipated those tastes, and even that enthusiasm, which are still almost foreign to the nation.

The mind of Charles the First was moulded by the Graces.  His favourite Buckingham was probably a greater favourite for those congenial tastes, and the frequent exhibition of those splendid masques and entertainments, which combined all the picture of ballet dances with the voice of music; the charms of the verse of Jonson, the scenic machinery of Inigo Jones, and the variety of fanciful devices of Gerbier, the duke’s architect, the bosom friend of Rubens.[188] There was a costly magnificence in the fetes at York House, the residence of Buckingham, of which few but curious researchers are aware:  they eclipsed the splendour of the French Court; for Bassompiere, in one of his despatches, declares he had never witnessed a similar magnificence.  He describes the vaulted apartments, the ballets at supper, which were proceeding between the services with various representations, theatrical changes, and those of the tables, and the music; the duke’s own contrivance, to prevent the inconvenience of pressure, by having a turning door made like that of the monasteries, which admitted only one person at a time.  The following extract from a manuscript letter of the time conveys a lively account of one of those fetes.

“Last Sunday, at night, the duke’s grace entertained their majesties and the French ambassador at York House with great feasting and show, where all things came down in clouds; amongst which, one rare device was a representation of the French king, and the two queens, with their chiefest attendants, and so to the life, that the queen’s majesty could name them.  It was four o’clock in the morning before they parted, and then the king and queen, together with the French ambassador, lodged there.  Some estimate this entertainment at five or six thousand pounds."[189] At another time, “the king and queen were entertained at supper at Gerbier the duke’s painter’s house, which could not stand him in less than a thousand pounds.”  Sir Symonds D’Ewes mentions banquets at five hundred pounds.  The fullest account I have found of one of these entertainments, which at once show the curiosity of the scenical machinery and the fancy