admiral barbarously pointed his cannon at the house; and several shots reaching it, her favourite, Jermyn, requested her to fly:  she safely reached a cavern in the fields, but, recollecting that she had left a lap-dog asleep in its bed, she flew back, and amidst the cannon-shot returned with this other favourite.  The queen related this incident of the lap-dog to her friend Madame Motteville; these ladies considered it as a complete woman’s victory.  It is in these memoirs we find, that when Charles went down to the house, to seize on the five leading members of the opposition, the queen could not restrain her lively temper, and impatiently babbled the plot; so that one of the ladies in attendance despatched a hasty note to the parties, who, as the king entered the house, had just time to leave it.  Some have dated the ruin of his cause to the failure of that impolitic step, which alarmed every one zealous for that spirit of political freedom which had now grown up in the Commons.  Incidents like these mark the feminine dispositions of Henrietta.  But when at sea, in danger of being taken by a parliamentarian, the queen commanded the captain not to strike, but to prepare at the extremity to blow up the ship, resisting the shrieks of her females and domestics.  We perceive how, on every trying occasion, Henrietta never forgot that she was the daughter of Henry the Fourth; that glorious affinity was inherited by her with all the sexual pride; and hence, at times, that energy in her actions which was so far above her intellectual capacity.

And, indeed, when the awful events she had witnessed were one by one registered in her melancholy mind, the sensibility of the woman subdued the natural haughtiness of her character; but, true woman! the feeling creature of circumstances, at the Restoration she resumed it, and when the new court of Charles the Second would not endure her obsolete haughtiness, the dowager-queen left it in all the full bitterness of her spirit.  An habitual gloom, and the meagreness of grief, during the commonwealth, had changed a countenance once the most lively; and her eyes, whose dark and dazzling lustre was ever celebrated, then only shone in tears.  When she told her physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, that she found her understanding was failing her, and seemed terrified lest it was approaching to madness, the court physician, hardly courtly to fallen majesty, replied, “Madam, fear not that; for you are already mad.”  Henrietta had lived to contemplate the awful changes of her reign, without comprehending them.

Waller, in the profusion of poetical decoration, makes Henrietta so beautiful, that her beauty would affect every lover “more than his private loves.”  She was “the whole world’s mistress.”  A portrait in crayons of Henrietta at Hampton-court sadly reduces all his poetry, for the miraculous was only in the fancy of the court-poet.  But there may be some truth in what he says of the eyes of Henrietta:—­