Instantly the audience laughed at the Duke’s tone of ridicule, and the poor woman was hissed off the stage.

The king himself did not escape Buckingham’s shafts; whilst Lord Chancellor Clarendon fell a victim to his ridicule:  nothing could withstand it.  There, not in that iniquitous gallery at Whitehall, but in the king’s privy chambers, Villiers might be seen, in all the radiance of his matured beauty.  His face was long and oval, with sleepy, yet glistening eyes, over which large arched eyebrows seemed to contract a brow on which the curls of a massive wig (which fell almost to his shoulders) hung low.  His nose was long, well formed, and flexible; his lips thin and compressed, and defined, as the custom was, by two very short, fine, black patches of hair, looking more like strips of sticking-plaster than a moustache.  As he made his reverence, his rich robes fell over a faultless form.  He was a beau to the very fold of the cambric band round his throat; with long ends of the richest, closest point that was ever rummaged out from a foreign nunnery to be placed on the person of this sacrilegious sinner.

Behold, now, how he changes.  Villiers is Villiers no longer.  He is Clarendon, walking solemnly to the Court of the Star Chamber:  a pair of bellows is hanging before him for the purse; Colonel Titus is walking with a fire shovel on his shoulder, to represent a mace; the king, himself a capital mimic, is splitting his sides with laughter; the courtiers are fairly in a roar.  Then how he was wont to divert the king with his descriptions!  ‘Ipswich, for instance,’ he said, ’was a town without inhabitants—­a river it had without water—­streets without names; and it was a place where asses wore boots:’  alluding to the asses, when employed in rolling Lord Hereford’s bowling-green, having boots on their feet to prevent their injuring the turf.

Flecknoe, the poet, describes the duke at this period, in ’Euterpe Revived’—­

    The gallant’st person, and the noblest minde,
    In all the world his prince could ever finde,
    Or to participate his private cares,
    Or bear the public weight of his affairs,
    Like well-built arches, stronger with their weight,
    And well-built minds, the steadier with their height;
    Such was the composition and frame
    O’ the noble and the gallant Buckingham.’

The praise, however, even in the duke’s best days, was overcharged.  Villiers was no ‘well-built arch,’ nor could Charles trust to the fidelity of one so versatile for an hour.  Besides, the moral character of Villiers must have prevented him, even in those days, from bearing ‘the public weight of affairs.’