abroad—­was little calculated to win suffrages from a mere man of pleasure like De Grammont.  The court, the city, the country, were in his days gloomy, discontented, joyless:  a proscribed nobility was the sure cause of the thin though few festivities of the now lugubrious gallery of Whitehall.  Puritanism drove the old jovial churchmen into retreat, and dispelled every lingering vestige of ancient hospitality:  long graces and long sermons, sanctimonious manners, and grim, sad faces, and sad-coloured dresses were not much to De Grammont’s taste; he returned to France, and declared that he had gained no advantage from his travels.  Nevertheless, either from choice or necessity, he made another trial of the damps and fogs of England.[8]

When he again visited our country, Charles II. had been two years seated on the throne of his father.  Everything was changed, and the British court was in its fullest splendour; whilst the rejoicings of the people of England at the Restoration were still resounding through the land.

If one could include royal personages in the rather gay than worthy category of the ‘wits and beaux of society,’ Charles II. should figure at their head.  He was the most agreeable companion, and the worst king imaginable.  In the first place he was, as it were, a citizen of the world:  tossed about by fortune from his early boyhood; a witness at the tender age of twelve of the battle of Edge Hill, where the celebrated Harvey had charge of him and of his brother.  That inauspicious commencement of a wandering life had perhaps been amongst the least of his early trials.  The fiercest was his long residence as a sort of royal prisoner in Scotland.  A travelled, humbled man, he came back to England with a full knowledge of men and manners, in the prime of his life, with spirits unbroken by adversity, with a heart unsoured by that ’stern nurse,’ with a gaiety that was always kindly, never uncourteous, ever more French than English; far more natural did he appear as the son of Henrietta Maria than as the offspring of the thoughtful Charles.

In person, too, the king was then agreeable, though rather what the French would call distingue than dignified; he was, however, tall, and somewhat elegant, with a long French face, which in his boyhood was plump and full about the lower part of the cheeks, but now began to sink into that well-known, lean, dark, flexible countenance, in which we do not, however, recognize the gaiety of the man whose very name brings with it associations of gaiety, politeness, good company, and all the attributes of a first-rate wit, except the almost inevitable ill-nature.  There is in the physiognomy of Charles II. that melancholy which is often observable in the faces of those who are mere men of pleasure.