shaken to a quick time.  Gaily did his Majesty perform it, leading to the hot exercise Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, stout and homely, and leaving Lady Castlemaine to his son, the Duke of Monmouth.  Then Charles, with ready grace, would begin the coranto, taking a single lady in this dance along the gallery.  Lords and ladies one after another followed, and ‘very noble,’ writes Pepys, ‘and great pleasure it was to see.’  Next came the country dances, introduced by Mary, Countess of Buckingham, the grandmother of the graceful duke who is moving along the gallery;—­and she invented those once popular dances in order to introduce, with less chance of failure, her rustic country cousins, who could not easily be taught to carry themselves well in the brawl, or to step out gracefully in the coranto, both of which dances required practice and time.  In all these dances the king shines the most, and dances much better than his brother the Duke of York.

In these gay scenes De Grammont met with the most fashionable belles of the court:  fortunately for him they all spoke French tolerably; and he quickly made himself welcome amongst even the few—­and few indeed there were—­who plumed themselves upon untainted reputations.  Hitherto those French noblemen who had presented themselves in England had been poor and absurd.  The court had been thronged with a troop of impertinent Parisian coxcombs, who had pretended to despise everything English, and who treated the natives as if they were foreigners in their own country.  De Grammont, on the contrary, was familiar with every one:  he ate, he drank, he lived, in short, according to the custom of the country that hospitably received him, and accorded him the more respect, because they had been insulted by others.

He now introduced the petits soupers, which have never been understood anywhere so well as in France, and which are even there dying out to make way for the less social and more expensive dinner; but, perhaps, he would even here have been unsuccessful, had it not been for the society and advice of the famous St. Evremond, who at this time was exiled in France, and took refuge in England.

This celebrated and accomplished man had some points of resemblance with De Grammont.  Like him, he had been originally intended for the church; like him he had turned to the military profession; he was an ensign before he was full sixteen; and had a company of foot given him after serving two or three campaigns.  Like De Grammont, he owed the facilities of his early career to his being the descendant of an ancient and honourable family.  St. Evremond was the Seigneur of St Denis le Guast, in Normandy, where he was born.

Both these sparkling wits of society had at one time, and, in fact, at the same period, served under the great Conde; both were pre-eminent, not only in literature, but in games of chance.  St. Evremond was famous at the University of Caen, in which he studied, for his fencing; and ‘St. Evremond’s pass’ was well known to swordsmen of his time;—­both were gay and satirical; neither of them pretended to rigid morals; but both were accounted men of honour among their fellow-men of pleasure.  They were graceful, kind, generous.