VII.  I visit Castlewood once more

VIII.  I travel to France and bring Home a Portrait of Rigaud

IX.  The Original of the Portrait comes to England

X. We entertain a very Distinguished Guest at Kensington

XI.  Our Guest quits us as not being Hospitable enough

XII.  A great Scheme, and who Balked it

XIII.  August 1st, 1714

THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND.

BOOK I

THE EARLY YOUTH OF HENRY ESMOND, UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING TRINITY COLLEGE, IN CAMBRIDGE.

The actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics to a tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a great head-dress.  ’Twas thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required these appurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure and cadence.  So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music:  and King Agamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden’s words):  the Chorus standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorously bewailing the fates of those great crowned persons.  The Muse of History hath encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of the Theatre.  She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure.  She too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a mistress of court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of the common people.  I have seen in his very old age and decrepitude the old French King Lewis the Fourteenth, the type and model of kinghood—­who never moved but to measure, who lived and died according to the laws of his Court-marshal, persisting in enacting through life the part of Hero; and, divested of poetry, this was but a little wrinkled old man, pock-marked, and with a great periwig and red heels to make him look tall—­a hero for a book if you like, or for a brass statue or a painted ceiling, a god in a Roman shape, but what more than a man for Madame Maintenon, or the barber who shaved him, or Monsieur Fagon, his surgeon?  I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden?  Shall we see something of France and England besides Versailles and Windsor?  I saw Queen Anne at the latter place tearing down the Park slopes, after her stag-hounds, and driving her one-horse chaise—­a hot, red-faced woman, not in the least resembling that statue of her which turns its stone back upon St. Paul’s, and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate Hill.  She was neither better bred nor wiser than you and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a wash-hand basin.  Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time?  I am for having her rise up off her knees, and take a natural posture:  not to be for ever performing cringes and congees like a court-chamberlain, and shuffling backwards out of doors in the presence of the sovereign.  In a word, I would have History familiar rather than heroic:  and think that Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we get thence.