Howard, he is spoken of in no very decent

terms.

And little Syd. for simile renown'd,

Pleasure has always sought, but never found:
Though all his thoughts on wine and women fall,
His are so bad, sure he ne'er thinks at all.
The flesh he lives upon is rank and strong;
His meat and mistresses are kept too long,
But sure we all mistake this pious man,
Who mortifies his person all he can:
What we uncharitably take for sin,
Are only rules of this odd capuchin ;
For never hermit, under grave pretence,
Has liv'd more contrary to common sense.'

Robert Sydney died at Penshurst, 1674. Ibid. The queen-dowager his mistress lived not over well in France.] To what a miserable state the queen was reduced may be seen in the following extract from the Memoirs of Cardinal De Retz. Four or five days before the king removed from Paris, I went to visit the Queen of England, whom I found in her daughter's chamber, who hath been since Duchess of Orleans. At my coming in she

said, You see I am come to keep Henrietta company. The poor child could not rise today for want of a fire.' The truth is, that the cardinal for six months together had not ordered her any money towards her pension, that no tradespeople would trust her for any thing; and that there was not at her lodgings in the Louvre one single billet. You will do me the justice to suppose that the Princess of England did not keep her bed the next day for want of a faggot; but it was not this which the Princess of Condé meant in her letter. What she spoke about was, that some days after my visiting the Queen of England, I remembered the condition I had found her in, and had strongly represented the shame of abandoning her in that manner, which caused the parliament to send 40,000 livres to her majesty. Posterity will hardly believe that a Princess of England, grand-daughter of Henry the Great, hath wanted a faggot, in the month of January, to get out of bed in the Louvre, and in the eyes of a French court. We read in histories with horror of baseness less

monstrous than this; and the little concern I have met with about it in most people's minds, has obliged me to make, I believe, a thousand times this reflection: that examples of times past move men beyond comparison more than those of their own times. We accustom ourselves to what we see; and I have sometimes told you, that I doubted whether Caligula's horse being made a consul would have surprised us so much as we imagine.' Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 261.

P. 178. Jermyn.] Henry Jermyn, younger son of Thomas, elder brother of the Earl of St. Alban's. He was created Baron Dover in 1685, and died without children at Cheveley in Cambridgeshire, April 6th, 1708. His corpse was carried to Bruges in Flanders, and buried in the monastery of the Carmelites there. St. Evremond, who visited Mr. Jermyn at Cheveley, says, ' we went thither, and were very kindly received by a person, who, though he has taken his leave of the court, has carried the civility and good taste of it into the country.' St. Evremond's Works, Vol. II. p. 223.

P. 179. The princess royal was the first who was taken with him.] It was suspected of this princess to have had a similar engagement with the Duke of Buckingham, as the queen with Jermyn, and that was the cause she would not see the duke on his second voyage to Holland, in the year 1652.

Ibid. The Countess of Castlemaine.] This lady, who makes so distinguished a figure in the annals of infamy, was Barbara, daughter and heir of William Villiers, Lord Viscount Grandison of the kingdom of Ireland, who died in 1642, in consequence of wounds received at the battle of Edge-hill. She was married, just before the restoration, to Roger Palmer, Esq. then a student in the Temple, and heir to a considerable fortune. In the 13th year of King Charles II. he was created Earl of Castlemaine in the kingdom of Ireland. She had a daughter, born in February, 1661, while she cohabited with her husband; but shortly after she became the avowed mistress of the king, who continued his connection with her until about the year 1672, when she was delivered of a daughter,

which was supposed to be Mr. Churchill's, afterwards Duke of Marlborough, and which the king disavowed. Her gallantries were by no means confined to one or two, nor were they unknown to his majesty. In the year 1670, she was created Baroness of Nonsuch in Surrey, Countess of Southampton, and Duchess of Cleveland during her natural life, with remainder to Charles and George Fitzroy, her eldest and third son, and their heirs male. In July, 1705, her husband died, and in November following she married a man of desperate fortune, known by the name of Handsome Fielding, who behaving in a manner unjustifiably severe towards her, she was obliged to have recourse to law for protection. Fortunately it was discovered that Fielding had already a wife living, by which means the duchess was enabled to free herself from his authority. She lived about two years afterwards, and died of a dropsy on the 9th of October, 1709, in her 69th year. Bishop Burnet says, she was a woman of great beauty, but most enormously vicious and ravenous; foolish, but imperious; very