and he was by no means likely, in advanced years and in declining health, to turn libertine. On the vices of the young and gay he looked with an aversion almost as bitter and contemptuous as that which he felt for the theological errors of the sectaries. He missed no opportunity of showing his scorn of the mimics, revellers, and courtesans who crowded the palace; and the admonitions which he addressed to the king himself were very sharp, and, what Charles disliked still more, very long. Scarcely any voice was raised in favor of a minister loaded with the double odium of faults which roused the fury of the people, and of virtues which annoyed and importuned the sovereign. Southampton was no more. Ormond performed the duties of friendship manfully and faithfully, but in vain. The chancellor fell with a great ruin. The king took the seal from him; the Commons impeached him; his head was not safe; he fled from the country; an act was passed which doomed him to perpetual exile; and those who had assailed and undermined him, began to struggle for the fragments of his power.

LOUIS XIV.

THE personal qualities of the French king added to the respect inspired by the power and importance of his kingdom. No sovereign has ever represented the majesty of a great State with more dignity and grace. He was his own prime minister, and performed the duties of that arduous situation with an ability and an industry which could not be reasonably expected from one who had in infancy succeeded to a crown, and who had been surrounded by flatterers before he could speak. He had shown, in an eminent degree, two talents invaluable to a prince the talent of choosing his servants well, and the talent of appropriating to himself the chief part of the credit of their acts. In his dealings with foreign powers he had some generosity, but no justice. To unhappy allies who threw themselves at his feet, and had no hope but in his compassion, he extended his protection with a romantic disinterestedness, which

seemed better suited to a knight-errant than to a statesman; but he broke through the most sacred ties of public faith without scruple or shame, whenever they interfered with his interest, or with what he called his glory. His perfidy and violence, however, excited less enmity than the insolence with which he constantly reminded his neighbors of his own greatness and of their littleness. He did not at this time profess the austere devotion which, at a later period, gave to his court the aspect of a monastery. On the contrary, he was as licentious, though by no means as frivolous and indolent, as his brother of England. But he was a sincere Roman Catholic; and both his conscience and his vanity impelled him to use his power for the defence and propaga tion of the true faith, after the example of his renowned predecessors, Clovis, Charlemagne, and St. Louis.

THE CABAL.

Ir happened by a whimsical coincidence that, in 1671, the cabinet consisted of five persons, the initial letters of whose names made up the word Cabal: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale.

Sir Thomas Clifford was a Commissioner of the Treas ury, and had greatly distinguished himself in the House of Commons. Of the members of the Cabal he was the most respectable: for, with a fiery and imperious temper, he had a strong though a lamentably perverted sense of duty and honor.

Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, then Secretary of State, had, since he came to manhood, resided principally on the Continent, and had learned that cosmopolitan indifference to constitutions and religions which is often observable in persons whose life has been passed in vagrant diplomacy. If there was any form of government which he liked, it was that of France; if there was any church for which he felt a preference, it was that of Rome. He had some talent for conversation, and some talent, also, for transacting the ordinary business of office. He had learned, during a life passed in travelling and negotiating, the art of accommodating his language and deportment to the society in which he found himVOL. III.-25

self. His vivacity in the closet amused the king; his gravity in debates and conferences imposed on the public; and he had succeeded in attaching to himself, partly by services and partly by hopes, a considerable number of personal retainers.

Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale, were men in whom the immorality which was epidemic among the politicians of that age appeared in its most malignant type, but variously modified by great diversities of temper and understanding. Buckingham was a sated man of pleasure, who had turned to ambition as to a pastime. As he had tried to amuse himself with architecture and music, with writing farces and with seeking for the philosopher's stone, so he now tried to amuse himself with a secret negotiation and a Dutch war. He had already, rather from fickleness and love of novelty than from any deep design, been faithless to every party. At one time he had ranked among the Cavaliers. At another time warrants had been out against him for main. taining a treasonable correspondence with the remains of the Republican party in the city. He was now again, a courtier, and was eager to win the favor of the king by services from which the most illustrious of those who had fought and suffered for the royal house would have recoiled with horror.

Ashley, with a far stronger head, and with a far fiercer and more earnest ambition, had been equally versatile; but Ashley's versatility was the effect, not of levity, but of deliberate selfishness. He had served and betrayed a succession of governments; but he had timed all his treacheries so well that, through all revolutions, his fortunes had constantly been rising. The multitude, struck with admiration by a prosperity which, while everything else was constantly changing, remained unchangeable, attributed to him a prescience almost miraculous, and likened him to the Hebrew statesman of whom it is written that his counsel was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God.

Lauderdale, loud and coarse both in mirth and anger, was perhaps, under the outward show of boisterous frankness, the most dishonest man in the whole Cabal. He had been conspicuous among the Scotch insurgents of 1638, and zealous for the Covenant. He was accused of having been deeply concerned in the sale of Charles the First to the English Parliament, and was therefore, in the estimation of good Cavaliers, a traitor, if possible, of a worse description than those who had sat in the High Court of Justice. He

often talked with noisy jocularity of the days when he was a canter and a rebel. He was now the chief instrument employed by the court in the work of forcing episcopacy on his reluctant countrymen; nor did he, in that cause, shrink from the unsparing use of the sword, the halter, and the boot. Yet those who knew him knew that thirty years had made no change in his real sentiments; that he still hated the memory of Charles the First, and that he still preferred the Presbyterian form of church government to every other.

THOMAS OSBORN, EARL OF DANBY.

THE chief direction of affairs was now intrusted to Sir Thomas Osborn, a Yorkshire baronet, who had, in the House of Commons, shown eminent talents for business and debate. Osborn became Lord Treasurer, and was soon created Earl of Danby. He was not a man whose character, if tried by any high standard of morality, would appear to merit approbation. He was greedy of wealth and honors, corrupt himself, and a corrupter of others. The Cabal had bequeathed to him the art of bribing Parliaments, an art, still rude, and giving little promise of the rare perfection to which it was brought in the following century. He improved greatly on the plan of the first inventors. They had merely purchased orators; but every man who had a vote might sell himself to Danby. Yet the new minister' must not be confounded with the negotiators of Dover. He was not without the feelings of an Englishman and a Protestant; nor did he, in his solicitude for his own interests, ever wholly forget the interests of his country and of his religion. He was desirous, indeed, to exalt the' prerogative, but the means by which he proposed to exalt it were widely different from those which had been contemplated by Arlington and Clifford. The thought of establishing arbitrary power, by calling in the aid of foreign arms, and by reducing the kingdom to the rank of a dependent principality, never entered into his mind. His plan was to rally round the monarchy those classes which had been the firm allies of the monarchy during the troubles of the pre

ceding generation, and which had been disgusted by the recent crimes and errors of the court. With the help of the old Cavalier interest, of the nobles, of the country gentlemen, of the clergy, and of the universities, it might he conceived, be possible to make Charles, not, indeed, an absolute sovereign, but a sovereign scarcely less powerful than Elizabeth had been.

Prompted by these feelings, Danby formed the design of securing to the Cavalier party the exclusive possession of all political power, both executive and legislative. In the year 1675, accordingly, a bill was offered to the Lords, which provided that no person should hold any office, or should sit in either House of Parliament, without first declaring on oath that he considered resistance to the kingly power as in all cases criminal, and that he would never endeavor to alter the government either in Church or State. During several weeks, the debates, divisions, and protests caused by this proposition kept the country in a state of excitement. The opposition in the House of Lords, headed by two members of the Cabal who were desirous to make their peace with the nation, Buckingham and Shaftesbury, was beyond all precedent vehement and pertinacious, and at length proved successful. The bill was not indeed rejected, but was retarded, mutilated, and at length suffered to drop.

So arbitrary and so exclusive was Danby's scheme of domestic policy. His opinions touching foreign policy did him more honor. They were, in truth, directly opposed to those of the Cabal, and differed little from those of the Country party. He bitterly lamented the degraded situation into which England was reduced, and vehemently declared that his dearest wish was to cudgel the French into a proper respect for her. So little did he disguise his feelings, that, at the great banquet where the most illustrious dignitaries of the State and of the Church were assembled, he not very decorously filled his glass to the confusion of all who were against a war with France. He would, indeed, most gladly have seen his country united with the powers which were then combined against Louis, and was for that end bent on placing Temple, the author of the Triple Alli ance, at the head of the department which directed foreign affairs. But the power of the prime minister was limited. In his most confidential letters he complained that the infatuation of his master prevented England from taking her proper place among European nations. Charles was insatiably