Page:Diary of the times of Charles II Vol. I.djvu/190

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74
DIARY AND CORRESPONDENCE OF

taken so much care about them, I should make you more apology for giving you that trouble, but that I intend to employ the health you may help me to by them in your service if there be any occasion for it while I am Commissioner of the Treasury, or in any other way that you shall judge me worthy to be employed in it.

I wish you joy of your new acquaintance you tell me you have made. I will only say for your comfort "dans le royaume des aveugles," you know who are kings, and I wish everything there were better for your sake, there being nobody to

    lieve you will understand it better in two." Even his personal defects and unreasonable maxims were calculated to attach adherents to him as a chief, and he was well qualified to be leader of a party ready to support all the pretensions of any King who supported the Protestant establishment." Lord Dartmouth in one of his notes says, "I never knew a man who was so soon put into a passion, or was so long before he could bring himself out of it, in which he would say things which were never forgot by any but himself. In Reresby's Memoirs, there is an account of a furious debauch in wine, in which he and Lord Chancellor Jefferies were engaged with Mr. Alderman Duncomb, when they drank themselves into that height of frenzy, that among friends it was whispered they had stripped unto their shirts, and that, had not an accident prevented them, they had got upon a sign-post to drink the King's health, which he adds was the subject of much derision, to say no worse."—Preface to the Correspondence of Lord Hyde. Reresby's Memoirs