and to the time when my little-boy-hero is forming his earliest acquaintance with the Old Bailey stones. I said that I wanted those last three dying years of the seventeenth century. Let me take them, and endeavour to make the best of them, even when I compress some of their characteristics within the compass of a single London day.
The century, then, is on its last legs. The town seems to have quite done with the Stuarts, socially speaking, although politically another Stuart will reign: a dethroned Stuart is actually at St. Germains, maundering with his confessors, and conspiring with his shabby refugee courtiers; thinking half of assassinating the abhorred Dutchman, and making Père la Chaise Archbishop of Canterbury in partibus, and half of slinking away to La Trappe, wearing a hair shirt, and doing grave-digging on his own account for good and all. Politically, too, this crooked-wayed, impracticable Stuart's son and grandson will give the world some trouble till the year 1788, when, a hundred years after the Revolution, a worn-out, blasé sensualist, called the Young Pretender, dies at Rome, leaving a brother, the Cardinal of York, who survived to be a pensioner of George the Third, and bequeathed to him those Stuart papers, which, had their contents been known at the Cockpit, Westminster, half a century before, would have caused the fall of many a head as noble as Derwentwater's, as chivalrous as Charles Ratcliffe's, and broken many a heart as loving and true as Flora Macdonald's or Lady Nithisdale's. But with the Restoration-Stuart period, London town has quite done. Rochester has died penitent, Buckingham bankrupt and forlorn. Archbishop Tenison has preached Nelly Gwynn's funeral sermon; Portsmouth, Davies, are no more heard of; Will Chiffinch can procure for kings no more: the rigid Dutchman scorns such painted children of dirt; Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, has married one Fielding, a swindling caricature of a "beau;" Wycherly is old and broken, and the iron of the Fleet has entered into his soul; and poor noble old John Dryden, twitted as a renegade, neglected, unpensioned, and maligned, is savagely writing the finest "copy" that has issued yet from that grand fertile brain, writing it with a Spartan fortitude and persistence, and ever and anon giving left-*legged Jacob Tonson a sound verbal trouncing, when the publisher would palm on the poet clipped moidores for milled Jacobuses. Ah, little boy Hogarth, you will see Johnson fifty years hence, listen to him behind the curtain in the twilight room, as the Jacobite schoolman raves against the cruelty of government in hanging Doctor Cameron; but you will never behold John Dryden in the flesh, little boy, or hear him at Wills's on golden summer afternoons, the undisputed oracle of wits, and critics, and poets. The horrible Chancellor Jeffries (however could the ruffian have found patience and temper to deliver a decree in Chancery!) is dead, but he has a son alive, a rake-hell, Mohock Lord Jeffries, who, four years hence, will be implicated in a scandalous disturbance at Dryden's house, in Gerrard Street; the poet's corpse lying there. There are brave men hard at work for the nineteenth century. Isaac Newton is working; in '95 he was appointed Master of the Mint. Pope is beginning to feel his
