the last moments of the polite Earl of Chesterfield, whose only expressed anxiety related to his friend Dayrolles being in the room without a chair to sit down upon.
If he was ready at a reply there were others about him who were not less happy. When he called Lord Chancellor Shaftesbury, in his own hearing, "The greatest rogue in England," the reply was—"Of a subject, Sir, perhaps, I am."[1] Not less witty was the sarcastic answer of the Lord Dorset, to whom I have already introduced the reader, as a lover of Nell Gwyn. The Earl had come to court on Queen Elizabeth's birthday, long kept as a holiday in London and elsewhere, and still, I believe, observed by the benchers of Gray's Inn. The King, forgetting the day, asked "What the bells rung for?" The answer given, the King asked further, "How it came to pass that her birthday was still kept, while those of his father and grand-father were no more thought of than William the Conqueror's?" "Because," said the frank peer to the frank King, "she being a woman chose men for her counsellors, and men when they reign usually choose women."[2] Of the same stamp was the more
