declared that he had gained no advantage from his travels. Nevertheless,
either from choice or necessity, he made another trial of the damps and
fogs of England.[8]

When he again visited our country, Charles II. had been two years seated
on the throne of his father. Everything was changed, and the British
court was in its fullest splendour; whilst the rejoicings of the people
of England at the Restoration were still resounding through the land.

If one could include royal personages in the rather gay than worthy
category of the 'wits and beaux of society,' Charles II. should figure
at their head. He was the most agreeable companion, and the worst king
imaginable. In the first place he was, as it were, a citizen of the
world: tossed about by fortune from his early boyhood; a witness at the
tender age of twelve of the battle of Edge Hill, where the celebrated
Harvey had charge of him and of his brother. That inauspicious
commencement of a wandering life had perhaps been amongst the least of
his early trials. The fiercest was his long residence as a sort of royal
prisoner in Scotland. A travelled, humbled man, he came back to England
with a full knowledge of men and manners, in the prime of his life,
with spirits unbroken by adversity, with a heart unsoured by that 'stern
nurse,' with a gaiety that was always kindly, never uncourteous, ever
more French than English; far more natural did he appear as the son of
Henrietta Maria than as the offspring of the thoughtful Charles.

In person, too, the king was then agreeable, though rather what the
French would call _distingué_ than dignified; he was, however, tall, and
somewhat elegant, with a long French face, which in his boyhood was
plump and full about the lower part of the cheeks, but now began to sink
into that well-known, lean, dark, flexible countenance, in which we do