WETHERELL
Oh, anecdotes: or his witticisms. There must be scores of them running wild. Leave out the done-to-death ones. Cut me no sirloin, sirrah; starve me no Nellies.
CLAY
I believe "Sir Loin" to be spurious. It belongs with ever so many Charles Lamb puns, sayable enough, only not said by the sayer.
WETHERELL
There isn't much chance for a king who has a genius for concise conversation.
CLAY
No. He doesn't get reported correctly, for one thing. How could Sir Walter, weighted as he was, as writers of his time were, by the heavy-artillery ideas of diction, reproduce, in Peveril or Woodstock, this light super-civilized fashion of speech, supple and stinging as a whip? And no writer of fiction since, has quite captured it, except Mr. Marriott Watson. You remember that episode in Galloping Dick? Exquisite! Charles the Second's talk is altogether the most admirable thing about him: though courtly, it had none of the circumlocutions of courtliness; it was exclusive and pertinent. "All this," as Walton sweetly says of Donne, "with a most particular grace, and an inexpressible addition of comeliness." The King's only long story, which for years he was always ready to tell from the beginning, "ever embellished," says mischievous Buckingham, "with some new circumstance," and which was wont to gather a knot of listeners old and new, was the story of his adventures after the battle of Worcester, in 1650. No heartier romance exists of pluck and patience, save the later record, so like it, of Prince Charlie's hardships, and his heroism under them; and its author's attachment to his only novel is simply a connoisseurship, a piece of esoteric appreciation: he took and gave delight with such thrilling biographical details as might have come from the mouth of Odysseus himself. His short sayings are all sterling, and his nicknames stuck like burs. Mr. Henry Bennet, afterwards Earl of Arlington, the grave and too inductive gentleman who so moved the mirth of Miss Frances Stuart, was "Whereas" to his royal master; the yacht named after the stout Duchess of Portsmouth, the yacht to whose great sheets the King and the Duke of York sprang "like common seamen," in a terrible storm once, off the Kentish coast, was known far and wide as "The Fubbs." Another joke about "Hans in Keldar," patronizing the ice-fair on the Thames, and inscribing his name there among the visitors, one need not recall too circumstantially. The Queen Dowager, Henrietta Maria, was always "Mam," to her perfectly respectful and solicitous eldest son; in an alliteration like an early English poet's, he congratulated his sister on her recovery from a grave illness, "between Mam's Masses, and M. de Mayerne's pills." His little portraitures of people, his given reason for a human like or dislike, his insight into character, and his gently sarcastic turn of phrase in expressing it,—are they not all superior things of their kind? He felt it impossible to marry a princess out of Germany: she would be "so dull and foggy." Of Isaac Vossius, the imperfect sceptic, Charles said: "Voss refuses to believe nothing, save the Bible." A celebrated man of affairs, then a deft page at court, won this neat encomium: "Sidney Godolphin is never in the way, and never out of the way." Sedley, shining Sedley, whom Charles greatly liked, he dubbed "Apollo's viceroy." His "Save the Earl of Burford!" when riding under the window whence Mistress Eleanor Gwynne ironically offered to throw her small son, since she had no name to call him by, is like the very finest coup de théâtre, and too like him not to be true. This climate he rated as the best climate, "because it gives the greatest number of out-of-door days." Not so thought Charles of Orleans, long before him, arraigning English weather from the standpoint of its unwilling guest, as at all times "prejudicial to the human frame." And every one knows the inimitable apology of Charles to his watchers, for "being so unconscionably long a-dying."
Unlike most wits, he preferred dialogue to monologue. His gravity and authority were so fixed, his merriment so obviously local and temporal, that repartee was part of his game; he winced at nothing, and often accepted, with excellent grace, sharper thrusts than his own. It is sometimes repeated that he was angered by Rochester's incomparable epigram, pinned to his chamber door:
"Here lies our sovereign lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one."