The Church of England doth all faction foster,
The pulpit is usurped by each impostor;
Ex tempore excludes the pater noster.”
Charles II. is said to have had some poetical talent, and, as Sir John Hawkins affirms, and as Horace Walpole thinks probable, the following lines were his composition:—
“I pass all my hours in a shady old grove,
But I live not the day when I see not my love;
I survey every walk now my Phyllis is gone,
And sigh when I think we were there all alone;
O then ’t is I think there’s no hell
Like loving too well.
But each shade and each conscious bower when I find,
Where I once have been happy, and she has been kind;
When I see the print left of her shape on the green,
And imagine the pleasure may yet come again,
O then ’t is I think that no joys are above
The pleasures of love.
While alone to myself I repeat all her charms,
She I love may be locked in another man’s arms;
She may laugh at my cares, and so false she may be,
To say all the kind things she before said to me;
O then ’t is oh then, that I think there’s no hell
Like loving too well.
But when I consider the truth of her heart,
Such an innocent passion, so kind without art;
I fear I have wrong’d her, and hope she may be
So full of true love to be jealous of me;
And then, ’t is I think that no joys are above
The pleasures of love.”
In the year 1766 Lord Hailes edited a curious account of the adventures of Charles II. after the battle of Worcester, “unquestionably written by himself, and republished some letters to his friends, chiefly to Arlington, there called Henry Bennet, together with a few made publick for the first time,”[153] one of the most amusing passages in the narrative being the subjoined:—
“As I was holding my horse’s foot, I asked the smith what news? He told me that there was no news that he knew of, since the good news of the beating of the rogues the Scots. I asked him whether there was none of the English taken that joined the Scots? He answered that he did not hear that that rogue Charles Stuart was taken, but some of the others, he said, were taken, but not Charles Stuart. I told him that if that rogue were taken, he deserved to be hanged more than all the rest for bringing in the Scots, upon which he said that I spoke like an honest man, and so we parted.”
There is little to note respecting the literary tastes of succeeding English sovereigns, with the exception of Queen Caroline, who was a great reader, and “frequently perplexed the divines of that period by her paradoxes on the subjects of fatality and free-will,” maintaining a correspondence with Leibnitz on the most abstruse subjects.
The plaintive lines below, described as “more touching than better poetry,” have generally been attributed to the Princess Amelia, daughter of George III., who will long be remembered “for the extreme passionate tenderness with which her father loved her,” and for her early death:—