"fatality of air" describe very expressively that look of melancholy
which all the Stuart features wore when in repose. The melancholy look
represented an underlying habitual mood of melancholy, or even
despondency, which a close observer may read in the character of the
"merry monarch" himself, for all his mirth and his dissipation, just as
well as in that of Charles the First or of James the Second. The
profligacy of Charles the Second had little that was joyous in it.
James Stuart, the Chevalier, had not the abilities and the culture of
Charles the Second, and he had much the same taste for intrigue and
dissipation. His amours were already beginning to be a scandal, and he
drank now and then like a man determined at all cost to drown thought.
He was always the slave of women. Women knew all his secrets, and were
made acquainted with his projected political enterprises. Sometimes
the fair favorite to whom he had unbosomed himself blabbed and tattled
all over Versailles or Paris of what she had heard, and in some
instances, perhaps, she even took her newly-acquired knowledge to the
English Ambassador and disposed of it for a consideration. At this
time James Stuart is not yet married; but marriage made as little {12}
difference in his way of living as it had done in that of his elderly
political rival, George the Elector. It is strange that James Stuart
should have made so faint an impression upon history and upon
literature. Romance and poetry, which have done so much for his son,
"Bonnie Prince Charlie," have taken hardly any account of him. He
figures in Thackeray's "Esmond," but the picture is not made very
distinct, even by that master of portraiture, and the merely frivolous
side of his character is presented with disproportionate prominence.
James Stuart had stronger qualities for good or evil than Thackeray
seems to have found in him. Some of his contemporaries denied him the
credit of man's ordinary courage; he has even been accused of positive
cowardice; but there does not seem to be the slightest ground for such
an accusation. Studied with the severest eye, his various enterprises,
and the manner in which he bore himself throughout them, would seem to
prove that he had courage enough for any undertaking. Princes seldom
show any want of physical courage. They are trained from their very
birth to regard themselves as always on parade; and even if they should
feel their hearts give way in presence