ture and a breeding thoroughly plebeian.
Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large measure both the
virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth
in high place, and used to respect themselves and to be respected by
others. It is not easy for a generation accustomed to find chivalrous
sentiments only in company with liberal Studies and polished manners
to image to itself a man with the deportment, the vocabulary, and
the accent of a carter, yet punctilious on matters of genealogy and
precedence, and ready to risk his life rather than see a stain cast on
the honour of his house. It is however only by thus joining together
things seldom or never found together in our own experience, that we can
form a just idea of that rustic aristocracy which constituted the main
strength of the armies of Charles the First, and which long supported,
with strange fidelity, the interest of his descendants.

The gross, uneducated; untravelled country gentleman was commonly a
Tory; but, though devotedly attached to hereditary monarchy, he had no
partiality for courtiers and ministers. He thought, not without reason,
that Whitehall was filled with the most corrupt of mankind, and that of
the great sums which the House of Commons had voted to the crown since
the Restoration part had been embezzled by cunning politicians, and part
squandered on buffoons and foreign courtesans. His stout English heart
swelled with indignation at the thought that the government of his
country should be subject to French dictation. Being himself generally
an old Cavalier, or the son of an old Cavalier, he reflected with bitter
resentment on the ingratitude with which the Stuarts had requited their
best friends. Those who heard him grumble at the neglect with which he
was treated, and at the profusion with which wealth was lavished on the
bastards of Nell Gwynn and Madam Carwell, would have supposed him ripe
for rebellion. But all this ill humour lasted only till the throne was
really in danger. It was precisely when those whom the sovereign had
loaded with wealth and honours shrank from his side that the country
gentlemen, so surly and mutinous in the season of his prosperity,
rallied round him in a body. Thus, after murmuring twenty years at the
misgovernment of Charles the Second, they came to his rescue in his
extremity, when his own Secretaries of State and the Lords of his own
Treasury had deserted him, and enabled him to gain