t and amazement.

The favourite's triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor, of
whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was aware.
Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful bitterness that is
inseparable from the nature of such women. And she hated him the more
because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he moved in utter unconcern of
her hostility. In this hatred she certainly did not lack for allies,
members of that licentious court whose hostility towards the austere
Chancellor was begotten of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked
to pull him down.

The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving vain--for
Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the Chancellor's
value to him--that crew of rakes went laboriously and insidiously to
work upon the public mind, which is to say the public ignorance--most
fruitful soil for scandal against the great. Who shall say how far my
lady and the Court were responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to
my Lord Clarendon's gatepost:

Three sights to be seen:
Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.

Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as stable
as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was, it follows
that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious jealousies to
mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her how insecure is the
tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the mercy of the very caprice
to existence.

And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for her, a
day when she found herself bereft of her influence with her royal lover,
when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway him. In part she owed
it to an indiscretion of her own, but in far greater measure to a child
of sixteen, of a golden-headed, fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature
that still found pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of
a quick and lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either
by the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was become
the toast of the day.

This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre, newly come
to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How profound an impression
her beauty made upon the admittedly impressionable old Pepys you may
study