Whitehall Gallery

February 11: 1655

As when the King of old 'Mid Babylonian gold, And picture-woven walls, and lamps that gleam'd Unholy radiance, sate, And with some smooth slave-mate Toy'd, and the wine laugh'd round, and music stream'd Voluptuous undulation, o'er the hall,-- Till on the palace-wall

Forth came a hand divine And wrote the judgment-sign, And Babylon fell!--So now, in that his place Of Tudor-Stuart pride, The golden gallery wide, 'Mid venal beauty's lavish-arm'd embrace, And hills of gambler-gold, a godless King Moved through the revelling

With quick brown falcon-eye And lips of gay reply; Wise in the wisdom not from Heaven!--as one Who from his exile-days Had learn'd to scorn the praise Of truth, the crown by martyr-virtue won: Below ambition:--Grant him regal ease! The rest, as fate may please!

--O royal heir, restored Not by the bitter sword, But when the heart of these great realms in free, Full, triple, unison beat The Martyr's son to greet, Her ancient law and faith and flag with thee Rethroned,--not thus!--in this inglorious hall Of harem-festival,

Not thus!--For even now, The blaze is on thy brow Scored by the shadowy hand of him whose wing Knows neither haste nor rest; Who from the board each guest In season calling,--knight and kerne and king,-- Where Arthur lies, and Alfred, signs the way;-- --We know him, and obey.

Lord Macaulay's lively description of this scene (Hist. Ch iv) should be referred to. 'Even then,' he says, 'the King had complained that he did not feel well.'

Tudor-Stuart; This famous Gallery was of sixteenth-century date.

When the heart; The weariness of England under the triple yoke of Puritanism, the Independents, and the Protector, has been already noticed: (Note on p. 125).

'The Restoration,' says Professor Seeley, in an able essay on current perversions of seventeenth-century-history, 'was not a return to servitude, but the precise contrary. It was a great emancipation, an exodus out of servitude into liberty . . . As to the later Stuarts, I regard them as pupils of Cromwell: . . . it was their great ambition to appropriate his methods,' (and, we may add, to follow his foreign policy in regard to France and Holland), for the benefit of the old monarchy. They failed where their model had succeeded, and the distinction of having enslaved England remained peculiar to Cromwell.'