murderers. He slept in one royal palace, and was brought to be beheaded at noonday, leisurely and solemnly, in front of another. He appeared on the scaffold in his usual dress, with the insignia, most splendid and costly, of the Garter.* Even the cap placed on his head before he laid it on the block had on it a laced border in the shape of a diadem. The Bishop of London received his last Remember. Even after he lay down (for he did not kneel) on the block, his lords of the chamber placed themselves, as in observance of courtly duty, one by each of his feet.† All this homage to the sense of national dignity and decency forms-even in the blackest scene of our history-a signal contrast to the subsequent mimicry of the Tigre-singe-and so Guizot has himself very eloquently acknowledged. In like manner the royal body was borne to a royal tomb on the shoulders of the Duke of Richmond, Lords Hertford, Southampton, and Lindsey, and was laid in the vault of Windsor, without any words or other ceremonies than the sighs and tears of the few faithful friends. The Puritans denied, indeed, all rites of religion; but Cromwell was an Englishman, and too great to take pleasure in the charnelhouse curiosities of a Robespierre. He aimed at the life of his king, but warred not with the dead, nor ever denied that respect to his mortal remains which the Restoration, to its eternal shame, refused to his own.

Charles now slept well and undisturbed, until Sir Henry Halford clapped him into his tiny essay. Treason had done its worst, and Lord Hertford was permitted by Cromwell, who knew the value of fidelity, to live unmolested; nay, the Buonaparte of England even condescended to court him-but in vain. His undivided allegiance was buried with his hopes and joys in his own king's grave. Eleven years after the royal martyrdom-when the pith and marrow of England, who had tasted the reality of Roundheads and Republicans, and had fully understood the worth of these public-good-private-place-mongers, now fled from petty tyrants to the Crown, and crowded to welcome Charles II. ;-first and foremost was Lord Hertford. The Garter was conferred on this faithful servant, and the title of Duke of Somerset restored, as amply as if the attainder of his grandfather had never been made. Thus a cloud, which for five successive reigns had hung over the house of Seymour, was cleared away. Five months later this true cavalier, full of years and honours, paid the last debt to nature. The large portrait of Lord Hertford at the Grove is not one

The Garter worn by the King, and bequeathed by Cardinal Yorke to George IV., was embroidered with alternate diamonds and rubies to the value of 28,0007.

See the curious contemporary print of the king's execution, re-engraved in the volume entitled 'Historical Sketches of Charles I.' by W. D. Fellowes, Esq., 4to., 1828. of

of the best, and neither chronological nor artistical considerations permit us to attribute it to Vandyke; the full, placid features indicate the lover of ease-yet a searching look about the eye, and a determination in the mouth, mark knowledge of the world, and a character not to be trifled with.

The excursion or pilgrimage to the site where the images of so much loyalty and valour are enshrined is enhanced by Lady Theresa's faithful and descriptive cicerone catalogue. The Grove, appropriately embosomed in ancient trees, overlooks, from a sunny bank, a trout-stream that gambols through meadows such as afforded pleasure and profit to the honest ichthyophile Isaac Walton. The interior is enriched with above a hundred pictures -præclara supellex-the Villiers representatives of the Chancellor having considerably added to their nucleus moiety. The sweet still country is no less delectable to reviewers, long in populous city pent, than the dignified tranquillity, the serene security of position of these relics of 'auld lang syne,' is refreshing to the eye, after certain modern chalky conventionalities exhibited elsewhere.

How full of vitality and humanity are these memorials of the past-these transcripts of master-beings of a history we all have read, and with whom a personal acquaintance is now made! Here, fixed by Vandyke's life-conferring power, they come amongst us again, and are realised-rescued as it were from the mythical and the romance in which time and their strange careers had almost included them. As we pace these silent but speaking saloons, the loyal, national, and single interest of the court and camp of Charles, into which neither republican nor foreigner intrude, is unmistakeable. The pictures are well arranged-treated as principals, and not, as too often, degraded into furniture, or sacrificed to Mr. Banting and the evil genius of blue silk and white and gold upholstery :-suaves res indeed-and sufficient for the herds of bleating Cockneys who are goaded through apartments of State by inexorable drovers; but sad it is for some to listen to the rote twaddle of show-housekeepers, public or private, and sadder still to think how little even the educated classes really know of past history and art, and how much less they care about such things. Meantime, at the Grove, portrait-painting is in many instances elevated to the historical, so truly is the delicate spirit of expression seized, the mind and intellect as well as the form and habit perpetuated on canvas. Fortunate age, when a Vandyke lived to depict such subjects, such costume, such real ladies and gentlemen-not made by Nature's journeymen, like the big mayors and Manchester men manufactured and hung up in Trafalgar Square. Still-let us be candid—charming as

were

were the garbs and bearings of the age of Charles, the Puritan Prynne had some reason when he inveighed against the 'unloveliness of love-locks,' and we cannot admire the bringing down the hair so much on the brow, by which that temple of intelligence is masked and narrowed.

We shall attempt no descriptive details of these pictures. They must be seen-or, if writing can do, the task is accomplished by Lady Theresa. One word only on the leading personages with whom we have been dealing. Here the founder and illustrator of the gallery may well pass first as he was wont; and a sitting portrait, by Sir Peter Lely, brings him vividly before us in his robes of office; but there is no legal speculation in his eye, nor do his mustachios or chin-tuft tally with abstract notions of a Lord High Chancellor; neither is much intellectual power stamped on his full, rotund face-not to say jowl-or much careworn study suggested in his golden locks. From the collector to the partitioner the transition is easy-videlicet to the vivacious Duchess of Queensberry-Kitty, ever young and gay'-who, profiting by the Solomon Court, divided this cherished creation of Clarendon; the oval portrait of her Grace by Hudson is not prepossessing-the expression of this friend of Prior's and patroness of Gay's-a striking figure, too, in Horace Walpole's Reminiscences-is forbidding and disinheriting. Of Charles I. there only remains a sketch, said to be by Vandyke, for the superb equestrian portrait at Blenheim. The fine full-length, once the pride of the Chancellor, is at Bothwell; thus the uxorious husband is separated from his wife in death-where they might have been united with more safety than in life. This queen of beauty, the cynosure of all observers, rules alone at the Grove, in all the unmatched elegance of Vandyke's greatest power. Near her are the three Royal children, Charles, James, and Mary; and, close at hand, a faithful guard, Lords Falkland, Capell, and Hertford. Not far off appear James I. by Vansomer, and Buckingham by Jansen. The minion of this mean, detestable pedant, a lanky Steenie, with the face of an angel, like St. Stephen,' presents the impersonation of a fop-a giant in dress, a pigmy in politics; near him, and by Vandyke, is Lord Grandison, another Villiers-a family in which beauty is hereditary-who fell prematurely on the battle-field. Then are grouped around the princely Pembroke, the dilettante Arundel, Newcastle, the virtuoso of the manége, the faithful Richmond, the highbred Derby, so brutally murdered by the Puritans, and his magnanimous Countess. These and many other most effective pictures cause us to turn from the curlyheaded Cornburys, and the plum-coloured silk dressing-gowns of Earl

Henry

6

Henry the second, who first began to sell. Nor can we bestow more than a glance on the other perriwigged degenerate descendants of the Chancellor. Time indeed is a leveller; the accidents of birth and fashion end at latest with the allotted span.' As the minnow-fry recede, the good and great-the tritons-expand. Howsoever inexorable, so soon and surely does posterity winnow predecessors. Weighed in the balance, how few really stand forth! Charles, Cromwell, and Clarendon; soon after Louis XIV., Turenne, and Marlborough. Nay, the very present judges of the present. Already the minor shooting-stars-the Soults and Massenas-fortisque Gyas, fortisque Cleanthus-pale their ineffectual fires; while Napoleon, Nelson, and Wellington shine with the splendour of fixed planets in the galaxy of glory.

Not less remarkable than the presence in this collection of some is the absence of others. Neither early recollections nor friendships in Spain induced Clarendon to give a place to Gondomar, the envoy who managed James, nor to Philip IV., the host of Charles, nor to his minister Olivares, the foe of Buckingham. Charles himself, be it remembered, possessed no pictures by Spanish artists; nay, he left behind him at Madrid his own portrait, which Velazquez had begun, and which now is lost for ever. The libel daub so recently puffed in English papers and Scotch courts is a Snare and a delusion. We especially wonder that Clarendon should have allotted no little nook to Sully, the beloved friend of the father of Henrietta-the minister and faithful friend, like himself, of a beloved and murdered master. We can understand why Clarendon, a good hater, allotted no panel in his gallery to the fiery, headlong Rupert, whose influence occasioned such damage to the royal cause. The real desideratum was Cromwell-whose absence, like the wanting bust of Brutus at the imperial funeral of Rome, or of Luther in the temple of the Danube, is the more suggestive of importance. The void has been recently supplied by the present Earl-(who claims kindred with the Protector through Mrs. Rich)-and we could have wished with a better picture. It could not well be expected that the Chancellor, in whose loyalty and politics there was no tolerance-so often the mask of indifference-should find room under his roof for republicans or regicides, or permit a Pym, a Marten, or a Bradshaw to come between the Derbys, Richmonds, and their nobility. Unlike Charles, to forgive enemies and forget friends formed no article in his code. He had embarked body and soul in the one side of God and king, and the single-heartedness of his faith and allegiance was reflected in his gallery. Those therefore who are freer from party or prejudice, and desire to have all the scenes and all the actors in this civil tragedy

brought

brought again before them as at a diorama, must wend their way not to the Grove, but to Oxford-and perhaps they had as well visit old Alma Mater soon, before, among other blessed chances and changes, she is turned into a cross between Aberdeen and Heidelberg.

6

It was about 1795 that Mr. Sutherland, a Russian merchant, took to illustrating the histories of Clarendon and Burnet-to which he devoted his life and fortune, infinitely to his better half's dissatisfaction, before whom printsellers recoiled; but the fair sex, jealous sometimes even of things, brook few rivals in the affections of their liege lords, and none in their purses. A rebuff and some official rudeness at the British Museum, in the days when contributors were chilled and repelled, and an accidental visit to the better-behaved Bodleian, led Mr. Sutherland to exclaim, Here my books shall repose!' Yet he bequeathed his collection to his wife, warning her with his last breath, that if she broke it up he would haunt her. The widow accordingly pursued the completion of this national work' with the ardour of the departed founder. Finally, this solace of her weeds swelled, after a growth of twenty-three years and an expense of 20,000l., into sixty-three folio volumes, bursting with 18,742 prints and drawings; then, having herself prepared the ponderous catalogue to which we have alluded before, she consigned the russia-bound regiment to, as we presume, nearly uninterrupted repose in some picturesque closet of the limitless, silent, monumental Bodleian: nor shall we disturb their rest beyond the remark that there lie entombed 713 portraits of Charles and 352 of Cromwell. Copperplates are subject, it would seem, to no less chances and changes than crowns. The head of Cromwell after his death was rubbed out of an engraving by Lombard, and that of Louis XIV. put in its place. The Grand Monarque's turn came next, and his was effaced in favour of Gustavus Adolphus. In due time the Swedish hero disappeared to make way for Cromwell once more— whose head having been again obliterated-that of Charles I. anew graces the copper in a happy, we hope a final, restoration.

ART. VIII.—Memoirs of the Whig Party during my Time. By Henry Richard Lord Holland. Vol. i. Post 8vo. 1852..

WH

HEN in the spring of last year we expressed our strong concurrence in the universal indignation excited by Lord Holland's 'Foreign Reminiscences,' and justified that indignation by extracts from a work which it was irksome and even disgusting to copy, we stated that we were chiefly induced to do so by