"
"There is no such word as 'sin' in Charles Stuart's Court, my dear young
lady. It is harder to achieve bad repute nowadays than it was once to be
thought a saint. Existence in this town is a succession of bagatelles.
Men's lives and women's reputations drift down to the bottomless pit upon
a rivulet of epigrams and chansons. You have heard of that Dance of Death,
which was one of the nervous diseases of the fifteenth century--a malady
which, after beginning with one lively caperer, would infect a whole
townspeople, and send an entire population curvetting and prancing,
until death stopped them. I sometimes think, when I watch the follies at
Whitehall, that those graceful dancers, sliding upon pointed toe through a
coranto, amid a blaze of candles and star-shine of diamonds, are capering
along the same fatal road by which St. Vitus lured his votaries to the
grave. And then I look at Rowley's licentious eye and cynical lip, and
think to myself, 'This man's father perished on the scaffold; this man's
lovely ancestress paid the penalty of her manifold treacheries after
sixteen years' imprisonment; this man has passed through the jaws of death,
has left his country a fugitive and a pauper, has returned as if by a
miracle, carried back to a throne upon the hearts of his people; and behold
him now--saunterer, sybarite, sensualist--strolling through life without
one noble aim or one virtuous instinct; a King who traffics in the pride
and honour of his country, and would sell her most precious possessions,
level her strongest defences, if his cousin and patron t'other side the
Channel would but bid high enough.
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