He does not lie in Westminster Abbey: I think he would have rebelled among the poets: he sleeps more quietly in the pretty church-yard of High-Lavor, a little way off, northward, from the New Park of Epping Forest.
The lives of these two men--Dryden and Locke--have brought us past the whole reach of Charles II.’s reign. That ignoble monarch has met his fate courageously; some days before the immediate end he knew it was coming, and had kind words for those about him.
He died on a Friday,[95] and on the Sunday before had held great revel in the famous gallery of Whitehall; next day came the warnings, and then the blow--paralytic, or other such--which shrivelled his showy powers, and brought his swarthy face to a whiteness and a death-like pallor that shocked those gay people who belonged in the palace. Then came the scourging with hot iron, and the administration of I know not what foul drugs that belonged to the blind medication of that day--all in vain; there were suspicions of poison; but the poison he died of was of his own making, and he had been taking it ever since boyhood.
A Catholic priest came to him stealthily and made the last promises to him he was ever to hear. To a courtier, who came again and again, he apologized--showing his courtesy to the last. “I’m an awful time in dying,” he said; and to somebody else--his brother, perhaps--“don’t let poor Nell Gwynne starve;” and so died.
James, the successor, was not loved--scarce by anyone; bigoted, obstinate, selfish, he ran quickly through the short race of which the histories will tell you. Only three years of it, or thereabout, and then--_presto!_ like the changing of the scenes at Drury Lane Theatre in one of the splendid spectacles of the day--James scuds away, and Cousin William (with his wife Mary, both of the blood royal of England) comes in, and sets up a fashion of rule, and an assured Protestant succession of regal names which is not ended yet.
And now, in closing this talk, I will summon into presence once again some of the notable personages who have given intellectual flavor to the years we have gone over, and will call the roll of a few new names among those actors who are to take in swift succession the places of those who disappear. At the date where we now are--1688--the date of the last English Revolution (who, pray, can predict the next?), the date of John Bunyan’s death, the date of Alexander Pope’s birth--excellent remembrancers, these!--at this epoch, I say, of the incoming of William and Mary, all those dramatic writers--of whom we made mention as having put a little tangled fringe of splendor about the great broidery of Shakespeare’s work--were gone. So was Herrick, with his sweet poems, and his pigs and tankards; and Howell, and Wotton, and the saintly George Herbert, and dear, good, old Izaak Walton--all comfortably dead and buried. So were Andrew Marvell, and the author of _Hudibras_. Archbishop Laud was gone long since to the scaffold, with the fullest acquiescence of all New Englanders; Jeremy Taylor gone--if ever man had right of way there--to heaven; Milton dead; Cowley dead; Waller dead.