"It's the first time I ever knew your Majesty to be a friend to Temperance," said Rochester: then turning to the delinquents, he continued"Pay attention, ye emblematical moralities and real raggamuffins, and listen to your sentence. You, Peace! were the first to break yourself, and shall therefore be bound over under a heavy penalty to keep yourself. You, Mercy! showed none of yourself, and shall therefore receive none of yourself. Justice! you may depend upon having yourself. You, Hope! on the contrary, must give yourself up; and you, Fortitude! may prepare to act with yourself. And now, ye self-antitheses, hearken to your verdict, as the Court shall record it. As his Majesty would be sorry to put the cardinal Virtues in the stocks, or order Faith, Hope, and Charity to be whipped at the cart's tail, in order to avoid such grievous scandal, and save ye all the shame of such an exposure, he is most graciously pleased to order that ye be jointly and severally hanged by the neck till ye be dead."

"O Lord! Lord!" cried Fortitude, who was less recovered from his intoxication than the others, and wore a face of most tipsy terror, "what will become of us? what will become of us? Do, my Lord Judge, show us mercy!"

"There he is," said Rochester, pointing to the man who had enacted that character,-" and a more remorseless-looking rogue I never saw. There is no chance for you in his face; it is suffused all over with the gallows.-You must swing, Sir; you must swing!"

""Ods fish!" cried Charles, interposing,"you will frighten the fellow out of his wits. The joke has gone far enough. Begone, ye varlets! the King pardons ye all, on condition that ye get not drunk again to-morrow, for it is the fast-day. Rochester, let them be well paid, for we prefer their travestie to the intended original. The rogues would doubtless rather receive money than applause; and thus shall we be all satisfied."

In expressing this opinion, his Majesty did not reckon upon the irritability and touchiness of Matthew Lock, the composer, who no sooner found that his pains were likely to be thrown away, than he bustled through the throng chafing with ire, and, approaching the royal seat, pettishly, exclaimed:-"With all due submission to your Majesty, I cannot submit to it. I cannot sit up all night to compose a curtaintune, and a quintetto, besides recitatives, to have them all lost in this way for a joke!"

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Tilly vally! man, they shall not be lost!" cried the Monarch; 66 we will have them another time, for it were no joke to lose a single note of your composing; and to-night you shall play to us your music of the witches in Macbeth, than which I know nothing finer."

"Your Majesty is certainly the best judge in England,” said the appeased musician, bowing complacently as he spoke.

"And a good composer too," added Ro

chester, "for he has soothed your wrath in a minute."

"Now then!" cried the King, clapping his hands together to draw attention, "let every gallant single out his beauty, for the supper awaits us. Music! play up the new French galliard, la belle Fontanges.-There is good Rhenish and rare Canary in the cellars of Christchurch, and we will all pledge our fair partners of the dance in each liquor, until beauty and the glass shall give a zest to one another. 'Ods fish! the sight of those tipsy masquers has made me thirsty: so hey for the Banquet-room! without further parley."

At these words he walked out of the hall, followed by the courtiers, each leading his partner or his mistress, and all smiling, talking, and laughing, till their glittering dresses and waving plumes gradually disappeared, the buzz of their voices was no longer heard, and only one person remained in the silent and deserted hall:

that one was Jocelyn. Disgusted by what he had already seen, he was too sad and sick at heart to endure any farther festivities. Far from participating in the past entertainment, his thoughts had reverted to the appalling scenes from which he had so recently escaped; and when he contrasted the ghastliness and desolation of the depopulated, plague-stricken city, its yawning sepulchres, and the tolling bells of its dead-carts, with the wild festivities and unbridled foolery, the mirth, music, and madness that had just been exhibiting before his eyes, almost expected that a voice should come up out of the great pit to rebuke these revellers for thus defying the King of Terrors, and flaunting in the very face of an offended God. Impressed with these feelings he withdrew from the Hall to his own apartments, wrote an excuse to the Duke of Monmouth, with whom he had engaged to sup on the following night, and determined to remain at home and devote the whole of the

he