ass[C]. There
are others who affirm that Nelly lodged at the _opposite_ side of Pall
Mall, because Evelyn gossips of her leaning from her window, "talking to
the king," who was lounging in St. James's Park, thereby wounding the
propriety of many, who think vice only vice when it becomes notorious.
Evelyn was always sadly perplexed by his faithful and high devotion to
Charles, the king, and his abhorrence of the vices of Charles, the man;
while Pepys jogged on, sometimes in the royal seraglio, sometimes at
church, sometimes with my Lady Castlemaine, sometimes with "Knip" at the
"king's house," seeing, admiring, and repeating--his morality held in
abeyance; and yet always, even to the kissing of "Mistress Nelly," "a
sweet pretty soul," companioned by his wife. If Pepys was a curiosity,
what must Madame Pepys have been![D] What must the "court set" of those
days have been, when we are absolutely refreshed by turning from them to
the uneducated but frank-hearted and generous woman,--tainted as she is
to all history by the worse than imperfections arising out of her
position, yet redeemed in a degree, by virtues, which, in that
profligate court, were entirely her own!

[Illustration: WHITEHALL.]

The scene in St. James's Park to which Evelyn refers, was an index to
the age[E].

Blessed as we are in the knowledge that nowhere in England are the
domestic virtues better cultivated or more truly flourishing than in our
own pure and high-souled court, we are almost inclined to treat as a
mythological fable, the history of Whitehall during the reign of Charles
the Second. No one trait of the father's better nature redeems that of
the son. His life was indeed

"a sad epicure's dream,"

and worse. He was not worthy even of the earnest devotion which the poor
orange-girl, of all his favorites, alone manifested to the last.

Poor Nell! the sympathy which every right-thinking woman feels it a
Christian duty to give to her and her class, far from extenuating vice,
is only a call upon the virtuous to be more virtuous, and to the pure to
be more pure. No one would plunge into crime, merely for the sake of
being redeemed therefrom; no one take the sin, who looked first at the
shame, hideous and enduring as it must be--however overshadowed by the
broad wings of mercy; the burn of the brand can never be effaced,
however skilfully healed. And when the wit, the loveliness, the
generosity, the fidelity of "Madame Ellen," when the mem