the world." Landing at Burlington-bay in Yorkshire, she lodged on the
quay; the parliament's admiral barbarously pointed his cannon at the
house; and several shots reaching it, her favourite, Jermyn, requested
her to fly: she safely reached a cavern in the fields, but, recollecting
that she had left a lap-dog asleep in its bed, she flew back, and amidst
the cannon-shot returned with this other favourite. The queen related
this incident of the lap-dog to her friend Madame Motteville; these
ladies considered it as a complete woman's victory. It is in these
memoirs we find, that when Charles went down to the house, to seize on
the five leading members of the opposition, the queen could not
restrain her lively temper, and impatiently babbled the plot; so that
one of the ladies in attendance despatched a hasty note to the parties,
who, as the king entered the house, had just time to leave it. Some have
dated the ruin of his cause to the failure of that impolitic step, which
alarmed every one zealous for that spirit of political freedom which had
now grown up in the Commons. Incidents like these mark the feminine
dispositions of Henrietta. But when at sea, in danger of being taken by
a parliamentarian, the queen commanded the captain not to strike, but to
prepare at the extremity to blow up the ship, resisting the shrieks of
her females and domestics. We perceive how, on every trying occasion,
Henrietta never forgot that she was the daughter of Henry the Fourth;
that glorious affinity was inherited by her with all the sexual pride;
and hence, at times, that energy in her actions which was so far above
her intellectual capacity.

And, indeed, when the awful events she had witnessed were one by one
registered in her melancholy mind, the sensibility of the woman subdued
the natural haughtiness of her character; but, true woman! the feeling
creature of circumstances, at the Restoration she resumed it, and when
the new court of Charles the Second would not endure her obsolete
haughtiness, the dowager-queen left it in all the full bitterness of her
spirit. An habitual gloom, and the meagreness of grief, during the
commonwealth, had changed a countenance once the most lively; and her
eyes, whose dark and dazzling lustre was ever celebrated, then only
shone in tears. When she told her physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, that
she found her understanding was failing her, and seemed terrified lest
it was approaching to madness, the court ph