en, and others
nearly connected to him by the ties of blood. His recommendation of the
Duchess of Portsmouth and Mrs. Gwyn, upon his death-bed, to his successor
is much to his honour; and they who censure it seem, in their zeal to
show themselves strict moralists, to have suffered their notions of vice
and virtue to have fallen into strange confusion. Charles's connection
with those ladies might be vicious, but at a moment when that connection
was upon the point of being finally and irrevocably dissolved, to concern
himself about their future welfare and to recommend them to his brother
with earnest tenderness was virtue. It is not for the interest of
morality that the good and evil actions, even of bad men, should be
confounded. His affection for the Duke of Gloucester and for the Duchess
of Orleans seems to have been sincere and cordial. To attribute, as some
have done, his grief for the loss of the first to political
considerations, founded upon an intended balance of power between his two
brothers, would be an absurd refinement, whatever were his general
disposition; but when we reflect upon that carelessness which, especially
in his youth, was a conspicuous feature of his character, the absurdity
becomes still more striking. And though Burnet more covertly, and Ludlow
more openly, insinuate that his fondness for his sister was of a criminal
nature, I never could find that there was any ground whatever for such a
suspicion; nor does the little that remains of their epistolary
correspondence give it the smallest countenance. Upon the whole, Charles
II. was a bad man and a bad king; let us not palliate his crimes, but
neither let us adopt false or doubtful imputations for the purpose of
making him a monster.

Whoever reviews the interesting period which we have been discussing,
upon the principle recommended in the outset of this chapter, will find
that, from the consideration of the past, to prognosticate the future
would at the moment of Charles's demise be no easy task. Between two
persons, one of whom should expect that the country would remain sunk in
slavery, the other, that the cause of freedom would revive and triumph,
it would be difficult to decide whose reasons were better supported,
whose speculations the more probable. I should guess that he who
desponded had looked more at the state of the public, while he who was
sanguine had fixed his eyes more attentively upon the person who was
about to moun