undeserving of his confidence, could easily wheedle him out
of titles, places, domains, state secrets and pardons. He bestowed
much; yet he neither enjoyed the pleasure nor acquired the fame of
beneficence. He never gave spontaneously; but it was painful to him to
refuse. The consequence was that his bounty generally went, not to those
who deserved it best, nor even to those whom he liked best, but to the
most shameless and importunate suitor who could obtain an audience.

The motives which governed the political conduct of Charles the Second
differed widely from those by which his predecessor and his successor
were actuated. He was not a man to be imposed upon by the patriarchal
theory of government and the doctrine of divine right. He was utterly
without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated
his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the
administration. Such was his aversion to toil, and such his ignorance of
affairs, that the very clerks who attended him when he sate in council
could not refrain from sneering at his frivolous remarks, and at his
childish impatience. Neither gratitude nor revenge had any share
in determining his course; for never was there a mind on which both
services and injuries left such faint and transitory impressions.
He wished merely to be a King such as Lewis the Fifteenth of France
afterwards was; a King who could draw without limit on the treasury for
the gratification of his private tastes, who could hire with wealth and
honours persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and who,
even when the state was brought by maladministration to the depths of
humiliation and to the brink of ruin, could still exclude unwelcome
truth from the purlieus of his own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear
whatever might disturb his luxurious repose. For these ends, and for
these ends alone, he wished to obtain arbitrary power, if it could
be obtained without risk or trouble. In the religious disputes
which divided his Protestant subjects his conscience was not at all
interested. For his opinions oscillated in contented suspense between
infidelity and Popery. But, though his conscience was neutral in the
quarrel between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians, his taste was
by no means so. His favourite vices were precisely those to which the
Puritans were least indulgent. He could not get through one day without
the help of diversions which the Puritans rega