'Monsieur Baptiste,'
all to win fair Beatrix Esmond. We know how 'Monsieur Baptiste' stole
his lady-love from the glum Colonel, and ran after the maids, and
drank too much wine, and came to the King's Arms at Kensington the day
after the fair (he was always 'after the fair'), and found Argyll's
regiment in occupation, and heard King George proclaimed.

Where in the world did Thackeray pick up the materials of that
brilliant picture of James VIII., gay, witty, reckless, ready to fling
away three crowns for a fine pair of eyes or a neat pair of ankles?
His Majesty's enemies brought against him precisely the opposite kind
of charges. There is a broad-sheet of 1716, _Hue and Cry after the
Pretender_, which is either by Swift or by one of 'the gentlemen
whom,' like Captain Bobadil, he 'had taught to write almost or
altogether as well as himself.' As to gaiety in James, 'you tell him
it is a fine day, and he weeps, and says he was unfortunate from his
mother's womb.' As to ladies, 'a weakness for the sex remarked in many
popular monarchs' (as Atterbury said to Lady Castlewood), our
pamphleteer tells the opposite tale. Two Highland charmers being
introduced 'to comfort him after the comfort of a man,' James
displayed 'an incredible inhumanity to beauty and clean linen,' merely
asking them 'whether they thought the Duke of Argyll would stand
another battle?' It is hard on a man to be stamped by history as
recklessly gay and amorous, also as a perfect Mrs. Gummidge for
tearful sentiment, and culpably indifferent to the smiles of beauty.
James is greatly misunderstood: the romance of his youth--sword and
cloak and disguise, pistol, dagger and poison, prepared for him; story
of true love blighted by a humorous cast of destiny; voyages, perils,
shipwrecks, dances at inns--all is forgotten or is unknown.

Meanwhile, who was her 'Oglethorpean majesty,' and why does the
pamphleteer of 1716 talk of 'James Stuart, _alias_ Oglethorpe'? By a
strange combination of his bad luck, James is called Miss Oglethorpe's
ungrateful lover by Thackeray, and Miss Oglethorpe's brother by the
pamphleteer, and by Whig slander in general. Thackeray, in fact, took
Miss Oglethorpe from the letter which Bolingbroke wrote to Wyndham,
after St. Germains found him out, as St. James's had done, for a
traitor. Bolingbroke merely mentions Fanny Oglethorpe as a busy
intriguer. There is no evidence that she ever was at Bar-le-Duc in her
life, none that she ever wa