is sallies often descended
into buffoonery, and he spared no one in his merry moods. One evening a
play of Dryden's was represented. An actress had to spout forth this
line--

'My wound is great because it is so small!'

She gave it out with pathos, paused, and was theatrically distressed.
Buckingham was seated in one of the boxes. He rose, all eyes were fixed
upon a face well known in all gay assemblies, in a tone of burlesque he
answered--

'Then 'twould be greater were it none at all.'

Instantly the audience laughed at the Duke's tone of ridicule, and the
poor woman was hissed off the stage.

The king himself did not escape Buckingham's shafts; whilst Lord
Chancellor Clarendon fell a victim to his ridicule: nothing could
withstand it. There, not in that iniquitous gallery at Whitehall, but in
the king's privy chambers, Villiers might be seen, in all the radiance
of his matured beauty. His face was long and oval, with sleepy, yet
glistening eyes, over which large arched eyebrows seemed to contract a
brow on which the curls of a massive wig (which fell almost to his
shoulders) hung low. His nose was long, well formed, and flexible; his
lips thin and compressed, and defined, as the custom was, by two very
short, fine, black patches of hair, looking more like strips of
sticking-plaster than a moustache. As he made his reverence, his rich
robes fell over a faultless form. He was a beau to the very fold of the
cambric band round his throat; with long ends of the richest, closest
point that was ever rummaged out from a foreign nunnery to be placed on
the person of this sacrilegious sinner.

Behold, now, how he changes. Villiers is Villiers no longer. He is
Clarendon, walking solemnly to the Court of the Star Chamber: a pair of
bellows is hanging before him for the purse; Colonel Titus is walking
with a fire shovel on his shoulder, to represent a mace; the king,
himself a capital mimic, is splitting his sides with laughter; the
courtiers are fairly in a roar. Then how he was wont to divert the king
with his descriptions! 'Ipswich, for instance,' he said, 'was a town
without inhabitants--a river it had without water--streets without
names; and it was a place where asses wore boots:' alluding to the
asses, when employed in rolling Lord Hereford's bowling-green, having
boots on their feet to prevent their injuring the turf.

Flecknoe, the poet, describes the duke at this period, in 'Euterpe
Revived'--

T