o his Grace the injustice to treat him as a
criminal on such a charge as this?" said the King. "However," he added,
after a moment's consideration, "Buckingham is accessible to every
sort of temptation, from the flightiness of his genius. I should not be
surprised if he nourished hopes of an aspiring kind--I think we had some
proof of it lately.--Hark ye, Chiffinch; go to him instantly, and bring
him here on any fair pretext thou canst devise. I would fain save him
from what lawyers call an overt act. The Court would be dull as a dead
horse were Buckingham to miscarry."

"Will not your Majesty order the Horse Guards to turn out?" said young
Selby, who was present, and an officer.

"No, Selby," said the King, "I like not horse-play. But let them be
prepared; and let the High Bailiff collect his civil officers, and
command the Sheriffs to summon their worshipful attendants from
javelin-men to hangmen, and have them in readiness, in case of any
sudden tumult--double the sentinels on the doors of the palace--and see
no strangers get in."

"Or _out_," said the Duke of Ormond. "Where are the foreign fellows who
brought in the dwarf?"

They were sought for, but they were not to be found. They had retreated,
leaving their instruments--a circumstance which seemed to bear hard on
the Duke of Buckingham, their patron.

Hasty preparations were made to provide resistance to any effort of
despair which the supposed conspirators might be driven to; and in the
meanwhile, the King, withdrawing with Arlington, Ormond, and a few other
counsellors, into the cabinet where the Countess of Derby had had
her audience, resumed the examination of the little discoverer. His
declaration, though singular, was quite coherent; the strain of romance
intermingled with it, being in fact a part of his character, which often
gained him the fate of being laughed at, when he would otherwise have
been pitied, or even esteemed.

He commenced with a flourish about his sufferings for the Plot, which
the impatience of Ormond would have cut short, had not the King reminded
his Grace, that a top, when it is not flogged, must needs go down of
itself at the end of a definite time, while the application of the whip
may keep it up for hours.

Geoffrey Hudson was, therefore, allowed to exhaust himself on the
subject of his prison-house, which he informed the King was not without
a beam of light--an emanation of loveliness--a mortal angel--quick
of step and bea