very
simple. Why should James II., whose credit required the concealment of
such acts, have allowed that to be written which endangered their
success? The answer is, cynicism--haughty indifference. Oh! you believe
that effrontery is confined to abandoned women? The _raison d'etat_ is
equally abandoned. _Et se cupit ante videri_. To commit a crime and
emblazon it, there is the sum total of history. The king tattooes
himself like the convict. Often when it would be to a man's greatest
advantage to escape from the hands of the police or the records of
history, he would seem to regret the escape so great is the love of
notoriety. Look at my arm! Observe the design! _I_ am Lacenaire! See, a
temple of love and a burning heart pierced through with an arrow! _Jussu
regis_. It is I, James the Second. A man commits a bad action, and
places his mark upon it. To fill up the measure of crime by effrontery,
to denounce himself, to cling to his misdeeds, is the insolent bravado
of the criminal. Christina seized Monaldeschi, had him confessed and
assassinated, and said,--

"I am the Queen of Sweden, in the palace of the King of France."

There is the tyrant who conceals himself, like Tiberius; and the tyrant
who displays himself, like Philip II. One has the attributes of the
scorpion, the other those rather of the leopard. James II. was of this
latter variety. He had, we know, a gay and open countenance, differing
so far from Philip. Philip was sullen, James jovial. Both were equally
ferocious. James II. was an easy-minded tiger; like Philip II., his
crimes lay light upon his conscience. He was a monster by the grace of
God. Therefore he had nothing to dissimulate nor to extenuate, and his
assassinations were by divine right. He, too, would not have minded
leaving behind him those archives of Simancas, with all his misdeeds
dated, classified, labelled, and put in order, each in its compartment,
like poisons in the cabinet of a chemist. To set the sign-manual to
crimes is right royal.

Every deed done is a draft drawn on the great invisible paymaster. A
bill had just come due with the ominous endorsement, _Jussu regis_.

Queen Anne, in one particular unfeminine, seeing that she could keep a
secret, demanded a confidential report of so grave a matter from the
Lord Chancellor--one of the kind specified as "report to the royal ear."
Reports of this kind have been common in all monarchies. At Vienna there
was "a counsellor of the ear"-