ust laugh and talk, though never so much against my will:
I believe I dissemble very ill to those who know me; at least, it is a
great constraint to myself, yet I must endure it. All my motions are so
watched, and all I do so observed, that if I eat less, or speak less, or
look more grave, all is lost in the opinion of the world; so that I have
this misery added to that of your absence, that I must grin when my
heart is ready to break, and talk when my heart is so oppressed that I
can scarce breathe. I go to Kensington as often as I can for air; but
then I never can be quite alone, neither can I complain--that would be
some ease; but I have nobody whose humour and circumstances agree with
mine enough to speak my mind freely to. Besides, I must hear of
business, which being a thing I am so new in, and so unfit for, does but
break my brains the more, and not ease my heart."

Thus different from the representation of Burnet was the actual state of
Queen Mary: and I suspect that our warm and vehement bishop had but
little personal knowledge of her majesty, notwithstanding the elaborate
character of the queen which he has given in her funeral eulogium. He
must have known that she did not always sympathise with his
party-feelings: for the queen writes, "The Bishop of Salisbury has made
a long thundering sermon this morning, which he has been with me to
desire to print; which I could not refuse, though I should not have
ordered it, for reasons which I told him." Burnet (whom I am very far
from calling what an inveterate Tory, Edward Earl of Oxford, does in one
of his manuscript notes, "that lying Scot") unquestionably has told many
truths in his garrulous page; but the cause in which he stood so deeply
engaged, coupled to his warm sanguine temper, may have sometimes dimmed
his sagacity, so as to have caused him to have mistaken, as in the
present case, a mask for a face, particularly at a time when almost
every individual appears to have worn one!

Both these cases of Charles the Second and Queen Mary show the absolute
necessity of researches into secret history, to correct the appearances
and the fallacies which so often deceive us in public history.

"The appetite for Remains," as the noble author whom I have already
alluded to calls it, may then be a very wholesome one, if it provide the
only materials by which our popular histories can be corrected, and
since it often infuses a freshness into a story which, after having b