at the side
of the fugitive king is heavily armed, with sword in hand, mounted on
heavy, galloping horses, going at high speed; and each is looking out
anxiously, with head turned aside as he flies, for any danger which may
menace--not himself, but the sovereign. Charles Stuart, riding between
them, is mounted upon a dark, high-stepping, pure-blooded English horse.
He wears the peaked hat of the time, and his long hair--that which
afterward became so notorious in the masks and orgies of Whitehall, and
in the prosecution of his amours in the purlieus of the capital--floats
out in wild dishevelment from his shoulders. He is dressed in the dark
velvet short cloak, and broad, pointed collar peculiar to pictures of
himself and his unfortunate father; he shows no weapon, and is leaning
ungracefully forward, as if outstripping the hard-trotting speed of his
horse. But the true interest of this figure, and of the whole picture,
is concentrated in the eyes. Those sad, dark eyes, steady and immovable
in their fixed gaze, reveal whole pages of history and whole years of
suffering. The fugitive king is not thinking of his flight, of any
dangers that may beset him, of the companions at his side, or even of
where he shall lay his perilled head in the night that is coming. Those
eyes have shut away the physical and the real, and through the mists of
the future they are trying to read the great question of _fate_!
Worcester is lost, and with it a kingdom: is he to be henceforth a
crownless king and a hunted fugitive, or has the future its
compensations? This is what the fixed and glassy eyes are saying to
every beholder, and there is not one who does not answer the question
with a mental response forced by that mute appeal of suffering thought:
"The king shall have his own again!"

The second picture lately in the same collection, is much smaller, and
commands less attention; but it tells another story of the same great
struggle between King and Parliament, through the agency of the same
feature. A wounded cavalier, accompanied by one of his retainers, also
wounded, is being forced along on foot, evidently to imprisonment, by
one of Cromwell's Ironsides and a long-faced, high-hatted Puritan
cavalry-man, both on horseback, and a third on foot, with musquetoon on
shoulder. The cavalier's garments are red and blood-stained, and there
is a bloody handkerchief binding his brow, and telling how, when his
house was surprised and his dependant