As when the King of old
'Mid Babylonian gold,
And picture-woven walls, and lamps that gleam'd
Unholy radiance, sate,
And with some smooth slave-mate
Toy'd, and the wine laugh'd round, and music stream'd
Voluptuous undulation, o'er the hall,--
Till on the palace-wall
Forth came a hand divine
And wrote the judgment-sign,
And Babylon fell!--So now, in that his place
Of Tudor-Stuart pride,
The golden gallery wide,
'Mid venal beauty's lavish-arm'd embrace,
And hills of gambler-gold, a godless King
Moved through the revelling
With quick brown falcon-eye
And lips of gay reply;
Wise in the wisdom not from Heaven!--as one
Who from his exile-days
Had learn'd to scorn the praise
Of truth, the crown by martyr-virtue won:
Below ambition:--Grant him regal ease!
The rest, as fate may please!
--O royal heir, restored
Not by the bitter sword,
But when the heart of these great realms in free,
Full, triple, unison beat
The Martyr's son to greet,
Her ancient law and faith and flag with thee
Rethroned,--not thus!--in this inglorious hall
Of harem-festival,
Not thus!--For even now,
The blaze is on thy brow
Scored by the shadowy hand of him whose wing
Knows neither haste nor rest;
Who from the board each guest
In season calling,--knight and kerne and king,--
Where Arthur lies, and Alfred, signs the way;--
--We know him, and obey.
Lord Macaulay's lively description of this scene (_Hist_. Ch iv) should
be referred to. 'Even then,' he says, 'the King had complained that he
did not feel well.'
_Tudor-Stuart_; This famous Gallery was of sixteenth-century date.
_When the heart_; The weariness of England under the triple yoke of
Puritanism, the Independents, and the Protector, has been already
noticed: (Note on p. 125).
'The Restoration,' says Professor Seeley, in an able essay on current
perversions of seventeenth-century-history, 'was not a return to
servitude, but the precise contrary. It was a great emancipation, an
exodus out of servitude into liberty . . . As to the later Stuarts, I
regard them as pupils of Cromwell: . . . it was their great ambition to
appropriate his methods,' (and, we may add, to follow his foreign policy
in regard to France and Holland), for the benefit of the old monarchy.
They failed where their model had succeeded, and the distinction of
having enslaved England remained peculiar to Cromwell.'