was gone before him for London:  so that he believes he is this day also come to towne before him; but no newes is yet heard of him.  This is all he brings.  Thence to my Lord Chancellor’s, and there, meeting Sir H. Cholmly, he and I walked in my Lord’s garden, and talked; among other things, of the treaty:  and he says there will certainly be a peace, but I cannot believe it.  He tells me that the Duke of Buckingham his crimes, as far as he knows, are his being of a caball with some discontented persons of the late House of Commons, and opposing the desires of the King in all his matters in that House; and endeavouring to become popular, and advising how the Commons’ House should proceed, and how he would order the House of Lords.  And that he hath been endeavouring to have the King’s nativity calculated; which was done, and the fellow now in the Tower about it; which itself hath heretofore, as he says, been held treason, and people died for it; but by the Statute of Treasons, in Queen Mary’s times and since, it hath been left out.  He tells me that this silly Lord hath provoked, by his ill-carriage, the Duke of York, my Lord Chancellor, and all the great persons; and therefore, most likely, will die.  He tells me, too, many practices of treachery against this King; as betraying him in Scotland, and giving Oliver an account of the King’s private councils; which the King knows very well, and hath yet pardoned him.

[Two of our greatest poets have drawn the character of the Duke of Buckingham in brilliant verse, and both have condemned him to infamy.  There is enough in Pepys’s reports to corroborate the main features of Dryden’s magnificent portrait of Zimri in “Absolom and Achitophel”: 

               “In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;
               A man so various that he seemed to be
               Not one, but all mankind’s epitome;
               Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
               Was everything by starts, and nothing long,

               But, in the course of one revolving moon,
               Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
               Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
               Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking,
                    * * * * * * *
               He laughed himself from Court, then sought relief
               By forming parties, but could ne’er be chief.”

Pope’s facts are not correct, and hence the effect of his picture is impaired.  In spite of the duke’s constant visits to the Tower, Charles ii. still continued his friend; but on the death of the king, expecting little from James, he retired to his estate at Helmsley, in Yorkshire, to nurse his property and to restore his constitution.  He died on April 16th, 1687, at Kirkby Moorside, after a few days’ illness, caused by sitting on the damp grass when heated from a fox chase.  The scene of his