BEGINNINGS OF REAL RACING AND GENEALOGIES OF BLOOD STOCK. 103 



room for her. A year or so afterwards he was a member of the notorious Cabal, and 

 actually became Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, in 1671. Though he 

 had bitterly offended his sovereign before the King's death, he outlasted Charles II. 

 by three years, and retired in the next reign to the calmer seclusion of a country 

 life, at a distance from his creditors. His discarded wife was Mary, heiress of Lord 

 Fairfax, who brought him most of the wealth he squandered, and, for a short time, 

 he lived an exemplary existence in a part of Windsor Castle, allotted to him by 

 Richard Cromwell, in company with the poet Cowley. But the estates he recovered 

 at the Restoration revealed his true character, and the sudden rain of honours so 

 turned his head, that he tried flat treason, and was only saved from arrest by the 

 horsemanship of Mary Fairfax, who got to her husband with a warning before the 

 King's messenger. When he was eventually lodged in the Tower, Charles II. 

 soon laughed him out of it, and he promptly joined that adventurous freebooter, 

 Colonel Blood, in an attempt on the Duke of Ormond's life, which was only followed 

 by quarrels with Lord Ossory, Lord Dorchester, and finally with the King himself. 

 His "character" has been written for all time in one of the most tremendous 

 pieces of portraiture I remember in the English language. It was published by 

 Tonson in 1759, in the second volume of the "Remains of Samuel Butler." The 

 second Duke of Buckingham, says this writer, " is one that has studied the whole 

 Body of Vice. His Parts are disproportionate to the whole, and like a Monster, he 

 has more of some and less of others than he should have. ... He has clam'd up 

 all those lights that Nature made into the noblest Prospects of the XYorld, and 

 opened other little blind Loopholes backward, by turning Day into Night, and 

 Night into Day. . . . He rises, eats, and goes to bed by the Julian Account, long 

 after all others that go by the new Stile; and keeps the same hours with Owls and 

 Antipodes. . . . He does not dwell in his House, but haunts it, like an evil spirit 

 that walks all night to disturb the Family, and never appears by Day. He lives 

 perpetually benighted, runs out of his Life, and loses Time, as men do their ways in 

 the Darke ; and as blind Men are led by their Dogs, so is he governed by some 

 meane Servant, or other that relates to his Pleasures. He is as inconstant as the 

 Moon which he lives under. . . . Thus with St. Paul, though in a very different 

 sense, he dies daily, and only lives in the Night. He deforms Nature, while he 

 intends to adore her, like Indians that hang jewels in their Lips and Noses. His 

 ears are perpetually drilled with a Fiddlestick. He endures Pleasures with less 

 Patience than other men do their Pains." 



