AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 



addresses, the course of their true love never did run smooth 

 And little wonder, since " the father of the hero was sitting in the 

 Long Parliament ; the father of the heroine was commanding in 

 Guernsey for King Charles ; and even when the war was ended," 

 continues Macaulay, " and Sir Peter Osborne returned to his 

 seat at Chicksands, the prospects of the lovers were scarcely less 

 gloomy. Sir John Temple had a more advantageous alliance in 

 view for his son. Dorothy Osborne was in the meantime besieged 

 by as many suitors as were drawn to Belmont by the fame of 

 Portia." Among them was Henry Cromwell, son of the Lord- 

 General, afterwards the Protector. Dorothy's relatives were 

 bitterly opposed to her intended marriage with Temple, and she 

 had to defend her lover's character from all sorts of attacks. She 

 held firm, and when at last, after seven years, her constancy was 

 on the point of being rewarded, she fell ill of smallpox ; she 

 escaped with her life, but her beauty was gone. Temple, however, 

 was not lacking in chivalry, and the pair were married. Hereafter 

 we hear little of Dorothy. 



Sir William Temple's fame as a statesman rests chiefly on the 

 celebrated league by which England, Sweden, and the Netherlands, 

 in 1668, united to curb the power of France under Louis XIV. 

 But the sympathies of Charles II. were thoroughly French, and 

 in 1670 he treacherously concluded another and secret treaty 

 with France, the Treaty of Dover, which rendered Temple's work 

 futile, and the great Triple Alliance, which Pepys, in his diary, 

 calls " the only good thing that hath been done since the King 

 came into England," inoperative. Temple thereupon retired to a 

 small estate which he had purchased at Sheen, near Richmond, 

 and threw himself with such ardour into horticulture that the 

 fame of his fruit trees spread far and wide. He did not return to 

 public life until the popular resentment against the French Alliance 

 and the Dutch war rose to clamorous heights, and compelled 

 Charles to send for him to negotiate a separate peace with Holland. 



For, easy and pleasure-loving as Charles was, and though served 

 by unscrupulous ministers, he still had wit enough to seek to bind 

 to his interests a man whose political character was unblemished, 

 who was in high favour with the nation, and whose capacity might 

 even at that hour have restored England to the position she had 

 held abroad under Elizabeth and Cromwell. Over and over again 



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