146 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
gravely upholding almost the entire framework of 
fantastic error, old even in Pliny’s time; and 
speaking of the king-bee with his generals, captains, 
and retinue, honey that was a dew divinely sent 
down from heaven, the miraculous propagation of 
bee-kind from the flowers, and all the other curious 
myths and fables handed down from writer to writer 
since the very earliest days. 
But, reading on in the little time-stained, worm- 
eaten book, it is not very difficult to guess at last 
why Rusden adopted this attitude. He was the 
King’s bee-master, and therefore a courtier first 
and a naturalist afterwards. In the first flush of the 
Restoration, anyone who had anything to say in 
support of the divine right of kings was certain to 
catch the Royal eye. Rusden admits himself con- 
versant with Butler’s ‘‘ Feminine Monarchie,”’ 
published some fifty years before, in which the 
writer argues that the single great bee in a hive was 
really a female. To a man of Rusden’s practical 
experience and deductive quality of mind, this state- 
ment must have lead, and no doubt did lead, to all 
sorts of speculations and discoveries. But with a 
ruler of Charles the Second’s temperament, feminine 
monarchies were not to be thought of. Rusden 
saw at once his restrictions and his peculiar oppor- 
tunity, and wrote his book on bees, which is really 
an ingenious attempt to show that the system of a 
self-ruling commonwealth is a violation of nature, 
and that, whether for bees or men, government 
under a king is the divinely ordained state. 
Whether, however, Rusden was deliberately 
insincere, or actually succeeded in blinding himself 
