inclined to go farther, they may rest assured that the greatest care shall be taken to render details of nauseous deeds and events as inoffensive as circumstances will permit.
The materials for a work such as the following consist mainly of a mass of discursive gossip, and it would be very difficult to deal with it without discursiveness. The author is only too conscious that he has succumbed to that difficulty without making any very serious effort to overcome it; but he hopes that, in a book which is not a biography, but an attempt to give some idea of a group of men, one of which is made the central figure, discursiveness may be forgiven, or at least tolerated.
Politics and history, properly so called, have no place, and will receive no notice in these pages. The subject of those pages, it must be admitted, is not very important; but side-lights, however insignificant, have their uses, and it may be that this particular side-view of the Court of Charles II. has been hitherto somewhat neglected.