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"If your Majesty hath a session in April for supporting your allies, I find it is resolved by many, that the money necessary to maintain your alliances shall be put into the hands of Commissioners, to issue it as they shall answer it to the two Houses; and these will be so chosen, that as it is likely that the persons will be very unacceptable to you, so they being trusted with the money will be as a Council of State to control all your councils. And as to your exchequer, I do not find any inclination to consider your necessity, unless many things be done to put them into another disposition than I can ob serve in them.

"The things that will be demanded will not be of so easy a digestion, as that I can imagine you will ever be brought to them, or indeed that it will be reasonable or honourable for you to grant them. So that, in this disorder of affairs, it is easy to propose difficulties, but not so easy to find out that which may remove them.

"There is one thing, and indeed the only thing, in which all honest men agree, as that which can easily extricate you out of all your troubles: it is not the change of a Minister, or of a Council, a new Alliance, or a Session of Parliament; but it is (and suffer me, Sir, to speak it with a more than ordinary earnestness) à change in your own heart, and in your course of life. And now, Sir, if you do not with indignation throw this paper from you, permit me with all the humility of a subject prostrate at your feet to tell you, that all the distrust your people have of you, all the necessities you are now under, all the indignation of Heaven that is now upon you and appears in the defeating all your

councils, flow from this; that you have not feared or served God, but have given yourself up to so many sinful pleasures. Your Majesty may, perhaps, justly think, that many of those that oppose you have no regard to religion; but the body of your people consider it more than you imagine. I do not desire your Majesty to put on an hypocritical show of religion, as Henry III. of France did, hoping to have weathered the storms of those times. No! that would be soon seen through; and, as it would provoke God more, so it would increase jealousies. No, Sir; it must be real, and the evidences of it signal: all those about you who are the occasion of sin, chiefly the women, must be removed, and your Court reformed. Sir, if you will turn you to religion sincerely and seriously, you shall quickly find a serene joy of another nature possess your mind, than what arises from gross pleasures: God will be at peace with you, and direct and bless all your councils: all good men would presently turn to you, and ill men would be ashamed and have a thin party. For I speak it knowingly, there is nothing hath so alienated the body of your people from you, as what they have heard of your life, which disposes them to give an easy belief to all other scandalous reports.

"Sir, this counsel is now almost as necessary for your affairs, as it is for your soul: and though you have highly offended that God, who hath been in- ~ finitely merciful to you in preserving you at Worcester fight and during your long exile, and who brought you back so miraculously, yet he is still good and gracious, and will upon your sincere repentance and change of life pardon all your sins, and receive you into his favour. Oh! Sir, what if you should

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die in the midst of all your sins? At the great tribunal, where you must appear, there will be no regard to the crown you now wear; but it will aggravate your punishment that, being in so eminent a station, you have so much dishonoured God. Sir, I hope you believe there is a God, and a life to come, and that sin shall not pass unpunished. If your Majesty will reflect upon your having now been twenty years upon the throne, and in all that time how little you have glorified God, how much you have provoked him, and that your ill example hath drawn so many after you to sin that men are not now ashamed of their vices; you cannot but think, that God is offended with you: and, if you consider how ill your councils at home and your wars abroad have succeeded, and how much you have lost the hearts of your people, you may reasonably conclude this is of God, who will not turn away his anger from you till you turn to him with your whole heart.

"I am no enthusiast, either in opinion or temper; yet I acknowledge I have been so pressed in my mind to make this address to you, that I could have no ease till I did it; and since you were pleased to direct me to send you through Mr. Chiffinch's hands such information as I thought fit to convey to you, I hope your Majesty will not be offended, if I have made this use of that liberty. I am sure I can have no other design in it, than your good; for I know very well, this is not the method to serve any ends of my own. I therefore throw myself at your feet, and once more, in the name of God whose servant I am, do most humbly beseech your Majesty to consider of what I have written; and not to despise it for the meanness of the person who hath sent it, but to

apply yourself to religion in earnest and I dare assure you of many blessings both temporal and spiritual in this life, and of eternal glory in the life to come. But if you go on in your sins, the judgements of God will probably pursue you in this life, so that you may be a proverb to after-ages: and, after this life, you will be for ever miserable; and I, your poor subject that now am, shall be a witness against you in the great day, that I gave you this free and faithful warning. Sir, no person alive knows, that I have written to you to this purpose; and I chose this evening, hoping your exercise tomorrow (January 30,) may put you in a disposition to weigh it more carefully. I hope your Majesty will not be offended with this sincere expression of my duty to you; for I durst not have ventured on it, if I had not thought myself bound to it both by the duty I owe to God and that which will ever oblige me to be, May it please your Majesty, &c."

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The occasion of the above Letter, which is preserved in the Life of Burnet' prefixed to the edition of the History of his own Times' by Dr. Flaxman, arose from Burnet's attendance at the death-bed of Mrs. Roberts, one of the King's mistresses, for whom he drew up an epistle of such tender expostulation as it might have been fit for her to address to the royal associate of her guilt; but she never had the vigour to transcribe it. Upon which, he resolved to write himself a very strong letter to his Majesty.*

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* It does not seem necessary, with Dr. Aikin, to infer from the fact of Charles' throwing it (after a second perusal) into the fire, that there was a want either of judgement or of delicacy in the reproof: since it would be hard to conceive any terms of

Upon the mediation, however, of Lord Halifax a momentary reconciliation took place, and the Mastership of the Temple was promised to the writer; but, upon his refusing to relinquish the society of his friends, the Earl of Essex, Lord Russell, and Sir William Jones, he was (to adopt his own expression) where he was before.'

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About this time he attended a sick person, who had been engaged in an amour with the Earl of Rochester. The manner, in which he conducted himself during her illness, excited in that nobleman an ardent desire to become acquainted with him; and throughout a whole winter he spent one evening a week with him, discussing all those topics, upon which men of light faith and loose morals attack Christianity The happy effect of these conferences is recorded in his invaluable account of the life and death of that witty and repentant profligate; An account, which (as Dr. Johnson has declared, in his 'Lives of the Poets') "the critic ought to read for it's elegance, the philosopher for it's argument, and the saint for it's piety." Wordsworth's well-chosen motto, from Bishop Taylor, for the reprint of his life is, "Deceive not yourselves: God's mercy cannot be made a pattern for any man's impiety. purport of it is, to bring us to repentance; and God will do it by the mercies of his mercy, or by the mercies of his judgements."

The

During the affair of the Popish Plot, he was often consulted by Charles II. upon the state of the nation; and about the same time he refused the

hortatory character so managed, as not to have appeared impertinent and officious to such a reader,

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