< Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu
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107
SAYINGS OF CHARLES II.

The old Lord Cromarty often mentioned this anecdote to his friends.[1]

"It is better to be envied than pitied," was his observation to Lord Chancellor Clarendon.[2]

"He that takes one stone from the Church, takes two from the Crown," was another of his sayings preserved by Pepys.[3]

He said to Lauderdale, "To let Presbytery go, for it was not a religion for gentlemen."[4]

That "God would not damn a man for a little irregular pleasure," he observed in one of his free discourses with Burnet on points of religion.[5]

If his short characters of men were in common at all like the one that has been preserved to us of Godolphin, we have lost a good deal by the lack of reporters. Of Godolphin, when only a page at court, he said, "that he was never in the way, and never out of the way;"[6] and this was a character, says Lord Dartmouth, which Godolphin maintained to his life's end.

When told by Will. Legge, that the pardoning of Lord Russell would, among other things, lay an eternal obligation upon a very great and numerous

  1. ↑ King's Anecdotes of his Own Times, p. 61.
  2. ↑ Clarendon's Own Life, i. 412, ed. 1827.
  3. ↑ Pepys, 29 March, 1669.
  4. ↑ Burnet, i. 184, ed. 1823.
  5. ↑ Burnet, ii. 23, ed. 1823.
  6. ↑ Lord Dartmouth in Burnet, ii. 240 ed. 1823.
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