Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/100

84 the viol) is not ill illustrated in the well-known jingle—

written on his enlargement of his band of fiddlers to four-and-twenty,—his habit, while at his meals, of having, according to the French mode, twenty-four violins playing before him; or by his letters written during his exile. "We pass our time as well as people can do," he observes, "that have no more money, for we dance and play as if we had taken the Plate fleet"; "Pray get me pricked down," he adds in another, "as many new corrants and sarabands and other little dances as you can, and bring them with you, for I have got a small fiddler that does not play ill."

Like others of his race, like James I. and James V. of Scotland, like his father and his grandfather, he was occasionally a poet. A song of his composition is certainly characteristic of his way of life:—