Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/123

Rh The old Lord Cromarty often mentioned this anecdote to his friends.

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

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

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

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.

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;" 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