So perverted grew his habit of mind, that eventually the strongest incentives could barely move, anger, or rouse him. To act like a man awake, he needed a shock, an emergency. He was of the greatest possible use at the Fire; he was of no use at all during the Plague. Planning a thing out, thinking of it beforehand, came to be intolerable to him. He who feared nothing else, feared communion with himself. "For he dared reflect, and be alone," is a sentence in the _Warwick Memoirs_, touching Charles the First, which looks as if it were intended for an oblique comment on his son. As it was, even at the worst, he prided himself on certain temperances. He liked good wine, but he kept his brain clear of hard drinking. "It is a custom your soul abhors," said the Speaker of the Commons before him, in the August of 1660. He liked a game of chance, but he never won or lost a pound at dice. In a time of the silliest superstition, when my lord and my lady conferred mysteriously with M. le Voisin or the Abbé Pregnani over in France, to whom the casting of horoscopes and the concocting of philters were "easy as lying," Charles held his own strong-minded attitude, and was delighted to see some applauded predictions quite overturned in the Newmarket races. "I give little credit to such kind of cattle," he writes to Henrietta, "and the less you do it, the better; for if they could tell anything, 'tis inconvenient to know one's fortune beforehand, whether good or bad." Yet he amused himself with the psychological, when it suited him. "Sir A.H. and Mrs. P., I beleeve, will end in Matrimony: I conclude it the rather because I have observed a cloud in his face, any time these two months, which Giovanni Battista della Porta, in his _Physionomia_, says, foretells misfortune." He frowned on irreligion, and stopped religious controversy with a wave of his hand. "No man," says Roger North, "kept more decorum in his expression and behavior in regard to things truly sacred than the King.... And amongst his libertines, he had one bigot, at least, (Mr. Robert Spencer) whom he called Godly Robin, and who used to reprove the rest for profane talking."
"Until near twenty," we learn from an anonymous pamphleteer who claims to have been eighteen years in the Prince's friendship and service, "until near twenty, the figure of his face was very lovely. But he is since grown leaner, and now the majesty of his countenance supplies the lines of beauty." "Majesty" sounds euphemistic; yet there was a great deal of genuine majesty in Charles the Second. Black armor was always wonderfully becoming to him, as we see in at least one Cooper miniature, in the print by Faithorne, and the rarer one by Moncornet. The lines of his cheek and mouth were very marked; when he needlessly began to wear a wig, their severity became intensified. He had the shadowy Stuart eyes, red-brown, full of soft light; but his look, in all of his portraits, is something so sombre that we have no English word for it: it is _morne_, it is _macabre_, Leigh Hunt well implies, in _The Town_, that such an appearance, linked with such a character, was a witticism in itself. He says: "If the assembled world could have called out to have a specimen of 'the man of pleasure' brought before it, and Charles the Second could have been presented, we know not which would have been greater, the laughter or the groans." His face was brown as a Moor's, and singularly reserved and forbidding; though "very, very much softened whensoever he speaks." One hardly knows why it was thought necessary to blacken it further with walnut-juice, for disguise, to provide the "reechy" appearance dwelt upon in Blount's narrative, when he set out from Boscobel. His long hair had been of raven hue, thick and glossy, "naturally curling in great rings"; but at the Restoration he was already becoming "irreverendly gray." When he turned suddenly upon you, we read, in _Ralph Esher_ (Hunt, first and last, shows a Rembrandtesque preoccupation with this dusky King), "it was as if a black lion had thrust his head through a hedge in winter." To the Rye House conspirators he was known as "the Blackbird," as they named the Duke of York, who was blonde, "the Goldfinch." It is a little curious that a Jacobite ballad, very familiar in Ireland, dating from before the Fifteen, bestows the same secret name (as a love-name, it need hardly be added) on James the Third, called the Pretender. James Howell, in a dedication to Charles the child, says:--