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ssss1 Strafford.
The “good motive for your friends to put it to a period” probably alluded to an object that Newcastle had very much at heart, of which we shall hear more by and by.
CHAPTER III.
ssss1
Clarendon tells us something of the personality of Newcastle.ssss1 “He was a very fine gentleman, active, full of courage and most accomplished in those qualities of horsemanship, dancing and fencing, which accompany a good breeding, in which his delight was. Besides that, he was amorous in poetry and music, to which he indulged the greatest part of his time.”
ssss1 History, Book viii. p. 507.
Newcastle seems also to have been “amorous” in pictures, if we may judge from the following letter.ssss1
ssss1 Hist. MSS. Comm., 13th Rep., Appendix, Part II, p. 131.
“W. Earl of Newcastle to Sir Anthony Vandyke.
ssss1
“1636 (7) February. Welbeck.—The favours of my friends you have so transmitted unto me as the longer I looke on them the more I think them nature and not art. It is not my error alone. If it be a disease, it is epidemical, for such power hath your hand on the eyes of mankind. Next the blessing of your company and sweetness of conversation, the greatest blessing were to be an Argus or all over but one eye, so it or they were ever fixed upon that which we must call yours. What wants in judgment I can supply with admiration, and scape the title of ignorance since I have the luck to be astonished in the right place, and the happiness to be passionately your humble servant.”