diligence; but what he could have said to the Nonconformists he could not imagine, except he believed that his nonsense suited their nonsense."[1]
On one occasion when unable or unwilling to sleep, he was so much pleased with a passage in a sermon by South, that he laughed outright, and turning to Laurence Hyde Lord Rochester, "Odds fish! Lory," said he, "your chaplain must be a Bishop, therefore put me in mind of him next vacancy."[2] Of Barrow, he said that "he was an unfair preacher,"[3] because, as it has been explained, he exhausted every subject and left no room for others to come after him;—but the King's allusion was made somewhat slyly to the length as well as excellence of Barrow's sermons."[4]
He said often "He was not priest-ridden: he would not venture a war nor travel again for any party."[5] Such is Burnet's story, curiously confirmed as it is by Sir Richard Bulstrode's conversation with the King on his former exile and the then condition of the country. "I," said the King, most prophetically indeed, "am weary of travelling—I am resolved to go abroad no more; but when I am dead
