VIII
At Hampton Court, less than anywhere else, could men forget that it was the Reign of Beauty. Did not Anne Hyde, the said Chancellor's daughter, herself no great beauty but a kindly, pretty-looking lady, who had risen, in spite of her father's perhaps not too serious protests, to be Duchess of York, with a good prospect of sitting on the throne, commission Peter Lely to paint the ladies whose charms were the admiration of the court, and whose stories, too often, were the gossip of every scandal-monger?
Charming pictures indeed they are, graceful, rich, and with an evidently truthful record of the ladies' manners, as well as their habits as they lived. Lely,—"a mighty proud man," Pepys says, "and full of talk,"—is par excellence a court-painter. He had none of the sincerity of Vandyke's best work. He had art, but no pathos; and his art was always artificial, but it was artificial with a freshness and an "air" which Kneller never attained. Rich though he became, even in his own day his merits were not always overrated. A story tells that once a critic said, "How is it that you have so great a reputation when you know, as well as I do, that you are no painter?" "Maybe," the artist answered, "but I am the best you have got." And it is so with the portraits he has left us.
The best memorial of "good King Charles's golden
