satirists long continued to repeat that a fine lady valued her
mottled green pottery quite as much as she valued her monkey, and
much more than she valued her husband.62 But the new palace was
embellished with works of art of a very different kind. A gallery
was erected for the cartoons of Raphael. Those great pictures,
then and still the finest on our side of the Alps, had been
preserved by Cromwell from the fate which befell most of the
other masterpieces in the collection of Charles the First, but
had been suffered to lie during many years nailed up in deal
boxes. They were now brought forth from obscurity to be
contemplated by artists with admiration and despair. The expense
of the works at Hampton was a subject of bitter complaint to many
Tories, who had very gently blamed the boundless profusion with
which Charles the Second had built and rebuilt, furnished and
refurnished, the dwelling of the Duchess of Portsmouth.63 The
expense, however, was not the chief cause of the discontent which
William's change of residence excited. There was no longer a
Court at Westminster. Whitehall, once the daily resort of the
noble and the powerful, the beautiful and the gay, the place to
which fops came to show their new peruques, men of gallantry to
exchange glances with fine ladies, politicians to push their
fortunes, loungers to hear the news, country gentlemen to see the
royal family, was now, in the busiest season of the year, when
London was full, when Parliament was sitting, left desolate. A
solitary sentinel paced the grassgrown pavement before that door
which had once been too narrow for the opposite streams of
entering and departing courtiers. The services which the
metropolis had rendered to the King were great and recent; and it
was thought that he might have requited those services better
than by treating it as Lewis had treated Paris. Halifax ventured