Remember, these lines were written by a poet, who on an important occasion represented the Government of Queen Anne at the great court of Louis XIV. of France. This Prior—when Queen Mary died—had his consolatory verses for King William. Indeed that death of Queen Mary set a great deal of poetry upon the flow. There was William Congreve,[97] who though a young man, not yet turned of thirty, had won a great rank in those days by his witty comedies. He wrote a pastoral—cleaner than most of his writing—in honor of William’s lost Queen:

Yet all this would have comforted the King not half so much as a whiff of smoke from the pipe of one of his Dutch dragoons. He never went to see one of Mr. Congreve’s plays, though the whole town was talking of their neatness, and their skill, and their wit. That clever gentleman’s conquests on the stage, and in the social world—lording it as he did among duchesses and countesses—would have weighed with King William not so much as the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly.

Yet Congreve was in his way an important man—immensely admired; Voltaire said he was the best comedy writer England had ever known; and when he came to London this keen-witted Frenchman (who rarely visited) went to see Mr. Congreve at his rooms in the Strand. Nothing was too good for Mr. Congreve; he had patronage and great gifts; it seemed always to be raining roses on his head. The work he did was not great work, but it was exquisitely done; though, it must be said, there was no preserving savor in it but the art of it. The talk in his comedies, by its pliancy, grace, neat turns, swiftness of repartee, compares with the talk in most comedies as goldsmith’s work compares with the heavy forgings of a blacksmith. It matches exquisitely part to part, and runs as delicately as a hair-spring on jewelled pinions.

I gave my readers a bit of the “Pandora Lament,” which Sir Richard Steele thought one of the most perfect of all pastoral compositions. And the little whimsey about Amoret, everybody knows; certainly it is best known of all he did:

They are very pretty; yet are you not sure that our wheezing, phlegmatic, business-loving, Dutch King William would have sniffed contemptuously at the reading of any such verselets?

A Pamphleteer.

A writer, however, of that time, of about the same age with Congreve, whom King William did favor, and did take at one period into his confidence,—and one of whose books, at least, you all have liked at some epoch of your life, and thought quite wonderful and charming—I must tell you more about. His presence counted for nothing; he was short, wiry, hook-nosed—not anyway elegant; Mr. Congreve would have scorned association with him. He was the son of a small butcher in London, and had never much schooling; but he was quick of apprehension, always eager to inform himself; bustling, shrewd, inquisitive, with abundance of what we call “cheek.” He never lacked simple, strong language to tell just what he thought, or what he knew; and he never lacked the courage to put his language into print or into speech, as the case might be.

By dint of his dogged perseverance and much natural aptitude he came to know Latin and Spanish and Italian, and could speak French, such as it was, very fluently. He was well up in geography and history, and such science as went into the books of those days. He wrote sharp, stinging pamphlets about whatever struck him as wrong, or as wanting a good slap, whether in morals, manners, or politics.

He was in trade, which took him sometimes into France, Spain, or Flanders. He could tell everyone how to make money and how to conduct business better than he could do either himself. He had his bankruptcies, his hidings, his compoundings with creditors, and his times in prison; but he came out of all these experiences with just as much animation and pluck and assurance as he carried into them.

There was a time when he was advertised as a fugitive, and a reward offered for his apprehension—all due to his sharp pamphlet-writing; and he was apprehended and had his fines to pay, and stood in the pillory; but the street-folk, with a love for his pluck and for his trenchant, homely, outspokenness, garnished the pillory with flowers and garlands. It was this power of incisive speech, and his capacity to win audience of the street-people, that made King William value his gifts and put them to service.

But I cannot tell of the half he wrote. Now it was upon management of families; again an Essay on Projects—from which Dr. Franklin used to say he derived a great many valuable hints—then upon a standing army; then upon the villainies of stock-jobbery. What he called poems, too, he wrote, with a harsh jingle of rhymes; one specially, showing that—

Again, he has a whole volume of Advice to English Tradesmen, as to how to manage their shops and bargainings; and it gives one a curious notion of what was counted idle extravagance in that day to read his description of the extraordinary and absurd expenditure of a certain insane pastry-cook:

He advises a young apothecary who has not large acquaintance to hire a stout man to pound in a big mortar (though he may have nothing to pound) all the early hours of the morning, and all the evening, as if he were a man of great practice. Then, in his Family Instructor, he advises against untruth and all hypocrisies; and he compresses sharp pamphlets into the shape of a leading article—is, in fact, the first man to design “leading articles,” which he puts into his Review or Indicator, in which periodicals he saves a corner for well-spiced gossip and scandal, to make—he says—the “paper relished by housewives.” He interviews all the cut-throats and thieves encountered in prison, and tells stories of their lives. I think he was the first and best of all interviewers; but not the last! Fifty of these pages of mine would scarce take in the mere titles of the books and pamphlets he wrote. His career stretched far down throughout Queen Anne’s days, and was parallel with that of many worthy men of letters, I shall have to mention; yet he knew familiarly none of them. Swift, who knew everybody he thought worth knowing, speaks of him as an illiterate fellow, whose name he has forgotten; and our pamphleteer dies at last—in hiding—poor, embroiled with his family, and sought by very few—unless his creditors.

I do not suppose you have read much that he wrote except one book; that, I know you have read; and this bustling, bouncing, inconsistent, indefatigable, unsuccessful, earnest scold of a man was named Daniel Defoe;[98] and the book you have read is Robinson Crusoe—loved by all boys better than any other book; and loved by all girls, I think, better than any other book—that has no love in it.

You will wonder, perhaps, that a man without academic graces of speech should have made a book that wears so and that wins so. But it wears and wins, because—for one thing—it is free from any extraneous graces of rhetoric; because he was not trying to write a fine book, but only to tell in clearest way a plain story. And if you should ever have any story of your own to tell, and want to tell it well, I advise you to take Robinson Crusoe for a model; if you ever want to make a good record of any adventures of your own by sea, or by land, I advise you to take Robinson Crusoe for a model; and if you do, you will not waste words in painting sunsets, or in decorating storms and sea-waves; but, without your straining, and by the simple colorless truth of your language, the sunsets will show their glow, and the storms rise and roar, and the waves dash and die along the beach as they do in nature.

Of Queen Anne.

Though not in great favor with the courtiers of Queen Anne, Defoe did serve her government effectively upon the Commission in Edinburgh, which brought about in this Queen’s time (and to her great honor) the legislative union of England and Scotland. She came, you know, to be called the “Good Queen Anne;” and we must try and get a better glimpse of her before we push on with our literary story. Royal duties brought more ripeness of character than her young days promised. I have said that she was not so attractive personally as her sister Mary; not tall, but heavy in figure—not unlike the present good Queen of England, but less active by far; sometimes dropsical—gouty, too, and never getting over a strong love for the table. She had great waves of brown hair—ringleted and flowing over her shoulders; and she had an arm and hand which Sir Godfrey Kneller—who painted her—declared to be the finest in all England; and whoso is curious in such matters can still see that wonderful hand and arm in her portrait at Windsor. Another charm she possessed was a singularly sweet and sympathetic voice; and she read the royal messages to the high court of Parliament with a music that has never been put in them since. If she had written them herself, I am afraid music would not have saved them; for she was not strong-minded, and was a shallow student; she would spell phonetically, and played havoc with the tenses. Nor was she rich in conversation, or full. Swift—somewhere in his journal—makes merry with her disposition to help out—as so many of us do—by talk about the weather; and there is a story that when, after King William’s death, the great Marquis of Normanby came on a visit of sympathy and gratulation to the new sovereign, the Queen, at an awkward pause, piped out, in her sweet voice: “It’s a fine day, Marquis!” Whereat the courtier, who was more full of dainty speech, said—in pretty recognition of its being the first day of her reign—“Your Majesty must allow me to say that it’s the finest day I ever saw in my life!” But this good Queen was full of charities, always beloved, and never failed to show that best mark of real ladyhood—the utmost courtesy and kindliness of manner to dependants and to her servants.

An Irish Dragoon.

Among the writers specially identified with this Queen’s reign was Sir Richard Steele;[99] not a grand man, or one of large influence; and yet one so kindly by nature, and so gracious in his speech and writing, that the world is not yet done with pardoning, and loving, and pitying that elegant author of the Tatler—though he was an awful spendthrift, and a fashionable tippler, and a creature of always splendid, and always broken, promises.

He was Irish born; was schooled at the Charter-house in London, where he met with that other master of delicate English, Joseph Addison—they being not far from the same age—and knitting a boy friendship there which withstood a great many shocks of manhood. They were together at Oxford, too, but not long; for Steele, somehow, slipped College early and became a trooper, and learned all the ways of the fast fellows of the town. With such a training—on the road to which his Irish blood led him with great jollity—one would hardly have looked to him for any early talk about the life of a true Christian Hero. But he did write a book so entitled, in those wild young days, as a sort of kedge anchor, he says, whereby he might haul out from the shoals of the wicked town, and indulge in a sort of contemplative piety. It was and is a very good little book;[100] but it did not hold a bit, as an anchor. And when he came to be joked about his Christian Heroship, he wrote plays (perhaps to make averages good) more moral and cleanly than those of Etherege or Wycherley—with bright things in them; but not enough of such, or of orderly proprieties, to keep them popular. Of course, this fun-loving, dusky, good-hearted, broad-shouldered Irish trooper falls in love easily; marries, too, of a sudden, some West Indian lady, who dies within a year, leaving him a Barbadoes estate—said to be large—does look large to Captain Steele through his cups—but which gives greater anxieties than profits, and is a sort of castle in Spain all through his life. With almost incredible despatch—after this affliction—he is in love again; this time with the only daughter of a rich Welsh lady. This is his famous Prue, who plays the coquette with him for a while; but writes privily to her anxious mamma that she “can never, never love another;” that “he is not high—nor rich—but so dutiful; and for his morals and understanding [she says] I refer you to his Christian Hero.”

Steele’s marriage comes of it—a marriage whose ups and downs, and lights and shadows have curious and very graphic illustration in the storm of notelets which he wrote to his wife—on bill-heads, perfumed paper, tavern reckonings—all, singularly enough, in existence now, and carefully kept in the Library of the British Museum.

Here is a part of one, written just before his marriage:

It is more promising for a man to speak of his own tippling than to have others speak of it; nor was this writer’s sinning in that way probably beyond the average in his time. But he was of that mercurial temperament which took wine straight to the brain; and so was always at bad odds with those men of better digestion (such as Swift and Addison) who were only tickled effusively with such bouts as lifted the hilarious Captain Steele into a noisy effervescence.

There are better and worse letters than those I have read; but never any lack of averment that he enjoys most of anything in life his wife’s delightful presence—but can’t get home, really cannot; some excellent fellows have come in, or he is at the tavern—business is important; and she is always his charming Prue; and always he twists a little wordy aureole of praise about her head or her curls. I suppose she took a deal of comfort out of his tender adjectives; but I think she learned early not to sit up for him, and got over that married woe with great alacrity. There is evidence that she loved him throughout; and other evidence that she gave him some moral fisticuffs—when he did get home—which made his next stay at the tavern easier and more defensible.

But he loved his Prue, in his way, all her life through, and showed a beautiful fondness for his children. In that budget of notelets I spoke of (and which the wife so carefully cherished), are some charming ones to his children: thus he writes to his daughter Elizabeth, whose younger sister, Mary, has just begun to put her initials, M. S., to messages of love to him:

But you must not think Steele was a man of no importance save in his own family. His friends counted by scores and hundreds; he had warm patrons among the chiefest men of the time; had political preferment and places of trust and profit, far better than his old captaincy; could have lived in handsome style and without anxieties, if his reckless kindnesses and convivialities had not made him improvident.

Steele’s Literary Qualities.

Nor must we forget the work by which he is chiefly known, I mean his establishment of the Tatler—the forerunner of all those delightful essays which went to the making of the Spectator and the Guardian; these latter having the more credit for their dignity and wise reticence, but the Tatler being more vivacious, and quite as witty. Addison came to the help of Steele in the Tatler, and Steele, afterward joined forces with Addison in the Spectator. I happen to be the owner of a very old edition of these latter essays, in whose “Table of Contents” some staid critic of the last generation has written his (or her) comments on the various topics discussed; and I find against the papers of Addison, such notes as—“instructive, sound, judicious;” and against those of Steele, I am sorry to say, such words as “flighty, light, witty, graceful, worthless;” and I am inclined to think the criticisms are pretty well borne out by the papers; but if flighty and light, he was not unwholesome; and he did not always carry the rollicking ways of the tavern into the little piquant journalism, where the grave and excellent Mr. Addison presided with him. Nay, there are better things yet to be said of him. He argued against the sin and folly of duelling with a force and pungency that went largely to stay that evil; and he never touches a religious topic that his manner does not take on an awe and a respect which belongs to the early pages of the Christian Hero. There are touches of pathos, too, in his writing, quite unmatchable; but straight and quick upon these you are apt to catch sound of the jingling spurs of the captain of dragoons. Thus, in that often quoted allusion to his father’s death (which happened in his boyhood), he says:

This is on page 364 of the Tatler, and on page 365 he says: “A large train of disasters were coming into my memory, when my servant knocked at my closet door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday next, at Garraway’s coffee-house.” And he sends for three of his friends—which was so like him!

So he goes through life—a kindly, good-hearted, tender, intractable, winning fellow; talking, odd-whiles, piously—spending freely—drinking fearlessly—loving widely—writing archly, wittily, charmingly.

We have a characteristic glimpse of him in his later years—for he lived far down into the days of the Georges (one of whom gave him his knighthood and title)—when he is palsied, at his charming country home in Wales, and totters out to see the village girls dance upon the green, and insists upon sending off to buy a new gown for the best dancer; this was so like him! And it would have been like him to carry his palsied steps straight thereafter to the grave where his Prue and the memory of all his married joys and hopes lay sleeping.

Joseph Addison.

Addison’s character was, in a measure, the complement of Steele’s. He was coy, dignified, reticent—not given to easy familiarities at sight—nor greatly prone to over-fondling. He was the son of an English rector down in Wiltshire; was born in a cottage still standing in Milston—a few miles north of Salisbury. He was a Charter-house boy and Oxford man; had great repute there as scholar—specially as Latinist—became a Fellow—had great Whig friends, who, somehow, secured him a pension, with which he set out upon European travel; and he wrote about what he saw in Italy, and other parts, in a way that is fresh and readable now. He was a year or two younger than Congreve, and a few weeks[101] only younger than Steele; nine years younger than De Foe, of whom it is probable he never knew or cared to know.

Very early in his career Addison had the aid of Government friends: his dignity of carriage gave them assurance; his reticence forbade fear of babbling; his elegant pen gave hope of good service; and he came to high political task-work—first, in those famous verses where he likens the fighting hero, Marlborough—then fresh from Blenheim—to the angel, who,

That poem took him out from scholarly obscurity, and set him well afoot in the waiting-rooms of statesmen. Poetry, however, was not to be his office; though, some years after, he did win the town by the academic beauties of his tragedy of “Cato”—the memory of which has come bobbing down over school-benches, by the “Speech of Sempronius,” to days some of us remember—

I suppose that speech may have slipped out of modern reader-books; but it used to make one of the stock declamations, on which ambitious school-boys of my time spent great floods of fervid elocution.

Addison wrote somewhat, as I have said, for Steele’s first periodic venture in the Tatler, attracted by its opportunities and the graces of it; and they together plotted and carried into execution the publication of the Spectator. I trust that its quiet elegance has not altogether fallen away from the knowledge of this generation of young people. Dr. Johnson, you know, said of its Addison papers, that whoever would write English well should give his days and nights to their perusal. Yet such a journal could and would never succeed now: it does not deal with questions of large and vital interest; its sentences do not crackle and blaze with the heat we look for in the preachments of our time. Its leisurely discourse—placid as summer brooks—would beguile us to sleep. A ream of old Spectators discussing proprieties and modesties would not put one of our daring ball-room belles to the blush. The talk of these old gentlemen about the minor morals were too mild, perhaps too merciful; yet it is well to know of them; and one can go to a great many worse quarters than the Spectator, even now, for proper hints about etiquette, manners, and social proprieties.

Sir Roger De Coverley.

Whatever other writings of these gallant gentlemen and teachers of Queen Anne’s time the reader may have upon his shelves, he cannot do better than equip them with that little story (excerpted from the Spectator) of “Sir Roger De Coverley.” No truer or more winning picture of worthy old English knighthood can you find anywhere in literature; nowhere such a tender twilight color falling through books upon old English country homes. Those papers made the scaffolding by which our own Irving built up his best stories about English country homesteads, and English revels of Christmas; and the De Coverley echoes sound sweetly and surely all up and down the pages of Bracebridge Hall.

The character of Sir Roger will live forever—so gracious—so courteous—so dignified—so gentle: his servants love him, and his dogs, and his white gelding.

Yet there were plenty of folks who sneered at these papers even then—as small—not worthy of notice. That great, bustling, slashing, literary giant, Dean Swift, says to Mistress Hester Johnson, “Do you read the Spectators? I never do; they never come in my way. They say abundance of them are very pretty.” “Very pretty!” a vast many satiric shots have been fired off to that tune. And yet Swift and Addison had been as friendly as two men so utterly unlike could be.

To complete the De Coverley picture, and give it relish in the boudoirs of the time, the authors paint the old knight in love—delicately, but deeply and wofully in love—with a certain unnamed widow living near him, and whose country house overlooks the park of the De Coverley estate.

This sounds like Steele. And the old knight leaves to her

This episode has an added interest, because about those times the dignified and coy Mr. Addison was very much bent upon marrying the elegant Lady Warwick, whose son had been correspondent—perhaps pupil of his. He did not bounce into marriage—like Steele—with his whole heart in his eyes and his speech; it was a long pursuit, and had its doubtful stages; six years before the affair really came about, he used to write to the Warwick lad about the tom-tits, and the robin-redbreasts, and their pretty nests, and the nightingales. But Addison, more or less fortunate than Sir Roger, does win the widow’s hand, and has a sorry time of it with her. She never forgets to look a little down upon him, and he never forgets a keen knowledge of it.

He has the liberty, however, after his marriage—with certain limitations—of a great fine home at Holland House, which is one of the few old country houses still standing in London, in the midst of the gardens, where Addison used to walk, in preference to my Lady’s chamber. His habits were to study of a morning—dine at a tavern; then to Button’s coffee-house, near to Covent Garden, for a meet with his cronies; and afterward—when the spectre of marriage was real to him—to the tavern again, and to heavier draughts than he was wont to take in his young days.

Pope said he was charming in his talk; but never so in mixed company; never when the auditors were so new or so many as to rouse his self-consciousness; this tied his tongue; but with one or two he knew well, the stream of the Spectator’s talk flowed as limpidly as from his pen.

He was not a great student; Bentley would have laughed at hearing him called so. But he could use the learning he had with rare deftness, and make more out of a page of the ancients than Bentley could make out of a volume. His graces of speech, and aptitude for using a chance nugget of knowledge, made him subject of sneer from those who studied hard and long. A man who beats his brains against books everlastingly, without great conquests, is apt to think lightly of the gifts of one like Addison, who by mere impact gets a gracious send-off into elegant talk.

If one has read nothing else of Addison’s, I think he may read with profit the “Vision of Mirza.” That, too, used to be one of the jewels in the ancient reader-books, and had so many of the graces of a story, that the book—my book at least—used to fall open of itself on those pages where began the wonderful vision in the Valley of Bagdad.

Though more years have passed since my reading of it than I dare tell, yet at the bare mention of the name I seem to see the great clouds of mist which gather on the hither and the thither sides of the valley: I see the haunting Genius in the costume of a shepherd, who from his little musical instrument makes sounds that are exceeding sweet.

Then I seem to see the prodigious tide of water rolling through the valley, and the long bridge with the crumbling arches stretching athwart the stream, and the throngs of people crowding over, and falling and slipping into the angry tide—which is the tide of death; I see that the larger number fall through into the waters, when they have scarce passed over a single arch of the bridge. But whatever may befall, always the throng is pressing on, and always the thousands are dropping away and disappearing in the gulf that sweeps below. I see that, though some few hobble along painfully upon the furthermost and half-broken arches that stand in the flood, not one of all the myriads passes over in safety; and I behold again (with Mirza) that beyond—far beyond, where the clouds of mist have lifted—lies a stretch of placid water, with islands covered with fruits and flowers, and a thousand little shining seas run in and out among these Islands of the Blessed. And when I look the other way, to see what may lie under the other and darker clouds of mist, lo! the shepherd who has conjured the Vision is gone; and instead of the rolling tide, the arched bridge, the crowding myriads, I see nothing but the long, hollow Valley of Bagdad, with oxen, sheep, and camels grazing upon the sides of it. It seemed to me, fifty years ago, that a man who could make such visions appear, ought to keep on making them appear, all his life long.

I have said nothing of the political life of Addison; there are no high lights in it that send their flashes down to us. He held places, indeed, of much consideration; his aptitudes, his courtesies, his discretion, his sagacities always won respect; but he was never a force in politics; the only time he attempted parliamentary speaking he broke down; but with a pen in his hand he never broke down until failing health and latter-day anxieties of many sorts shook his power. I have already hinted at the probable infelicities of his late and distinguished marriage; whatever else may be true of it (and authorities are conflicting), it certainly did not bring access of youth or ambition or joyousness.

In his later years, too, there came a quarrel with his old friend Steele—cutting more deeply into the heart of this reticent man than it could cut into the much-scarified heart of that impressionist, the author of the Tatler; there were stories, too, pretty well supported, that Addison in those last weary days of his—feeble and asthmatic—drank over-freely, to spur his jaded mind up to a level with the talk of sympathizing friends.

Pope, too, in those times, had possibly aggravated the quiet, calm essayist, with the sting of his splendid but scorpion pen;[102] and all accounts assure us that Addison (though under fifty) did give a most kindly welcome to death. The story told by Young, and repeated by Dr. Johnson, of his summoning young Warwick to see how a Christian could die, is very likely apocryphal. It was not like him; this modest philosopher never made himself an exemplar of the virtues. We know, however, that he died calmly and tranquilly. Who can hope for more?

Not many legacies have come down to us from those days of Queen Anne which are worthier than his; and all owe gratitude to him for at least one shining page in all our hymnals: it will keep the name of Addison among the stars.

CHAPTER VIII.

In our last talk we had an opening skirmish with a group of royal people; we saw James II. flitting away ignominiously from a throne he could not fill or hold; we saw that rough fighter, the opinionated William III., coming to his honors—holding hard, and with gauntleted hand, his amiable consort, Queen Mary. I spoke of the relationship of these two; also had some fore-words about Mary’s sister, the future Queen Anne, and about the death of her boy, the little Duke of Gloucester.

I had something to say of that easy and artful poet, Matthew Prior, who smartly wrote his way, by judicious panegyrics and well-metred song, from humble station to that of ambassador at the court of France. We had a taste of the elegant Congreve, and said much of that bouncer of a man Daniel De Foe; the character of this latter we cannot greatly esteem—but when can we cease to admire the talent that gave to us the story of Robinson Crusoe?

Then I spoke to you of Sir Richard Steele—poor Steele! poor Prue! And I spoke also of his friend Addison, the courtly, the reticent, the graceful, and the good. All of these men outlived William and Mary; all of them shone—in their several ways—through the days of Queen Anne.

Royal Griefs and Friends.

Mary, consort of William III., died some six years before the close of the century; she was honestly mourned for by the nation; and I cited some of the tender music which belonged to certain poetic lamentations at the going off of the gentle Queen. The little boy prince, Gloucester, presumptive heir to the throne, died in 1700 (so did John Dryden and Sir William Temple). Scarce two years thereafter and William III.—who was invalided in his latter days, and took frequent out-of-door exercise—was thrown from his horse in passing over the roads—not so smooth as now—between Hampton Court and Kensington. There was some bone-breakage and bruises, which, like a good soldier, he made light of. In the enforced confinement that followed, he struggled bravely to fulfil royal duties; but within a fortnight, as he listened to Albemarle, who brought news about affairs in Holland, it was observed that his eyes wandered, and his only comment—whose comments had always been like hammer-strokes—was, “I’m drawing to the end.”[103] Two days after he died.

Then the palace doors opened for that “good,” and certainly weak, Queen Anne, whose name is so intimately associated with what is called “the Augustan age” of English letters, and whose personal characteristics have already been subjects of mention. She was hardly recovered from her grief at the death of her prince-boy, and was supported at her advent upon royalty by that conspicuous friend of her girl years and constant associate, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. It would be hard to reach any proper understanding of social and court influences in Anne’s time, without bringing into view the sharp qualities of this First Lady of her Chamber. Very few historians have a good word to say for her. She was the wife of that illustrious general, John of Marlborough, whom we all associate with his important victories of Blenheim and of Ramillies; and in whose honor was erected the great memorial column in the Park of Woodstock, where every American traveller should go to see remnants of an old royal forest, and to see also the brilliant palace of Blenheim, with its splendid trophies, all given by the nation—at the warm urgence of Queen Anne—in honor of the conquering general.

You know the character of Marlborough—elegant, selfish, politic, treacherous betimes, brave, greedy, sagacious, and avaricious to the last degree. He made a great figure in William’s time, and still greater in Anne’s reign; his Duchess, too, figured conspicuously in her court. She was as enterprising as the Duke, and as money-loving—having smiles and frowns and tears at command, by which she wheedled or swayed whom she would. She did not believe in charities that went beyond the house of Marlborough; in fact, this ancestress of the Churchills was reckoned by most as a harpy and an elegant vampire. Never a Queen was so beleaguered with such a friend; she was keeper of the privy purse, and Anne found it hard (as current stories ran) to get money from her for her private charities; hard, indeed, to dispose of her cast-off silken robes as she desired. Why, you ask, did she not blaze up into a flame of anger and of resolve, and bid the Duchess, once for all, begone? Why are some women born weak and patient of the chains that bind them? And why are others born with a cold, imperious disdain and power that tells on weaklings, and makes the space all round them glitter with their sovereignty?

When this Sarah of Marlborough was first in waiting upon the Princess Anne, neither Duke nor Duchess (without titles then) could count enough moneys between them to keep a private carriage for their service; and before the Duke died their joint revenues amounted to £94,000 per annum.

Then the great park at Woodstock became ducal property. I have said it was richly worth visiting; its encircling wall is twelve miles in length; the oaks are magnificent; the artificial waters skirt gardens and shrubberies that extend over three hundred acres; the grass is velvety; the fallow deer are in troops of hundreds. And one must remember, in visiting the locality, that there stood the ancient and renowned royal mansion of Henry II.—that there was born the Black Prince—and, very probably, Chaucer may have wandered thereabout, and studied the “daisies white,” and listened to the whirring of the pheasants—a wood-music one may hear now in all the remoter alleys.

How many hundred thousands were expended upon the new Blenheim palace, built in Anne’s time, I will not undertake to compute. The paintings gathered in it—spoils of the great Duke’s military marches—interest everyone; but the palace is as cold and stately and unhome-like and unloveable as was the Duchess herself.

Builders and Streets.

Sir John Vanbrugh[104] was the architect of Blenheim, and you will recognize his name as that of one of the popular comedy writers of Queen Anne’s time, who not only wrote plays, but ran a theatre which he built at the Haymarket. It was not so successful as the more famous one which stands thereabout now; the poor architect, too, had a good many buffets from the stinging Duchess of Marlborough; and some stings besides from Swift’s waspish pen, which the amiable Duchess did not allow him to forget.

Another architect of these times, better worth our remembering—for his constructive abilities—was Sir Christopher Wren, who designed some forty of the church-spires now standing in London; and he also superintended the construction of the Cathedral of St. Paul’s, which had been steadily growing since a date not long after the great fire—thirty-five years intervening between the laying of the foundations and the lifting of the cross to the top of the lantern. It is even said that, when he was well upon ninety, Wren supervised some of the last touches upon this noble monument to his fame.[105]

There was not so much smoke in London in those days—the consumption of coal being much more limited—and the great cross could be seen from Notting Hill, and from the palace windows at Kensington. The Queen never abandoned this royal residence; and from the gravel road by which immediate entrance was made, stretched away the waste hunting ground, afterward converted into the grassy slopes of Hyde Park—stagnant pools and marshy thickets lying in place of what is now the Serpentine. People living at Reading in that day—whence ladies now come in for a morning’s shopping and back to lunch—did then, in seasons of heaviest travelling, put two days to the journey; and joined teams, and joined forces and outriders, to make good security against the highwaymen that infested the great roads leading from that direction into the town. Queen Anne herself was beset and robbed near to Kew shortly before she came to the throne; and along Edgeware Road, where are now long lines of haberdasher shops, and miles of gas-lamps, were gibbets, on which the captured and executed highwaymen were hung up in warning.

John Gay.

Some of these highwaymen were hung up in literature too, and made a figure there; but not, I suspect, in way of warning. It was the witty Dean Swift who suggested to the brisk and frolicsome poet, John Gay, that these gentlemen of the high-road would come well into a pastoral or a comedy; and out of that suggestion came, some years later, “The Beggar’s Opera,” with Captain Macheath for a hero, that took the town by storm—ran for sixty and more successive nights, and put its musical, saucy songlets afloat in all the purlieus of London. It was, indeed, the great forerunner of our ballad operas; much fuller, indeed, of grime and foul strokes than Mr. Gilbert’s contagious sing-song; but possessing very much of his briskness and quaint turns of thought, and of that pretty shimmer of language which lends itself to melody as easily as the thrushes do.

This John Gay[106]—whose name literary-mongers will come upon in their anthologies—was an alert, well-looking young fellow, who had come out of Devonshire to make his way in a silk-mercer’s shop in London. He speedily left the silk-mercer’s; but he had that about him of joyousness and amiability, added to a clever but small literary faculty, which won the consideration of helpful friends; and he never lost friends by his antagonisms or his moodiness. Everybody seemed to love to say a good word for John Gay. Swift was almost kind to him; and said he was born to be always twenty-two, and no older. Pope befriended and commended him; great ladies petted him; and neither Swift nor Pope were jealous of a petting to such as Gay; his range was amongst the daisies—and theirs—above the tree-tops. A little descriptive poem of his, called Trivia, brings before us the London streets of that day—the coaches, the boot-blacks, the red-heeled cavaliers, the book-stalls, the markets, the school-boys, the mud, the swinging sign-boards, and the tavern-doors. In the course of it he gives a score or more of lines to a description of the phenomena of the solidly frozen Thames—sharply remembered by a good many living in his time[107]—with booths all along the river, and bullocks cooked upon the frozen roads which bridged the water; and he tells of an old apple-woman, who somehow had her head lopped off when the break-up came, and the ice-cakes piled above the level—tells it, too, in a very Gilbert-like way, as you shall see: