and its royal façade stretching along the river bank, to the myriad of strangers who every year sail up or down the Thames.

He made friends, too, with Princess Anne, the sister of the dead Queen, and now heir to the throne. This Princess Anne (afterward Queen Anne) was married to a prince of Denmark, only notable for doing nothing excellently well; and was mother of a young lad, called Duke of Gloucester, whom all England looked upon as their future king. And this little Duke, after Queen Mary's death, came to be presented at court in a blue velvet costume, blazing all over with diamonds, of which one may get a good notion from Sir Godfrey Kneller's painting of him, now in Hampton Court. But the velvet and the diamonds and best of care could not save the weakly, blue-eyed, fair-cheeked, precocious lad; his precocity was a fatal one, due to a big hydrocephalic head that bent him down and carried him to the grave while William was yet King.

The Princess mother was in despair; was herself feeble, too; small, heavy, dropsical, from all which she rallied, however, and at the death of William, which occurred by a fall from his horse in 1702,

came to be that Queen Anne, who through no special virtues of her own, gave a name to a great epoch in English history, and in these latter days has given a name to very much architecture and furniture and crockery, which have as little to do with her as they have with our King Benjamin of Washington.

I may have more to say of her when we shall have brought the literary current of our story more nearly abreast of her times.

There was not much of literary patronage flow. ing out from King William. I think there was never a time when he would not have counted a good dictionary the best of books, not excepting the Bible; and I suspect that he had about the same contempt for "literary fellers" which belongs to our average Congressman. Yet there were

shoals of poets in his time who would have de

lighted to burn incense under the nostrils of the asthmatic King.

Some Literary Fellows.

There was Prior,* for instance, who, from having been the son of a taverner at Whitehall, came to be a polished wit, and at last an ambassador, through the influence of strong friends about the court. In his university days he had ventured to ridicule, in rattling verse, the utterances of the great Dryden. You will know of him best, perhaps, if you know him at all, by a paraphrase he made of that tender ballad of the "Nut-brown Maid," in which the charming naturalness of the old verse is stuck over with the black patches of Prior's pretty rhetoric. But I am tempted to give you a fairer and a more characteristic specimen of his vivacity and grace. Here it is:

"What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows
The difference there is betwixt nature and art;
I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose;
And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.
So when I am wearied with wandering all day,
To thee, my delight, in the evening I come,
No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my visits, and thou art my home."

Matthew Prior, b. 1664; d. 1721.

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,* 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:

"No more these woods shall with her sight be blest,
Nor with her feet these flowery plains be prest;
No more the winds shall with her tresses play,
And from her balmy breath steal sweets away.
Oh, she was heavenly fair, in face and mind,
Never in nature were such beauties joined ;

Without all shining, and within - all white;

--

Pure to the sense, and pleasing to the sight;

Like some rare flower, whose leaves all colors yield,
And-opening - is with sweetest odors filled."

*William Congreve, b. 1670; d. 1729. See edition of his dramatic works, with pleasant introduction by Leigh Hunt (1840).

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