the battle of the Boyne; and a brooding unrest in Scotland, of which, whenever you come to read or study, you should mate your reading with that charming story of Old Mortality-one of the best of Scott's. Its scene reaches over from the days of Charles II to the early years of the Dutch King William, and sets before one more vividly than any history all those elements of unrest with which the new sovereign had to contend on his northern borders the crazy fanaticism of fierce Cameronians the sturdy, cantankerous zeal of Presbyterians-the workings of the old, hot, obstinate leaven of Prelacy, and the romantic, lingering loyalty to a Stuart king. But William ended by having all his kingdom well in hand, and all his household too. There was strong affection between William and Mary; he relishing her discretion, her reserves, and her culture ; and she loving enough to forget the harsh gauntleted hand which he put upon those who were nearest and dearest to him. He was more military than diplomatic, and I think believed in no Scripture more devoutly than in that which sets forth the mandate, "Wives, obey your husbands." The King was not a strong man physically, though a capital soldier; he was short, awkward, halting in movement, appearing best in the saddle and with battle flaming in his front; he had asthma, too, fearfully; was irritable-full of coughs and coldsbuilding a new palace upon the flank of Hampton Court, to get outside of London smoke and fogs; setting out trees there, and digging ponds in Dutch style, which you may see now; building Kensington, too, which was then out of town, and planting and digging there of which you may see results over the mouldy brick wall that still hems in that old abode of royalty. He carried his asthma, and dyspepsia, and smoking Dutch dragoons to both places. People thought surely that the Queen, so well made and blessed with wonderful appetite, would outlive him, and so give to the history of England a Mary II.; but she did not. An attack of small-pox, not combated in those days by vaccination, or even inoculation, carried her off on a short illness. Π. He grieved, as people thought so stern a master could not grieve; but rallied and built to the Queen's memory that most magnificent of monuments, Greenwich Hospital, which shows its domes 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, 1 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 flowing 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 delighted 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 * Matthew Prior, b. 1664; d. 1721. |