successor at all. She had declared to Marlborough passionately that such a thing as the visit of the Hanoverian prince in the capacity of heir was a thing she could not bear, not for a week; and a severe letter which she wrote on the subject to his grandmother, the old Electress Sophia, was supposed to have had some share in causing the old lady's death. But indoors in the secret chambers and by the backstairs came whispers now of another name, that of James Stewart, more familiar and kindly, the boy-brother whom Anne had believed the prevailing fable about, for whom she had invented the name of the Pretender, but who now in her childless decay began to present himself to her as the victim of a great wrong. Poor queen! she was torn asunder by all these crosses and contradictions, her heart melting towards her father's son, her intellect perceiving that he was impossible, her confidante urging every argument in his favour upon her. Marlborough first with all his faction and his foes, then Harley and St. John quarrelling in her very presence-chamber; and when the closet door was shut and the curtains drawn, and all the world shut out save Abigail lying on a mattress on the floor to be near her mistress, then would come up the most momentous question of all: the Stewart or the German! Little wonder if Anne was harassed beyond all endurance, and the powers of life worn out before their time. The hopes of the Jacobite party were rising higher every day as the end approached; but the other side were on the alert, and George I. was peacefully proclaimed as soon as the queen out of her lethargy had slipped beyond the boundaries of any earthly kingdom.

The Marlboroughs, who had been living on the Continent since their disgrace, came back with this new change. The duke's entry into London, 'in great state, attended by hundreds of gentlemen on horseback, and some of the nobility in their coaches,' a few days after, is reported by one of the chroniclers of the time. The duchess followed him soon after; and whether her temper and disposition had so far mended as to allow him to enjoy the peace he had so often hoped for by the side of her he loved, he had at least a tranquil evening-time among his friends and dependents, and the grandchildren who were to be his heirs, for only one of his own children survived at his death. Duchess Sarah lived long after him. She was sixty-two when he died, but nevertheless, in spite of temper and every other failing, was still charming enough to be sought in marriage by two distinguished suitors, one of them that proud Duke of Somerset, whose wife had supplanted her at court, and who must have known everything about Sarah of Marlborough. She answered this potentate in the only way consistent with the dignity of a woman of her age and circumstances, but added, with a noble pride which sat well upon her, that had she been but half her age, not the emperor of the world should ever have filled the place sacred to great Marlborough. It is a pity we could not leave her here in this glow of proud tenderness and constancy. She was capable of that, and many other noble things; but not of holding her tongue, of withdrawing into the background, or accepting in other ways the natural change from maturity to age. Her restless energies had some legitimate outlets. She finished Blenheim. She wrote

innumerable explanations, memorandums, finally shaping themselves into that 'Account of the conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough from her first coming to court,' which is one of the most interesting of all mémoires pour servir. This was published in her eighty-second year, and it is curious to think of the vivacious and unsubdued spirit which could throw itself back so completely out of the calm of age into the conflicts and the very atmosphere of what had passed thirty years before. And she did her utmost to prepare for a great life of Marlborough, which should set her hero right with the world. But her time was not always so innocently employed, and it is to be feared that she wrangled to the end of her life. The 'Characters' of her contemporaries which she left behind are full of spite and malice. There was no peace in her soul. A characteristic little story is told of her in an illness. 'Last year she had lain a great while ill without speaking her physician said she must be blistered or she would die; she called out, "I won't be blistered, and I won't die!""' and apparently for the moment kept her word. She lived long enough to be impaled by Pope, in verses which an involuntary admiration for this daring, dauntless, impassioned woman makes us reluctant to quote. She survived almost her entire generation, and was capable of living a hundred years more had nature permitted. She was eighty-four when she succumbed at last in the year 1744, thirty years after the death of her queen.

THE QUAKER

I

It is perhaps straining a little the limits of a historical period to place William Penn among the characteristic figures of the reign of Anne. His active career was almost over by the time she came to the throne, and he had little to do with the public service, and nothing at all with the perfidies and intrigues of the time. He belongs, however, to the last fatal and melancholy chapter of the history of the Stewarts which ends in her; and in many of the scenes through which we have tried to trace her uncertain figure was an actor more conspicuous and interesting. The paradox which his life presents is chiefly brought about by his attachment to the race, or at least to one, the least attractive member of it. No more strange position could well be than that in which he stands, attached at once to the old and the new world—the founder of a republic, the courtier of a tyrannical monarch: a rebel against not only rule but courteous custom, and all the gentle traditions of social respect and yet the partisan and counsellor of the last king who has tried to maintain absolute power and divine right in England. The antagonistic forces between which he stood, sympathising with both, not only

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combated but denounced each other as the accursed thing, and tore the world asunder, without disturbing the faith or losing the support of this man-at once a Quaker and a Cavalier, a missionary preaching to the poor and an agent in the intrigues of a tyrant.

It may lessen the wonder somewhat when we know that the tyrant whom he served was a fatherly friend, showing his best side to the eyes of his champion; and that Penn's republic was tempered by the intended supremacy of a governor paternal and authoritative. But, when all is said that can be said, his life remains a problem, full of contradictions, which it is sometimes difficult to reconcile with entire good faith-contradictions so undisguised and simple that they suggest a naïveté and artlessness of character scarcely compatible with the knowledge and experience of a man of the world. That this simple explanation might be the last word of the enigma is, however, not an explanation likely to content the world, which believes in everything rather than in simplicity of mind-a quality indeed not much to be expected from a man who had known the court of Charles and lived in that of James, and acquired polish and grace in the society of Versailles in the great days of Louis Quatorze. Notwithstanding the contradictions in his life, no one has received a more abundant meed of approval and admiration in history. We may take from Macaulay, who is not his friend nor favourable to him, a summary of Penn's great reputation, made with that brilliancy of words, in those finely balanced sentences which linger on the ear, and sway the judgment more or less, even when the sense is