dream of with visionary passion. This was the kind of sentiment with which the little princess regarded the bright and animated creature who formed one of her young stepmother's train. Mary of Modena was really only a few years older than the girls at Richmond. They were all young together, accustomed to the perpetual gaiety of the court of Charles if kept apart from its licence, and surrounded by court gossip and all the quips and pranks of fashionable wit. Probably all this might sound heavy enough now if we had a chronicle of it, for fun is apt to evaporate like champagne, and that which pleases one age is very stale in the next; but it made the atmosphere gay in those days, and if the comfort was less, the surroundings, the splendour of dress and equipage, the pictorial effects of society, were much more brilliant than anything we are cognisant of. How every gazer in the streets would rush now to see one such lumbering coach as those which carried the court ladies on their commonest errands, or to watch half a dozen gentlemen vapouring about in their laced coats who were the most ordinary appearances at that time! The lovely English landscape at Richmond, the winding river appearing and disappearing in silver links among the trees, the great oaks and elms forming stately avenues, the little groups of children and growing girls in quaint stiff garments, brocade 'that would stand alone,' head-dresses mounting up to the skies, pattering with high-heeled shoes along the terraces with perhaps a black page-boy in gorgeous livery, the latest mode, in attendance, or sleek court-usher learned in the scandal of the times-affords

the prettiest scene. There sometimes would come perhaps Charles himself, a wolf among the lambs, concerning whom the wise virgins of the court made memorandums in their journals, 'Be sure never to talk to the king'; or James, not much less dangerous, but curbed and softened there by the presence of his children—revolving his darker schemes, but all unconscious of the part which these two blooming young creatures in their curls were to play in the perplexed and painful history of the next twenty years.

Tragedy stands darkling behind us often in the most simple combinations of common life, but seldom so perceptibly as in these historic chapters. The Duke of York was a kind father according to all information; indeed it must have been a hard-hearted man who would have been less than kind to the motherless girls too young to oppose his will, fair and sweet in their earliest bloom, who were his only living children. They were the heirs of England, but not with any oppressive certainty of heirship, for was not there a young wife by his side, smiling upon everybody, and restoring him to something of the standing and all the hopes of youth? The Lady Anne in particular, the rosy little princess, not clever like her sister, but with her pretty voice and good-tempered roundness, who could think of any tragic importance attaching to her? She was far down in the line of succession. Mary of Modena's children, yet unborn, and those which Nature, who could doubt, held in store for young Mary of England, as soon as a fit husband should be found for her, stood in visionary array between little Anne and any approach to the

crown. She would be left to hang upon the arm and bask in the smiles of her young stepmother's young lady-in-waiting, with many a laugh at the premature favouritism. 'We had used to play together when she was a child,' says the great duchess long after, in the curious book written in her old age with the bold title of An Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough,' which every historian quotes, but all revile, somewhat without reason it seems to us. 'She even then expressed a particular fondness for me. This inclination increased with our years. I was often at court, and the princess always distinguished me by the pleasure she took to honour me preferably to others with her conversation and confidence. In all her parties for amusement I was sure by her choice to be one.' We cannot help thinking that it was a proof of some discrimination on the part of the little princess, to choose thus early for her favourite friend one who, whatever were her faults, must have been the most brilliant, interesting, and amusing of companions. She for whom her great general sighed like a lovesick boy whenever he was absent from her, for whom some of the best men of the time entertained a constant friendship-what a refuge from the dulness of the ordinary world to have such an animated and dauntless comrade amid the superficial obsequiousness of the young court ladies, and the admonitory discourses of the elder ones, bent on reminding a little princess perpetually of her rank, and what was due to it! Upon no subject have historians more consistently railed and blasphemed, but for our own part it has always seemed to us one of the most charm

ing episodes in history, if it had not come to so disagreeable an end.

Mistress Sarah was one of the actors in the masque above referred to. She was in the most intimate circle of the Duke of York's household, closely linked to all its members with that relationship which belongs only to a court, though every great household was in those days a court so far as this was concerned. The attendants of the royal household combined subordination and equality, service and freedom, in a way which is now impossible in any other rank. They were as good gentlemen as the king, yet subject to him by a sentiment which made it not only natural but necessary that they should be ready to sacrifice everything for him, even their lives. They were his closest friends, his counsellors, more near him than his nearest relations, yet always his servants. Could it be possible to establish such a relationship between ordinary masters and servants, what a gain would it not be! But there is neither equality enough, nor difference enough to afford any foundation for such a bond except in the surroundings of royalty. It is one of the fine things of the feudal system which we have lost along with the evil things.

No doubt it added immensely to the attraction which the bright and animated girl exercised over her playmates and companions that she had a romantic lovestory, and at a period when marriages were everywhere arranged, as at present in continental countries, by the parents, had made a secret marriage, under the most romantic circumstances, with a young hero worthy, if ever man was, to rank among the paladins. He was

not an irreproachable hero: court scandal had not spared him. He was said to have founded his fortune upon the bounty of one of the shameless women of Charles's court. But the imagination of the period was not over delicate, and probably had he not become so great a man and acquired so many enemies we should have heard little of John Churchill's early vices. His sister, Arabella Churchill, has no glory to cover her shortcomings, but it is a curious instance of the sudden efflorescence now and then of a race, which neither before nor after is of particular note, that she should have been the mother of that one illegitimate Stewart who might, had he been legitimate, have changed the fortunes of the house, the Duke of Berwick. Had she, instead of Anne Hyde, been the Pamela of James's career, what a difference might that have made in history! Nobody had heard of the Churchills before: they have not been a distinguished race since. It is curious that they should have produced, all unawares, without special preparation or warning, the two greatest soldiers of the age.

This, however, is a digression. Young Churchill was attached to the Duke of York's service as Sarah Jennings was to that of the Duchess. He had served abroad with distinction. In 1672, when France and England, for once in a way, were allies against Holland, he had served under the great Turenne, who called him my handsome Englishman,' and vaunted his gallantry in a way which might have inspired even a less powerful genius. He was but twenty-two when he thus gave proofs of his future greatness; when he returned after