Whenever, in my casual reading, I meet with even the slightest mention of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, I pause to offer her memory a silent salutation. I have just now read two rather large volumes about her, and it becomes necessary to me to break into articulate homage. It is an instinct with most of us to be struck (whether we are catholic enough to admire, or not) by the spectacle of any person wholly and absolutely consistent with himself and with some simple elemental law of his being. Now I know of no man or woman in history who, on anything like a large scale and with recognizable strength of will and action, is at all comparable to Sarah Jennings for unity of life and feeling. In her slightest aside and most vehement speech, in her least and her greatest actions, the same spectacle is presented to my admiring vision-a procession of strong, unfaltering, straightforward, frank, remorseless, heartless selfishness. She was a perfect expression of egotism, without compromise or exception-a type, an example forever. The moralist may say this or that, but the artist cannot choose but applaud.

It is not my purpose to "review" Mr. FitzGerald Molloy's Life of her which I have just read. (He calls it "The Queen's Comrade," in which title I doubt poor Queen Anne would have seen irony or cynicism.) But it would be less than civil not to thank him for much material new to me, and to compliment him on the pleasant manner of its presentment. To people who have not made a study of the sort of thing the book should be both illuminative and interesting, and an excellent corrective, so far as it goes, in regard to Revolution times of that arch-manipulator of truth, Lord Macaulay. To

me, who knew something of the subject, it was an increase of detailed knowledge and a confirmation of opinion. The latter very decidedly, especially as regarded Sarah Jennings. In every fresh detail she was the same as I had always seen her, never swerving to the right or the left, grasping everything with her strong hands, and striking hard with them if she were thwarted-old friends, old benefactors, her own children; it was all one to her. A perfectly consistent woman.

You can express her life with the simplicity and finality of a problem in Euclid. The theory which guided her throughout, and which I will not believe could have been less than half conscious, was clearly this: that the world was created for the benefit of Sarah Jennings; and those who aided this wise design of Providence by advancing her fortunes, heaping money and titles on her, and so forth, were simply doing their duty, and deserved neither return nor any feeling of gratitude on her part; that those who ceased so to do, or who were indifferent, or who did the opposite, were wretches for whom no punishment could be too severe; they were thwarting the nature of things. There is something almost impersonal in the even, unhesitating retribution with which she pursued any one who had crossed or offended her in the slightest degree; such a perwas an undoubted reptile, and when it raised its head-whenever or wherever-Sarah Jennings hit at it. And, mark, there was very little cant or self-righteousness about all this. She was not like Queen Mary II, who, whenever her treachery to her father had been brought home to her, went and congratulated Heaven on her vir tues in her diary.

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No misconduct, you may be sure, was ever brought home to the mind of the Duchess of Marlborough. When Queen Anne finally dismissed her, the Duchess simply excused herself for ever having put up with the society of such a creature as her Sovereign. "I am afraid," she wrote to Sir David Hamilton, "you will have a very ill opinion of one that could pass so many hours with one I have just given such a character of; but though it was extremely tedious to pass so many hours where there could be no conversation, I knew she loved me." You see, the kindness had been all on the Duchess's part, not on the Queen's, who had endured all kinds of affronts in the last reign, because she would not part with her favorite, and since her accession had heaped every benefit she could on the Duchess. Of course Sarah had given her sovereign a direct piece of her mind before her dismissal, in terms even then, when English people were far less obsequious to Royalty than they are now, very much out of the way, but not as one defending herself, rather as one painfully pointing out a child's naughtiness. To say that she did not blame herself for the rupture is to understate the truth; in her mind no conduct of hers, whatever it was, could justify a revolt against her. With the same beautiful and, I do not doubt, sincere simplicity, when she had to leave England, she bewailed the necessary ruin of a country which had ceased to pay the Duke and her ninety thousand a year. There was no cant in this; it flowed inevitably from her theory of life.

For the expression of this theoryand it was surely a fine theory to live with-Nature had been kind to Sarah Jennings and us. It had given her every quality necessary to make it clear to our edification. begin with, she was only sionate when her interests

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concerned, not otherwise. People who are passionate in their love affairs may be selfish, but their selfishness is superficially obscured now and then by an apparent regard for the other person. Sarah Jennings escaped that obscuration. Moreover her coldness of blood, in that regard, probably ministered to the extreme uxoriousness of the Duke, lasting from young manhood to old age. Wherever he was, campaigning or not, he sent her constant letters of devotion, and was lucky, it seemed, if he escaped a douche of criticism in return. He mentions a "kind" letter of hers as something extraordinary. No one could throw stones at the Duchess on the score of her morals, in the usual sense of the term, so that she was invulnerable to the general criticism of English moralists; in fact, I venture to think they ought to acclaim her as a "good woman." But her husband could not stand against her theory; she could not curb her indignation with Anne for taking a new favorite, and so give him a chance of keeping his places. It is not an extended selfishness that we contemplate in Sarah Jennings; it is the real thing; self with her meant self.

Again, she had a splendid constitution, a strong will and a good head; necessary qualities, because if she had been ailing, weak or a fool, her selfishness might have been just as complete, but it would not have been so fine a spectacle for us. Also she was naturally frank and straightforward. Had she been more inclined to subterfuge and double-dealing she might, it is true, have had even greater success in life, but her memory would not be so finely simple to appreciate. She was not an intriguer. She felt it due to her theory of life to march straight to her goal and seize on what she wanted in the eye of the world. Of course she dropped people who had ceased to be useful to her, but openly

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and as a natural consequence. When James's cause was hopeless she dropped him; it was his fault that he could no longer promote and enrich her husband, and so he forfeited her patronage. is really misleading to call such plaindealing as that treachery. The great successes in her life were due to her influence over Anne, and that was gained by no flattery or intrigue, but by the frank imposition of a strong will on a weak one. Anne became her creature and took her orders. When Anne had revolted and that source of power was gone, even then she did not intrigue. She made one straightforward threat, to publish the letters of "Mrs. Morley" to "Mrs. Freeman." It was rather like blackmailing, to be sure, and no doubt the Duchess thought it hard that Providence should drive her to such means to her just ends, but it was not intriguing. Nor, in the absence of direct evidence, do I believe that she coquetted between St. Germain and Hanover as her husband did. He was a born intriguer, a man natively underhand, but it was not her way at all. She did not plot to bring people into power; when they were in power she went to them and demanded everything they had to give. Moreover, she honestly disliked St. Germain, and was true to her dislikes. Fairly consistent in an age of turncoats, fairly truthful in an age of liars, and very strong in an age of weaklings-her good qualities in this kind all minister to the supreme effect of her life.

Accident and circumstance as well as natural qualities conspired to bring her theory into relief. If she had been successful without interruption, had never met with a rebuff, we should have missed the sublime spectacle of her indignation, of her wrath with those who had defied the right order of the universe. The first rebuff came with William and Mary. Mary hated

Lady Churchill, a fact which Lady Churchill was very slow to grasp. But when she did grasp it, and the fact that she and Lord Churchill had little to hope for from the new Court, she said very forcible things. Other peoIt is,

ple were disappointed as well. indeed, rather refreshing to observe the indignation of the patriots who had brought in William of Orange when they perceived that he preferred his Dutch minions, the Bentincks and the Keppels, to his English traitors, driving the latter from his presence that he might get drunk in peace with the former. The Princess Anne said things about him that we may fairly trace to the more trenchant style of her favorite "Caliban" and "the Dutch monster" I am sure were phrases of Sarah Jennings. But Sarah was generous; those who sinned against her had to be punished all their lives, but her just wrath stopped short at the grave. "When the King came to die," she beautifully wrote, "I felt nothing of that satisfaction which I once thought I should have had upon this occasion

so little is it in my nature to retain resentment against any mortal (however unjust he may have been) in whom the will to injure is no more." Surely a grand passage! But familiarity with the injustice of kings did not prevent this great woman from taking infinite pains to punish humble people. When Sir John Vanbrugh had the temerity to criticize her she "was very sorry I had fouled my fingers in writing to such a fellow;" but, mindful of her duty to the world, she took the trouble to fill thirty sheets of paper with charges against Sir John.

In her old age, indeed, she found time to do a good deal of polemical writing against her enemies. Among other such efforts she wrote an elaborate account of her daughter's misconduct towards her, and sent the agreeable brochure to various friends and relations.

"Having boare what I have done for so many years, rather than hurt my children, I hope nobody will blame me now," etc, etc. Also she dictated to Hooke her famous "Account of her Conduct," and composed with Henry Fielding her "Vindication." (What would one not give to have heard these two geniuses in consultation!) vindication, it need hardly be said, took the form of exposing the wickedness of other people rather than of defending herself. . . . But I protest that as I think of this splendid old woman, bedThe Cornhill Magazine.

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ridden at last and so near her end, still indomitable, still strong in thought, and still keenly humorous, I feel sympathy for her human qualities rather than admiration for her superhuman perfection. But that is a sentimental weakness and must be suppressed. An artistic wonder and joy in the contemplation of life and character absolutely thorough, absolutely true to itselfthat must be one's emotion when one reads of Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough.

G. S. Street.

We who love English, we who rejoice in the grand march of English words, often forget and disuse our privileges. Even the miser turns over his gold, and rolls in it. We ignore the pageants that might heal sore eyes; we stand soiled on the brink of cleansing and charmed waters; we see the perspective of illimitable gardens, and will not walk in them. We are content always with the same few of our possessions; we catalogue the rest, and sleep on the catalogue. We are the richest people in the world, and we know it, and the mere knowledge seems to suffice us. We take our wealth for granted, foolishly unaware that wealth taken for granted is no longer wealth. While reading Jane Austen, and reading her again (good little Jane!) we take for granted, we assume, the Elizabethan and Jacobean age! Oh, yes! Lamb's "Specimens," Hazlitt's "Elizabethan Dramatists"-this matter has been attended to once for all! Consider yourselves read, excellent contemporaries of Shakespeare. We admit you. You are of course. Shakespeare is your

representative among us. We honor him, sometimes, and through him, you. He alone wrote nearly forty plays-think of that, and understand that we make it a rule to peruse Jane Austen's complete works every year.

Such is our ineffable attitude towards our golden age, an age comprising at least a dozen great poets, at least fifty writers of rare distinction, and at least a hundred that the dictionaries and cyclopædias dare not omit; the age when English, just come to lusty manhood, was indeed English-riotous, immense, magnificent, lovely-when the flood of art gushed careless, gorgeous and overwhelming, like a mighty cataract. We, whose best produce one novel in three years, have the effrontery to talk of the creative impulse. Heavens! We bave forgotten what it is. We chatter about language, we who polish a period in a month; we prate like children. How those Ulysses, bending their formidable bows, would laugh at our catapults! One can picture Jove saying to an Elizabethan: "Here! These Victorians have a singular conceit of them

selves. Show them what is what." And the Elizabethan would bare his brawny arms and with a quill a yard long write the whole blessed Victorian literature in six months, and get tipsy each night at the "Mermaid" to boot.

The reason why we should return to the Elizabethan men is, not because they are "classical," not because they are the correct thing and part of a proper education, but simply and solely because they are, in the colloquial phrase which was always on the lips of William Morris, so "jolly fine," so amusing, diverting, refreshing, uplifting, satisfying. To read them is to plunge into a vast marble bath-the dive, the tingle in the ears, the headshaking, the striking-out, the swish of water, the final emergence, the deep breath-"Ah! That was grand!" These works were written in joy, and in joy they are to be read. Do not confuse them with "The Ring and the Book," "Ghosts," or "Clarissa Harlowe." They are the sheer expression of the plenteous joy and the exultant power of life. And, above all, do not imagine that, because Shakespeare happened to be Shakespeare, his companions were second-rate. There are sundry nonShakespearian English plays far superior to sundry plays of Shakespeare. The assertion may sound startling, but if it does, the more shame to the startled. Shakespeare was hemmed in by great men, authors of great works; and the Twentieth Century, which must needs be acquainted with "Love's Labor Lost" and "The Comedy of Errors," could not even name those works, unless by chance it had been to a University Extension lecture.

Who has read "Philaster?"

Nay, to break down that polite convention which assumes the omniscience of readers, is there one "well-read" man in five who can with certainty name the author of "Philaster?" And "Philaster" is among the most resplen

dent ornaments of the world's drama. It was the first and finest success of Beaumont and Fletcher, the brethren who, by common consent of critics, stand next to Shakespeare. Beaumont died at thirty-two, Fletcher at fortysix; and they wrote, beside oddments, a play for every week in the year. They were the Rostands of the Elizabethan stage, incredibly fecund, full of easy invention, versed in all technique, great poets by profession-in short, artists of the supreme sort.

"Philaster" is well within the usual Elizabethan dramatic formula. Philaster is heir to the crown of Sicily, which has been usurped by the king of Calabria. The King designates Pharamond of Spain his heir, and offers him the hand of his daughter, Arethusa. But Arethusa falls in love with Philaster, and Philaster gives her his page, Bellario (Euphrasia in disguise, heroine of the piece). Most of the action springs from a false accusation of immorality against Arethusa and BellarioEuphrasia. In the sequel, of course, Bellario's sex is disclosed, Philastèr becomes the darling of the people, and all is set right between Arethusa and Philaster, while the constancy of Euphrasia, who loves Philaster, is its own reward.

Note first the blustering wooing of Arethusa by Pharamond, the swaggerer:

Sweet princess You shall enjoy a man of men to be Your servant; you shall make him yours, for whom Great queens must die.

Such sounding is worthy of Shakespeare's Antony. You would think that with that cock's note Pharamond could silence all opponents, but Philaster shrivels him up in a phrase:

Know, Pharamond,

I loathe to brawl with such a blast as thou,