510 MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 



any inclination to flatter, that I remember I read the Tatler, No. 14, with 

 great pleasure, where he says, " Bless us ! is it possible that when the neces- 

 sities of life are supplied, a man would flatter to be rich, or circumvent to be 

 powerful ? " and then goes on with a great deal very fine, and ends, that 'tis 

 less despicable to beg a supply to a man's hunger than his vanity. I must 

 add one thing more, which I had almost forgot, that the queen never gave any 

 particular reason for all that violent proceeding against Lord Sunderland. 

 She was angry with him about two years before, for something in the 

 Scotch business, which was misrepresented to her, but she took his excuse 

 upon it; and he certainly had said nothing disrespectful or uneasy to her; 

 and she appeared so well satisfied with him, that, just before he was put out, 

 (after she had allowed my Lord Godolphin to write to my Lord Marlborough 

 upon it), she took care of his health, and advised some medicine for him to 

 take, I think for a cold. 



" 'St. Alban's, April 23rd, 1711.' 



" In many other of her letters Sarah treats her majesty much more severely; 

 and, scattered through her numerous defences of her own conduct while fa- 

 vourite and comptroller of the queen's purse, there are numerous passages of 

 the most bitter sarcasm and withering scorn. She paints the ' good Queen 

 Anne,' as people once called her, as a selfish, sensual, and low-minded woman ; 

 ignorant and helpless in the extreme, a slattern, and a shrew ; weak and yet 

 obstinate ; endowed with worse than plebeian vulgarity of manners, and yet 

 entertaining the highest notions of royal blood, and gentility ' by the grace 

 of God.' The grain of salt with which all this is to be taken, ought, no doubt, 

 to be a large one. 



" In one of the papers we have read in the Coxe collection, it is said, 'The 

 queen's friendships were flames of extravagant passion, ending in indifference 

 or aversion. Her love to the prince (Anne's husband, the Prince of Denmark) 

 seemed in the eyes of the world to be prodigiously great. But if the passion 

 of grief were great, her stomach was much greater ; for that very day he died she 

 eat three very large and hearty meals : so that one would think, that, as other 

 persons' grief takes away their appetite > her appetite took away her grief. 

 I know that in some libels she hath been reproached as one who indulged her- 

 self in drinking strong liquors, but I believe this was utterly groundless, and 

 that she never went beyond such a quantity of strong wines as her physicians 

 judged to be necessary for her. * * * Her presents were generally very 

 few and very mean, as fruits, or venison, or the like, unless in cases where she 

 was directed by precedents in the former reigns.' 



" We have mentioned in a former part of our Table Talk, that the duchess 

 employed eminent literary men of the day to write most of her defences and 

 attacks. The paper from which we havfe last quoted was supposed by Arch- 

 deacon Coxe to have been written by St. Priest, and to be part of the identical 

 document Sarah showed to Mr. Walpole, who was somewhat discomforted 

 thereat. What Queen Anne most dreaded after their rupture, was that the 

 duchess would publish their correspondence, for her grace gave her to under- 

 stand she had kept every silly letter her majesty had addressed her, as well as 

 a copy of every letter she had written to her majesty. In the queen's letters 

 there was much to blush at : her fondness of the favourite was puerile, and 

 absolutely a doating ; her language, orthography, grammar, and style were 

 below par even at those days. Her majesty concludes a letter on ' church 

 livings ' with these words, in which the second and third persons of the 

 possessive pronouns are amusingly confounded. "And this is all I can 

 now trouble my dear, dear Mrs. Freeman with, but that her poor unfortunate 

 Morley will be faithfully yours to her last moment/ In other parts of this 

 correspondence her majesty's sensibility is still more maudlin, the tone in 

 which she speaks of herself more abject, and her grammar worse. 



" ' As to our names Morley and Freeman,' says Sarah, ' the queen herself 

 was always uneasy if I used the Word ' highness ' or ' majesty/ and would 



