A CURIOUS RACE. 



No one, probably, who has ever looked at the placid, heavy, 

 unexpressive features of Queen Anne, as they are preserved to 

 us in her portraits, would ever credit her with sporting tastes. 

 Nor have any of her historians, so far as we know, ever said 

 anything to suggest her indulgence in such tastes. They have 

 represented her to us as a devout, chaste, and formal personage 

 — a prude, in short, of the first water. Lord Chesterfield com- 

 plained bitterly of the decorous dulness of her Court. Her 

 Drawing-rooms, he said, had more the air of solemn places of 

 worship than the gaiety of a Court. 



' If a fine man and a fine woman were well enough disposed 

 to wish for a private meeting, the execution of their good inten- 

 tions was difficult and dangerous. The preliminaries could only 

 be settled by the hazardous expedient of letters ; and the only 

 places almost for the conclusion and ratification of the definitive 

 treaty were the Indian houses in the City, where the good 

 woman of the house, from good nature and perhaps some little 

 motive of interest, let out her back-rooms for momentary lodg- 

 ings to distressed lovers.' 



But for all the privacy with which she surrounded herself, 

 Queen Anne was a keen sportswoman. She hunted regularly 

 until her persistent habit of over-eating herself made her too fat 

 to take such active exercise. It was, however, as a patroness of 

 the Turf that she most deserves the respect of sportsmen. It was 

 she who first started the Royal Gold Cups in the north, and not 

 only did she give these cups, but she was very eager as a runner 

 of her own horses on the Turf. She used almost invariably to 

 enter her own horses for her own loo-guinea Gold Cups, for six- 

 year-olds, carrying I2st. — four- mile heats. She was not, how- 

 ever, very fortunate. She had a pretty good horse in her gray 

 gelding Pepper, who was placed for the York Gold Cup in 1712, 

 and her gray horse Mustard (she had a fancy for grays) ran 

 well there in 1713 ; but neither was good enough to win her a 



