about great catastrophes from little causes.  When a whim of authority took hold of her, she called it giving a stir with the poker.  She would say with an air of profound thought, “No peer may keep his hat on before the king except De Courcy, Baron Kingsale, an Irish peer;” or, “It would be an injustice were my husband not to be Lord High Admiral, since my father was.”  And she made George of Denmark High Admiral of England and of all her Majesty’s plantations.  She was perpetually perspiring bad humour; she did not explain her thought, she exuded it.  There was something of the Sphinx in this goose.

She rather liked fun, teasing, and practical jokes.  Could she have made Apollo a hunchback, it would have delighted her.  But she would have left him a god.  Good-natured, her ideal was to allow none to despair, and to worry all.  She had often a rough word in her mouth; a little more, and she would have sworn like Elizabeth.  From time to time she would take from a man’s pocket, which she wore in her skirt, a little round box, of chased silver, on which was her portrait, in profile, between the two letters Q.A.; she would open this box, and take from it, on her finger, a little pomade, with which she reddened her lips, and, having coloured her mouth, would laugh.  She was greedily fond of the flat Zealand gingerbread cakes.  She was proud of being fat.

More of a Puritan than anything else, she would, nevertheless, have liked to devote herself to stage plays.  She had an absurd academy of music, copied after that of France.  In 1700 a Frenchman, named Foretroche, wanted to build a royal circus at Paris, at a cost of 400,000 francs, which scheme was opposed by D’Argenson.  This Forteroche passed into England, and proposed to Queen Anne, who was immediately charmed by the idea, to build in London a theatre with machinery, with a fourth under-stage finer than that of the King of France.  Like Louis XIV., she liked to be driven at a gallop.  Her teams and relays would sometimes do the distance between London and Windsor in less than an hour and a quarter.

II.

In Anne’s time no meeting was allowed without the permission of two justices of the peace.  The assembly of twelve persons, were it only to eat oysters and drink porter, was a felony.  Under her reign, otherwise relatively mild, pressing for the fleet was carried on with extreme violence—­a gloomy evidence that the Englishman is a subject rather than a citizen.  For centuries England suffered under that process of tyranny which gave the lie to all the old charters of freedom, and out of which France especially gathered a cause of triumph and indignation.  What in some degree diminishes the triumph is, that while sailors were pressed in England, soldiers were pressed in France.  In every great town of France, any able-bodied man, going through the streets on his business, was liable to be shoved by the crimps into a house called the oven.  There he was shut up with others in the same plight; those fit for service were picked out, and the recruiters sold them to the officers.  In 1695 there were thirty of these ovens in Paris.