From a certain point of view, the reign of Anne appears a reflection of the reign of Louis XIV.  Anne, for a moment even with that king in the race which is called history, bears to him the vague resemblance of a reflection.  Like him, she plays at a great reign; she has her monuments, her arts, her victories, her captains, her men of letters, her privy purse to pension celebrities, her gallery of chefs-d’oeuvre, side by side with those of his Majesty.  Her court, too, was a cortege, with the features of a triumph, an order and a march.  It was a miniature copy of all the great men of Versailles, not giants themselves.  In it there is enough to deceive the eye; add God save the Queen, which might have been taken from Lulli, and the ensemble becomes an illusion.  Not a personage is missing.  Christopher Wren is a very passable Mansard; Somers is as good as Lamoignon; Anne has a Racine in Dryden, a Boileau in Pope, a Colbert in Godolphin, a Louvois in Pembroke, and a Turenne in Marlborough.  Heighten the wigs and lower the foreheads.  The whole is solemn and pompous, and the Windsor of the time has a faded resemblance to Marly.  Still the whole was effeminate, and Anne’s Pere Tellier was called Sarah Jennings.  However, there is an outline of incipient irony, which fifty years later was to turn to philosophy, in the literature of the age, and the Protestant Tartuffe is unmasked by Swift just in the same way as the Catholic Tartuffe is denounced by Moliere.  Although the England of the period quarrels and fights France, she imitates her and draws enlightenment from her; and the light on the facade of England is French light.  It is a pity that Anne’s reign lasted but twelve years, or the English would not hesitate to call it the century of Anne, as we say the century of Louis XIV.  Anne appeared in 1702, as Louis XIV. declined.  It is one of the curiosities of history, that the rise of that pale planet coincides with the setting of the planet of purple, and that at the moment in which France had the king Sun, England should have had the queen Moon.

A detail to be noted.  Louis XIV., although they made war with him, was greatly admired in England.  “He is the kind of king they want in France,” said the English.  The love of the English for their own liberty is mingled with a certain acceptance of servitude for others.  That favourable regard of the chains which bind their neighbours sometimes attains to enthusiasm for the despot next door.

To sum up, Anne rendered her people hureux, as the French translator of Beeverell’s book repeats three times, with graceful reiteration at the sixth and ninth page of his dedication and the third of his preface.

IV.