ladies of quality. The stainless purity of her private life and the strict attention which she paid to her religious duties were the more respectable, because she was singularly free from censoriousness, and discouraged scandal as much as vice. In dislike of backbiting indeed she and her husband cordially agreed; but they showed their dislike in different and in very characteristic ways. William preserved profound silence, and gave the talebearer a look which, as was said by a person who had once encountered it, and who took good care never to encounter it again, made your story go back down your throat.[1] Mary had a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and playdebts by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favourite sermon, Doctor Tillotson's on Evil Speaking. Her charities were munificent and judicious; and, though she made no ostentatious display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and Ireland, and who were starving in the garrets of London. So amiable was her conduct, that she was generally spoken of with esteem and tenderness by the most respectable of those who disapproved of the manner in which she had been raised to the throne, and even of those who refused to acknowledge her as Queen. In the Jacobite lampoons of that time, lampoons which, in virulence and malignity, far exceed any thing that our age has produced, she was not often mentioned with severity. Indeed she sometimes expressed her surprise at finding that libellers who respected nothing else
- ↑ Mémoires originaux sur le règne et la cour de Frédéric I, Roi de Prusse, écrits par Christophe Comte de Dohna. Berlin, 1833. It is strange that this interesting volume should be almost unknown in England. The only copy that I have ever seen of it was kindly given to me by Sir Robert Adair. "Le Roi," Dohna says, "avoit une autre qualité tres estimable, qui est celle de n'aimer point qu'on rendit de mauvais offices à personne par des railleries." The Marquis de La Forêt tried to entertain His Majesty at the expense of an English nobleman. "Ce prince," says Dohna "prit son air sévère, et, le regardant sans mot dire, lui fit rentrer les paroles dans le ventre. Le Marquis m'en fit ses plaintes quelques heures après. 'J'ai mal pris ma bisque,' dit-il; 'j'ai cru faire l'agréable sur le chapître de Milord… mais j'ai trouvé à qui parler, et j'ai attrapé un regard du roi qui m'a fait passer l'envie de rire.'" Dohna supposed that William might be less sensitive about the character of a Frenchman, and tried the experiment. But, says he, "j'eus à peu près le même sort que M. de la Forêt."
