THE reigns of the female sovereigns of England hold a remarkable position in our annals. Perhaps as a little compensation for the ill-treatment which their sex has always had in literature, it has so happened that the two great epochs under which letters have specially flourished in our country have been those of our two queen-regnants, in themselves as unlike as two human creatures could well be; and this, no doubt, is one reason why the ages of Elizabeth and Anne have always specially attracted the attention of men of letters. But it has not been literature alone that has given them importance. In both cases these epochs themselves were of the most critical character, full of the surgings of new elements, the struggles of new forces with the old, and the full tide of one and another of those great waves of mental energy which seem to rise and fall periodically among men, though without leaving any trace by which their recurrence can be calculated. Comets and eclipses have NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXI., No. 4.

no longer any mystery for us. We know when they will come as well as we know when the omnibus will pass the corner of the street; but we do not know when the law of mental evolution will bring such constellations as those which adorned the "spacious times of great Elizabeth" into our firmament again, or vary them, as in the combinations which still make glorious, though with a less exuberant light, the age of Anne. We are afraid the days of Victoria will not shine with a similar lustre; but as we are not spectators, but actors in the drama at this present moment, we may leave that calculation to those who come after us. In the mean time, it is enough to mark how curious is the recurrence of these high tides of energy and genius in the race, and how little they are traceable to any conscious agencies, or come under any established laws. Why, for instance, to say nothing of the more ethereal soul of the poet, did military genius leap over more than half a century from Marlbor

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ough to Wellington? And why, oh why, has no one appeared since worthy to hold the candle to those great soldiers? These are phenomena which do not enter into the theories of Mr. Darwin or the calculations of Mr. Galton. All other ebbings and flowings may be gauged and tabulated; but here is a kind of high and low tide, which is controlled by no moon, and foreseen by no astronomer. When it comes it awakens the world, if not directly to applause and admiration, at least to the struggle of new forces, and the exhilarating consciousness of life renewed. The general course of living is stimulated, and every drop of salt water in every wave rises so much the higher upon the beach, dashes with more exultant foam of storm upon the rocks. And those ages stand out upon the duller level with a freshening of interest, an inexhaustible dramatic call upon our sympathies. They detach themselves from the background in which the great concerns of the world are always lumbering on, more or less dully, and make us aware of what has been accomplished for good or for evil in the intervals. In Elizabeth's time the great passion of our modern national life was preparing; but the stream had only gained grandeur and force and nobility by that swelling of all its currents which preceded the catastrophe. In Anne's time chaos was subsiding once more, the torrents calming down into their channels, the streams collecting to fill the national veins. Or, to change the metaphor, these two great and wealthy epochs of history are like the banks between which a raging and tumultuous stream is making its furious way. From one eminence the clear-sighted spectator might foresee a national agony of troubles to come, and from the other could look back upon dangers miraculously overcome, and a passage accomplished for the ark of safety through storm and peril.

And even the most abstract of historians-the writers to whom men are not men but only officials in the long procession of events, kings and statesmen and generals-must permit a certain personality to appear when a woman holds, even nominally, the chief place in the historic scene. The group which surrounds Queen Anne is remarkable in various ways. It is not that she herself has, like

her great predecessor, any touch of genius, or even of that intense and large individuality which often takes the place of genius, to make her remarkable; but there is a curious mixture of the great and the paltry in her immediate circle, and in the influences that move that circle so wonderful a combination of motives and objects that are imperial in their vast importance, with impulses and babble which are scarcely superior to a housekeeper's room-that the comic and the tragical, the familiar and the heroic, get mixed up in a way which never surely was seen before on so exalted a stage. The most conventional type of female government, the hackneyed devices of broad comedy, to show how intriguing waiting-maids can manage a stupid mistress, could not have been more perfectly realized than in this chapter of the great epic of English story; and yet the men pushed in and out of office by these Abigails were such men as Marlborough and Bolingbroke, and the affairs of the nation came to no fatal break-down under their influence. This strange group at the head of affairs adds a whimsical element to the great tale which is in some respects so majestic and in others so trivial; and in conformity with this strange conjunction, the age itself sweeps along-so great, so polished, so courtly; so mean, so rude, so brutal; so full of piety and simplicity, and the most depraved morals and the loudest vice; swearing like the coarsest trooper, yet writing like Addison-that the paradox is kept up throughout, and enters into every detail. It is scarcely, however, the curious manifestations of character or picturesque contrasts of national life which so abound in the age of Anne, which have been Dr. John Hill Burton's* leading inducement to add this fine and full study of an epoch so important, to the valuable history of Scotland which we already owe to him, and of which it is the natural corollary and conclusion. Though his work is full of lively and graphic touches, the reader is aware that it is not his custom to present a series of word-pictures in place of a sustained and serious narrative. Neither is there any fear that he

*A History of the Reign of Queen Anne. By John Hill Burton, D.C.L., Historiographer-Royal for Scotland. 3 Vols. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons. 1880.

will take refuge in the abundant gossip of the time, by way of amusing our minds, and withdrawing them from the great threads of meaning which traverse all, but which, amid the confusion of warp and weft, it is not always easy to keep hold upon. So far as Scotch affairs are concerned, it is, as we have said, the natural sequel of his great history. The Revolution Settlement, with which that valuable work concludes, important as it was, still left many points which were capable of being reopened. It was a kind of betrothal rather than marriage of two very different, in some particulars dissimilar and often jarring companions, neither of whom was much inclined to yield to the other, and for whose future accord and conjugal jogging on together, with no more than lawful bickering, very substantial pledges had to be taken. If the bridegroom was arrogant and overbearing, the bride was grim and fierce beyond the use even of medieval heroines; and as in every betrothal there is always a possibility still of severance, so in this one there were moments when the silken leash was strained to its utmost, and one or the other ready to fling off the bondage, and stamp upon the uncompleted contract. The story of the concluding passages, and of the accomplished fact of the Union, is told more clearly and more fully in these pages than it has yet been told, with an indication of the vital points of difference, which only an authority at once in Scotch law and history could have so thoroughly mastered; and very interesting is the contrast and coupling of the two powers, who, the legal fetters once forged, have on the whole kept on their way with so much harmony, and as much mutual comprehension as perhaps was possible. This concluding chapter of the separate annals of his country Dr. Burton owed to us, and he has paid the debt thoroughly.

But even the Union, important as it is, is but one of the events in Queen Anne's reign, the great animating thought and inspiration of which were the Protestant succession-a principle which made England at that period-notwithstanding all the difference of politics, lively enough and warlike at all times-more surely a unanimous nation than she had ever been. Nothing can show more clearly the profound distrust with which the

Catholic creed had imbued the whole race than this passionate national sentiment. The great Protestant King William had lived and died unbeloved and unsympathetic; a great man, no doubt, but one who neither conciliated the prejudices nor attracted the affections of the country, which he on his side did not love; and the choice of the new line in which the crown was to descend was one which must have wounded the beliefs and inclinations of many in a country where primogeniture has outlived all changes. Nor was there any thing in the character of the house of Hanover to call forth national enthusiasm. The narrow mind, which so often goes with narrow possessions-a strong nationality totally alien from our own (notwithstanding those strenuous relationships of race which were not discovered, or, at least, insisted upon, till long after), and manners which were neither charming in themselves nor capable of modification-made the foreign Elector, the "German lairdie," in his own person, a figure most unlikely to call forth any enthusiasm. Dr. Burton speaks of this contemptuous nickname as a proof of the popular misconception of the antiquity and importance of the house from which we sought our reigning line. But the six-and-thirty quarterings of Teutonic heraldry have never been impressive to the English intelligence, and we doubt whether the fullest understanding of them would have much changed the sentiment which suggested that felicitous title. Nobody knows better than our historian, or has more clearly pointed. out, the intolerant insularism and contempt of other people, which is one of the great national characteristics of Englishmen; and a tremendous weight of pedigree overbalancing a meagre estate has always been a favorite object of de-rision; but this makes the extraordinary unanimity of the national sentiment only. the more apparent. Whatever was to happen to the nation, one thing it was resolved should not happen. England might have a monarch she hated. Such a thing had been, and had been endured;. but a Popish king she would not tolerate. Notwithstanding the existence of a by no means insignificant Jacobite party, and of a large class, which, without courage enough to be Jacobite, had romantic leanings that way, or a kind of fantastic