As time went on the queen's health grew no better, and she was such an enormous eater that frequent attacks of {492}gout were the result,--particularly as she had grown so corpulent from her other disease, dropsy, that she could take no exercise, and had to be lowered and raised from one floor to another in the palace by means of a chair worked with pulleys and ropes. She was in constant dread lest her brother should land in England, or George of Hanover present himself at court to claim his place as her successor. She, therefore, wrote two letters, one to Princess Sophia, Dowager Electress of Brunswick, the other to George Augustus, Duke of Cambridge, setting forth the danger of such a proceeding, and appealing to their honor. As we know, her fears were groundless in that direction; for the house of Hanover made no attempt to approach the shores of England, though there has been some dispute among historians as to their real intentions in this matter. [[A.D. 1714.]] Queen Anne paid the ballad writer, Tom D'Urfey, a fee of fifty pounds for a verse he repeated one day while she was at dessert, that happened to tickle her fancy. As it refers to the Hanover succession, it is worth repeating:-- "The crown's far too weighty For shoulders of eighty; She could not sustain such a trophy. Her hand, too, already Has grown so unsteady She can't hold a sceptre; So Providence kept her Away--poor old Dowager Sophy!" Certainly D'Urfey did not earn his fifty pounds for the literary merit of the verse, but perhaps it was because it possessed so little that it pleased the queen. The Electress Sophia of Hanover, about whom it was written, died before the end of the year, at the age of eighty-four.