He made friends, too, with Princess Anne, the sister of the dead Queen, and now heir to the throne. This Princess Anne (afterward Queen Anne) was married to a prince of Denmark, only notable for doing nothing excellently well; and was mother of a young lad, called Duke of Gloucester, whom all England looked upon as their future king. And this little Duke, after Queen Mary’s death, came to be presented at court in a blue velvet costume, blazing all over with diamonds, of which one may get a good notion from Sir Godfrey Kneller’s painting of him, now in Hampton Court. But the velvet and the diamonds and best of care could not save the weakly, blue-eyed, fair-cheeked, precocious lad; his precocity was a fatal one, due to a big hydrocephalic head that bent him down and carried him to the grave while William was yet King. The Princess mother was in despair; was herself feeble, too; small, heavy, dropsical, from all which she rallied, however, and at the death of William, which occurred by a fall from his horse in 1702, came to be that Queen Anne, who through no special virtues of her own, gave a name to a great epoch in English history, and in these latter days has given a name to very much architecture and furniture and crockery, which have as little to do with her as they have with our King Benjamin of Washington. I may have more to say of her when we shall have brought the literary current of our story more nearly abreast of her times. There was not much of literary patronage flowing out from King William. I think there was never a time when he would not have counted a good dictionary the best of books, not excepting the Bible; and I suspect that he had about the same contempt for “literary fellers” which belongs to our average Congressman. Yet there were shoals of poets in his time who would have delighted to burn incense under the nostrils of the asthmatic King. _Some Literary Fellows._ There was Prior,[96] for instance, who, from having been the son of a taverner at Whitehall, came to be a polished wit, and at last an ambassador, through the influence of strong friends about the court. In his university days he had ventured to ridicule, in rattling verse, the utterances of the great Dryden. You will know of him best, perhaps, if you know him at all, by a paraphrase he made of that tender ballad of the “Nut-brown Maid,” in which the charming naturalness of the old verse is stuck over with the black patches of Prior’s pretty rhetoric. But I am tempted to give you a fairer and a more characteristic specimen of his vivacity and grace. Here it is: