But the secret of that extraordinary influence which Sarah Duchess of Marlborough acquired over every being with whom she came into contact, originated not in her attributes of beauty and of grace. Mrs. Jennings, her mother, represented as she was by the infamous Mrs. Manley, the wretched authoress of the “New Atalantis,” as a sorceress and a depraved creature too vile to live, was also allowed by the same authority to have cultivated in her daughter every art that could charm. That of conversation, in particular, the Duchess of Marlborough is said to have possessed. Shrewd, sarcastic, fearless, so beautiful that all she said was sure to be approved by the one sex; so much in fashion and in favour, that nothing she did could possibly be disapproved by the other; Sarah might readily, without any extraordinary cultivation of intellect, figure greatly in repartee, dogmatize with the security of a youthful beauty, and gain, perhaps, in asserting her crude opinions, knowledge and experience from the replies which one so lively would know well how to elicit. It appears that at this time she had never even dreamed of politics, nor thought of cultivating that vigorous intellect so much applauded in after times by the great ones of the earth. Education had contributed little to extend the sphere of her inquiring mind. She knew no language but her own, and never had the industry nor the ambition to learn even French. Bishop Burnet, who knew her intimately, thus describes his own and his wife’s friend. “The Duchess of Marlborough was,” says he, “a woman of little knowledge, but of a clear apprehension and a true judgment.”[76] The account which the Duchess gives of the manner in which many hours of her day, in the season when the improvement of reason ought to be progressive, were dissipated, is, in few words, “that she never read nor employed her time in anything but playing cards, nor had she any ambition.”[77] Well might she declare herself to be weary of a court life. Such was the friend to whom the Princess was early bound by the ties of habit, and afterwards by something almost more ardent than common friendship; and exactly was she adapted, from independent, uncompromising spirit, half magnanimous and half insolent, to attain a complete dominion over every faculty of Anne’s shallow mind. The Princess, inured to courts, and probably sickened by the mechanical homage which she could remember from her infancy, might have distrusted adulation in one not much older than herself, and who had been her playmate before the cruel distinctions of rank were recollected or regretted. “But a friend was what she most courted.”[78]