“Kings and princes, for the most part,” remarks the Duchess, “imagine they have a dignity peculiar to their birth and station, which ought to raise them above all connexions of friendship with an inferior. Their passion is to be admired and feared, to have subjects awfully obedient, and servants blindly obsequious to their pleasure. Friendship is an offensive word; it imports a kind of equality between the parties; it suggests nothing to the mind, of crowns or thrones; high titles, or immense revenues, fountains of honour, or fountains of riches, prerogatives which the possessors would always have uppermost in the thoughts of those who approach them.”[79] Such were the notions of royalty which the Duchess entertained, and which Hook, the historian, whom she employed in her old age to write the famous Vindication of her career from which this quotation is borrowed, has well expressed in his own language. Yet the decided, dauntless way in which this clause against monarchs is struck off, is strongly characteristic of the Duchess, and must have met with her cordial approbation, if not solely suggested by herself. “The Princess,” she, however, proceeds to state, “had a different taste. A friend was what she most coveted; and, for the sake of friendship, (a relation which she did not disdain to have with _me_,) she was fond of that _equality_ which she thought belonged to it. She grew uneasy to be treated by me with the form and ceremony due to her rank; nor could she bear from me the sound of words which implied in them distance and superiority. It was this turn of mind which made her one day propose to me, that whenever I should happen to be absent from her, we might in our letters write ourselves by feigned names, such as would import nothing of distinction between us. MORLEY and FREEMAN were the names her fancy hit upon, and she left me to choose by which of them I would be called. My frank, open temper led me to pitch upon FREEMAN, and so the Princess took the other; and from this time Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman began to converse together as equals, made so by affection and friendship.”[80] This well-meant but dangerous experiment shows at least that Anne understood the nature of true friendship, which, like all other “perfect love, casteth out fear;” whilst it is also obvious that the kind-hearted Princess did not comprehend the character of the remarkable and highly gifted being for whose sake she thus broke through the trammels of etiquette. The friendly compact, unequal as it was, grew under the pressure of those trials which Anne had to encounter during the reign of her father and sister. When she found that James had complied with her earnest request that Lady Churchill might be placed in her service, she communicated the intelligence to her favourite, in terms of joy and affection.