It cannot be disputed but that the Princess acted with a degree of pusillanimity which was a feature in her character, and throughout her subsequent life made her the victim of daring minds, of whose intrigues she was the slave, and at the same time, from her exalted station, the active principle. Anne knew her father too well to suppose, that whilst he retained the power to defend his daughter, he would suffer her to be treated with indignity, or allow violence to be done to her feelings as a wife, or to her opinions as a Protestant. The pretext that it was unsafe for her to remain, on account of the schemes which might be formed against her by the priests, was a needless alarm, and an ungenerous insinuation. If we are to conclude that Princes may discard natural feeling, and ties of duty, from their consideration, in times of difficulty, we may commend the prudence of Anne in absenting herself from a scene of distress wherein her father was the chief actor; we may excuse her from remaining to receive the deserted and degraded king, justly expiating grave offences by the bitterest mortifications, but stung most by the utter alienation of one daughter, and the heartless discretion of the other. But had Anne continued in London, had she waited to receive the dishonoured King, and, by kindly sympathy and filial affection which is of no party, endeavoured to soothe the pangs of his return to his gloomy capital—had she thus solaced the most painful hours of a father whom she was to see no more, she would have compromised no party, nor entailed upon herself any responsibility. She was a passive neutral being; unambitious, and, in those days, whilst her brother and sister lived, comparatively unimportant: any breach of what is called consistency, that fatal word which seems, in a public sense, to be invented to banish sincerity and to smother nature, would, in her, have been attributed to the most amiable source; except, perhaps, by her stern formal brother-in-law, or by her virtuous, wise sister,—a pattern of wives, but an undutiful and heartless daughter, and a cold and ungracious sister. Anne wanted soul—wanted resolution and character more than heart; and at a critical period, when she might have acted so as to avoid subsequent self-reproach, and might have reaped the satisfaction to her own mind that she had not added to the sharpness of the “serpent’s tooth,” she absconded—for the flight had much of that character—under the auspices of Lady Churchill, and guarded by the Bishop of London. It is natural to suppose that the yearnings which in her latter days she felt towards her brother, the Pretender, and her manifest distaste to the Hanoverian succession, proceeded, in a degree, from a too late regret for the part which on this occasion she had been induced to take, and which was quickly followed by her surrender of her right to William the Third.