She was also a great proficient in the art of painting, and drew King James II. and his queen, which pieces are highly applauded by Mr Dryden. These engaging and polite accomplishments were the least of her perfections, for she crowned all with an exemplary piety towards God in a due observance of the duties of religion, which she began to practise in the early part of her life. But as her uncommon virtues are enumerated on her monument-inscription, I shall only observe that she was one of the maids of honour to the Duchess of York, and that she died of the small-pox in the flower of her age, to the unspeakable grief of her relations and all others who were acquainted with her excellences, in her father's lodgings, within the cloister of Westminster Abbey, on the 16th day of June 1685, in her twenty-fifth year. Mr Dryden's muse put on the mourning habit on this sad occasion, and lamented the death of our ingenious poetess in very moving strains, in a long ode, from whence I shall take the liberty of transcribing the eighth stanza; and the rather as it does honour to another female character. "Now all those charms that blooming grace The well-proportioned shape and beauteous face, Shall never more be seen by mortal eyes; In earth the much-lamented virgin lies! Not wit nor poetry could fate prevent, Nor was the cruel destiny content To finish all the murder at a blow, To sweep at once her life and beauty too; But, like a hardened felon, took a pride, To work more mischievously slow, And plundered first, and then destroyed. O, double sacrifice, as things divine, To rob the relique and deface the shrine! But thus Orinda died: Heaven by the same disease did both translate; As equal were their souls, so equal was their fate." [Illustration: Painted by Gole (reproduction of signature of Queen Anne)] QUEEN ANNE. [BORN 1664. DIED 1714.] MISS STRICKLAND.