Women of History Part 10

The knowledge of Greek, though once not very uncommon in a woman, had become prodigious in the days of Louis XIV.; and when this distinguished lady taught Homer and Sappho to speak French prose, she appeared a phoenix in the eyes of her countrymen. She was undoubtedly a person of very rare talents and estimable character; her translations are numerous, and reputed to be correct, though Niceron has observed that she did not raise Homer in the eyes of those who were not prejudiced in his favour. Her husband was a scholar of kindred mind and the same pursuits. Their union was facetiously called the wedding of Latin and Greek. But each of this learned couple was skilled in both languages.

Dacier was a great translator: his Horace is perhaps the best known of his versions; but the Poetics of Aristotle have done him most honour.

The Daciers had to fight the battle of antiquity against a generation both ignorant and vainglorious, yet keen-sighted in the detection of blemishes, and disposed to avenge the wrongs of their fathers, who had been trampled upon by pedants, with the help of a new pedantry, that of the court and the mode. With great learning, they had a competent share of good sense, but not, perhaps, a sufficiently discerning taste or liveliness enough of style to maintain a cause that had so many prejudices of the world now enlisted against it.

LADY MASHAM.

[1658.]

BALLARD.

Damaris, Lady Masham, the daughter of the famous Dr Cudworth, and second wife of Sir Thomas Masham of Oates, in Ess.e.x, was born in 1658. Her father, who soon perceived the bent of her genius, took particular care in her tuition, and she applied herself with great diligence to the study of divinity and philosophy, under the direction of the celebrated Mr Locke, who was a domestic in her family for many years, and at length died in her house at Oates.

Soon after she was married, the fame of her learning, piety, and ingenuity, induced the celebrated Mr Norris to address and inscribe to her, by way of letter, his "Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life."

This began a friendship between them, which, having its foundation in religion, seemed very likely to be firm and lasting; but it seems to have been in a great measure dissolved before it had been of any long continuance, occasioned by this lady's contracting an indissoluble friendship with Mr Locke, whose divinity and philosophy is well known to have differed from that of Mr Norris. Not long after, the latter, in certain published letters, maintained the proposition, that "mankind are obliged strictly, as their duty, to love with desire nothing but G.o.d only;" and Lady Masham published, without her name, her "Discourse concerning the Love of G.o.d," wherein she applied herself to the examination of Mr Norris's scheme, which included the proposition, that every degree of love of any creature is sinful; a proposition defended by him on the ground (borrowed from Father Malebranche) that G.o.d, not the creature, is the efficient cause of our sensations. Mrs Masham examined this hypothesis with great accuracy and ingenuity, and represented in a strong light the evil consequences resulting from it.

About the year 1700, Lady Masham also wrote a treatise, "Occasional Thoughts in reference to a Virtuous and Christian Life," the princ.i.p.al design of which was to improve religion and virtue; and, indeed, it is so full of excellent instruction, that, if carefully perused by both s.e.xes, it could not fail of obtaining much of its desired end. She complains much of the too great neglect of religious duties, occasioned, as she believed, by the want of being better acquainted with the fundamentals of religion; and very justly reprehends and reproaches persons of quality for so scandalously permitting their daughters to pa.s.s that part of their youth, in which the mind is most ductile and susceptible of good impressions, in a ridiculous circle of diversions, which is generally thought the proper business of young ladies, and which so generally engrosses them that they can find no spare hours wherein to make any improvement in their understandings.

As Mrs Masham owed much to the care of Mr Locke for her acquired endowments and skill in arithmetic, geography, chronology, history, philosophy, and divinity, so, as he was a domestic in her family, she returned the obligation with singular benevolence and grat.i.tude, always treating him with the utmost generosity--her friendship for him being inviolable. It is recorded that, as she sat by Mr Locke's side the night before he died, he exhorted her to regard this world only as a state of preparation for a better; that she desired to sit up with him that night, but he would not permit her. The next day, as she was reading the Psalms in a low tone by him in his room, he desired her to read aloud.

She did so, and he appeared very attentive till the approach of death prevented him. He then desired her ladyship to break off, and in a few minutes afterwards expired. As a testimony of her grat.i.tude to Mr Locke's memory, she drew up that account of him which is printed in the great Historical Dictionary.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Drawn by J. Thurston. Engraved by F. Engleheart.

ANNE KILLEGREW.

From a Miniature by Sir Peter Lely in the possession of Mr.

Winstanley.]

ANNE KILLIGREW.

[BORN 1660. DIED 1685.]

BALLARD.

The daughter of Dr Henry Killigrew, prebendary of Westminster, became eminent in the arts of poetry and painting; and had it pleased Providence to protract her life, she might probably have excelled most of the professors in both. She was the Orinda of Mr Dryden, who seems quite lavish in her commendation; but as we are a.s.sured by a writer of great probity [Wood's "Athenae"] that she was equal to, if not superior to that praise, let him be my voucher for her skill in poetry.

"Art she had none, yet wanted none, For Nature did that want supply; So rich in treasures of her own, She might our boasted stores defy; Such n.o.ble vigour did her verse adorn, That it seemed borrowed where 'twas only born."

The great poet is pleased to attribute to her every excellence in that science; but if she has failed of some of its excellences, still should we have great reason to commend her for having avoided those faults by which some have derived a reflection on the science itself, as well as on themselves. Speaking of the purity and charity of her compositions, he bestows on them this commendation,--

"Her Arethusian stream remains unsoiled, Unmixed with foreign filth, and undefiled; Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child."

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 G.o.d 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Painted by Gole (reproduction of signature of Queen Anne)]

QUEEN ANNE.

[BORN 1664. DIED 1714.]

MISS STRICKLAND.

Queen Anne "had a person and appearance not at all ungraceful, till she grew exceeding gross and corpulent. There was something of majesty in her look, but mixed with a sullen and constant frown, that plainly betrayed a gloominess of soul and cloudiness of disposition within. She seemed to inherit a good deal of her father's moroseness, which naturally produced in her the same sort of stubborn positiveness in many cases, both ordinary and extraordinary, and the same sort of bigotry in religion." This pa.s.sage, being written for insertion in a party work, appeals to vulgar opinion. The slight contraction in the queen's eyes, the writer perfectly well knew, had been occasioned by violent inflammation in her childhood, and was not connected with temper. The d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough likewise well knew, and had experienced, that excessive indulgence, and not moroseness, in his family circle, was the fault of the unhappy James II., her own early benefactor. However, this libel was to have been published under Bishop Burnet's mask. Thus does the creature of the bounty of those she maligns pursue her theme: "Queen Anne's memory was exceeding great, almost to a wonder, and had these two peculiarities very remarkable,--that she could, when she pleased, forget what others would have thought themselves bound by truth and honour to remember, while she remembered all such things as others would have thought it a happiness to forget. Indeed, she chose to exercise it in very little besides ceremonies and customs of courts, and such-like insignificant trifles. So that her conversation, which otherwise might have been enlivened by so great a memory, was only made more empty and trifling by its chiefly turning upon fashions and rules of precedence, or some such poor topics. Upon which account, it was a sort of misfortune to her that she loved to have a great crowd come to her, having little to say to them, but 'that the weather was either hot or cold;' and little to inquire of them, but 'how long they had been in town?' or the like weighty matters. She never discovered any readiness of parts, either in asking questions or in giving answers. In matters of ordinary moment, her discourse had nothing of brightness or wit; in weightier matters, she never spoke but in a hurry, and had a certain knack of sticking to what had been dictated to her to a degree often very disagreeable, and without the least sign of understanding or judgment." As the d.u.c.h.ess was considered the queen's "dictator" for thirty years, she had ample opportunity of speaking on this trait of her character; but it only became apparent to her when the dictatorship was transferred for a few years to another person. "The queen's letters,"

she continues, "were very indifferent, both in sense and spelling, unless they were generally enlivened with a few pa.s.sionate expressions, sometimes pretty enough, but repeated over and over again, without the mixture either of diversion or instruction."

Now turn the medal, and read the reverse:--"Queen Anne had a person and appearance very graceful; something of majesty in her look. She was religious without affectation, and certainly meant to do everything that was just. She had no ambition, which appeared by her being so easy in letting King William come before her to the crown, after the king, her father, had followed such counsels as made the nation see they could not be safe in their liberty and lives without coming to the extremities they did; and she thought it more for her honour to be easy in it, than to make a dispute who should have the crown first that was taken from her father. And it was a great trouble to her to be forced to act such a part against him, even for security, which was truly the case; and she thought those that showed the least ambition had the best character. Her journey to Nottingham was purely accidental, never concerted, but occasioned by the great fright she was in when King James returned from Salisbury; upon which she said she would rather jump out of the window than stay and see her father."

Those who have read the previous character drawn of Queen Anne by the same person must think the contradictions between the two truly monstrous, and the emanation of a bewildered brain. Some candid persons, disposed to sentimentalise on the fierce d.u.c.h.ess, have supposed that, after a lapse of time, her mind had softened towards her benefactress, and that she wrote the last character as a reparation for the first. But such inferences vanish before the fact that the d.u.c.h.ess herself favours the world with her motives, in raising a statue at Blenheim to her former royal mistress, and adorning it with the laudatory inscription, the whole being avowedly not to do justice to Queen Anne, but to vex and spite Queen Caroline, the consort of George II. Here are her words: "This character of Queen Anne is so much the reverse of Queen Caroline, that I think it will not be liked at court." In the middle of the last century, the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough hated Queen Caroline more than she did Queen Anne. Such is the real explanation of these discrepancies.

Other contemporary authors have mentioned traits of Queen Anne, according to their knowledge. When all are collected and examined, certain contradictions occur; for they do not enough distinguish between the actions of Anne in her youth, as an uneducated and self-indulgent woman, and the undeniable improvement in her character. Even the awful responsibility of a reigning sovereign, whose practical duties were at that era by no means clearly defined, awoke her conscience to trembling anxiety for the welfare of her people. Much permanent good she a.s.suredly did, and no evil, as queen-regent, notwithstanding the ill-natured sarcasms of a Whig politician, who, when mentioning her demise at an opportune juncture for the Hanoverian succession, declared that "Queen Anne died like a Roman, for the good of her country." But no sovereign was ever more deeply regretted by the people. The office of regality was, there is no doubt, a painful occupation to her; for her constant complaint was, observes Tindal, "that she was only a crowned slave," the originality of which expression savours not of the dulness generally attributed to this queen.

Her person is represented differently by those who saw her daily. "Her complexion was ruddy and sanguine; the luxuriance of her chestnut hair has already been mentioned. Her face was round and comely, her features strong and regular; and the only blemish in it was that defluxion which had fallen on her eyes in her childhood, had contracted the lids, and given a cloudiness to her countenance." Thus the frown that the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough dwells on malevolently did not arise from ill-nature, but from defect of vision. The d.u.c.h.ess has likewise given a malignant turn to a trifling incident arising from Anne's near-sightedness, quoted in her early life. "Queen Anne was of a middle stature," observes another contemporary; "not so personable and majestic as her sister, Queen Mary. Her face was rather comely than handsome; it seemed to have a tincture of sourness in it, and, for some years before she died, was rubicund and bloated. Her bones were small, her hands extremely beautiful, her voice most melodious, and her ear for music exquisite.

She was brought up in High Church principles, but changed her parties according to her interest. She was a scrupulous observer of the outward and visible forms of G.o.dliness and humility in public service; as, for instance, she reproved once the minister of Windsor Castle for offering her the Sacrament before the clergy present had communicated;" thus forgetting her position and dignity as head of the church.

ESTHER JOHNSON.

[BORN 1684. DIED 1728.]

JEFFREY.

Esther Johnson, better known to the reader of Swift's works by the name of Stella, was the child of a London merchant, who died in her infancy, when she went with her mother, who was a friend of Sir William Temple's sister, to reside at Moorpark, where Swift was then domesticated. Some part of the charge of her education devolved upon him, and, though he was twenty years her senior, the interest with which he regarded her appears to have ripened into something as much like affection as could find a place in his selfish bosom. Soon after Sir William Temple's death he got his Irish livings, besides a considerable legacy; and as she had a small independence of her own, it is obvious that there was nothing to prevent their honourable and immediate union. Some cold-blooded vanity or ambition, however, or some politic antic.i.p.ation of his own possible inconstancy, deterred him from this outward and open course, and led him to an arrangement which was dishonourable and absurd in the beginning, and in the end productive of the most acc.u.mulated misery.