incapable of enjoying or of understanding. He never once, during his
whole reign, showed himself at the theatre. [55] The poets who wrote
Pindaric verses in his praise complained that their flights of sublimity
were beyond his comprehension. [56] Those who are acquainted with the
panegyrical odes of that age will perhaps be of opinion that he did not
lose much by his ignorance.

It is true that his wife did her best to supply what was wanting, and
that she was excellently qualified to be the head of the Court. She was
English by birth, and English also in her tastes and feelings. Her
face was handsome, her port majestic, her temper sweet and lively, her
manners affable and graceful. Her understanding, though very imperfectly
cultivated, was quick. There was no want of feminine wit and shrewdness
in her conversation; and her letters were so well expressed that they
deserved to be well spelt. She took much pleasure in the lighter kinds
of literature, and did something towards bringing books into fashion
among ladies of quality. The stainless purity of her private life and
the strict attention which she paid to her religious duties were the
more respectable, because she was singularly free from censoriousness,
and discouraged scandal as much as vice. In dislike of backbiting indeed
she and her husband cordially agreed; but they showed their dislike in
different and in very characteristic ways. William preserved profound
silence, and gave the talebearer a look which, as was said by a person
who had once encountered it, and who took good care never to encounter
it again, made your story go back down your throat. [57] Mary had a way
of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and playdebts by asking
the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read
her favourite sermon, Doctor Tillotson's on Evil Speaking. Her charities
were munificent and judicious; and, though she made no ostentatious
display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in
order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and
Ireland, and who were starving in the garrets of London. So amiable was
her conduct, that she was generally spoken of with esteem and tenderness
by the most respectable of those who disapproved of the manner in which
she had been raised to the throne, and even of those who refused
to acknowledge her as Queen. In the Jacobite lampoons of that time,
lampoons which, in virulence