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 and malignity, far exceed any thing that our age has
produced, she was not often mentioned with severity. Indeed she
sometimes expressed her surprise at finding that libellers who
respected nothing else respected her name. God, she said, knew
where her weakness lay. She was too sensitive to abuse and
calumny; He had mercifully spared her a trial which was beyond
her strength; and the best return which she could make to Him was
to discountenance all malicious reflections on the characters of
others. Assured that she possessed her husband's entire
confidence and affection, she turned the edge of his sharp
speeches sometimes by soft and sometimes by playful answers, and
employed all the influence which she derived from her many
pleasing qualities to gain the hearts of the people for him.58

If she had long continued to assemble round her the best society
of London, it is probable that her kindness and courtesy would
have done much to efface the unfavourable impression made by his
stern and frigid demeanour. Unhappily his physical infirmities