race which is called history, bears to him the vague resemblance of a

reflection. Like him, she plays at a great reign; she has her

monuments, her arts, her victories, her captains, her men of letters,

her privy purse to pension celebrities, her gallery of chefs-d'oeuvre,

side by side with those of his Majesty. Her court, too, was a cortège,

with the features of a triumph, an order and a march. It was a miniature

copy of all the great men of Versailles, not giants themselves. In it

there is enough to deceive the eye; add God save the Queen, which might

have been taken from Lulli, and the ensemble becomes an illusion. Not a

personage is missing. Christopher Wren is a very passable Mansard;

Somers is as good as Lamoignon; Anne has a Racine in Dryden, a Boileau

in Pope, a Colbert in Godolphin, a Louvois in Pembroke, and a Turenne in

Marlborough. Heighten the wigs and lower the foreheads. The whole is

solemn and pompous, and the Windsor of the time has a faded resemblance

to Marly. Still the whole was effeminate, and Anne's Père Tellier was

called Sarah Jennings. However, there is an outline of incipient irony,

which fifty years later was to turn to philosophy, in the literature of

the age, and the Protestant Tartuffe is unmasked by Swift just in the

same way as the Catholic Tartuffe is denounced by Molière. Although the

England of the period quarrels and fights France, she imitates her and

draws enlightenment from her; and the light on the façade of England is

French light. It is a pity that Anne's reign lasted but twelve years, or

the English would not hesitate to call it the century of Anne, as we say

the century of Louis XIV. Anne appeared in 1702, as Louis XIV. declined.

It is one of the curiosities of history, that the rise of that pale

planet coincides with the setting of the planet of purple, and that at

the moment in which France had the king Sun, England should have had the

331

The Man Who Laughs