Anne
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Anne
nor the flattery, often equally robust, of her poets and prose writers, has succeeded in persuading posterity that good Queen Anne was either an attractive woman or—though she appropriated to herself Queen Elizabeth's motto (semper eadem)—a great queen. On the other hand, spared though she was by neither foe nor friend, yet even in her own libellous age it was chiefly left to foreign pens to libel a genuinely national queen. Since Queen Anne has been dead, popular sentiment has preserved her name in kindly remembrance for the sake of her homely virtues, and neither partisan nor sectarian prejudice has prevented historians from acknowledging that she took no ignoble view of the responsibilities belonging to the throne on which a parliamentary compromise had seated her—the last of our Stuart sovereigns.