Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/27

 INTRODUCTION xxiii ������wit, gayety, and remarkable powers of mind that he had "honorably wooed her for his wife." Of Lady Belasyse Mary of Modena never felt the slightest jealousy. It was Catharine Sedley, the maid of honor drawing the highest salary, intrepid, brilliant, conscious of her power over James, and unscrupulous in her use of it, who roused all the fierce antagonism in the nature of the Italian wife, and brought discord into the court circle. Of the other maids of honor Anne Killigrew was the most famous. She died of smallpox in her twenty-fifth year. But she had already shown superior ability in both poetry and painting. She was a pupil of Lely and her royal master and mistress sat to her for their portraits. If we may trust Dry den's Ode to Mistress Anne Killigrew, her pencil was also skilled in the representation of landscapes. Dryden was her master in poetry, and she was not a pupil of whom he needed to be ashamed. The thin volume of her pub- lished verse shows a vigor and a bitterness not to be looked for in a maid of honor. There is no hint of interest in nature, no tenderness, no lightness, almost no beauty or grace. The poems are marked instead by a crude virility. They are apparently genuine in their Carlylean scorn of fools, and of men who will expose themselves to hostile arms, or give themselves to "toylsome study" "all for the praise of Fools." " O famisht soul," she exclaims, "which such thin food can feed." She hates war, but she shows admiration for strength and daring, and she scorns weakness. There is in her poems no contemplative religious spirit, but there is a stern morality, and an emphatic recogni- tion of reason as man's supreme guide. There would seem to be valid reasons in the law of affinities for a warm friend- ship between the two Annes. They were both, Miss Strick- land says, "much beloved by her [Mary of Modena], were ladies of irreproachable virtue, members of the Church of ��� �