of the house.

'Alas, poor infant!' quoth the father. 'It is a crafty knave,' quoth the Lord Chamberlain ; 'let me see him here no more.'

With the help of the old black-letter, and antiquated orthography, one can make a perfect picture out of this tale. There, in grave deliberation, sat my Lord Chamberlain, wagging his beard with most expressively suspicious winks at my Lord Chandois, and other officials, all labouring to unravel sundry profound plots, devised and executed by the crafty knave' who stood before them in stiff brocaded petticoats, audaciously demanding his figs. The precocious conspirator was to be taught betimes what faith his betters kept with heretics; for to be sure his obstinate loyalty to a suspected princess savoured strongly of heretical pravity. To promise figs and administer a whipping was a beautiful specimen of 'Popery made easy' to the apprehension of a babe. Meantime my Lord of Devonshire, wholly unconscious of the weighty affair then in progress, sat with closed windows in his prison, duly watched by the keeper; while the Lady Elizabeth's Grace enjoyed her solitary walk in that narrow garden, frowned upon by the black and blood-stained walls,

'With many a foul and midnight murder fed; '

and, as Foxe beautifully says, with this small liberty contenting herself in God.

The persecuted princess was ordained to be the means of rescuing her country from an iron furnace, cleansing it from a fearful accumulation of defilement, raising it from the lowest point of debasement, and elevating it to unprecedented power, grandeur, and

importance among the nations of the earth. Such an instrument is generally sharpened and polished for its work by a severe exposure to the grindstone and the file; and this was the discipline then endured by Elizabeth, who, far from anticipating her future greatness, daily looked for the poisoned bowl, or listened by night for the assassin's stealthy tread. It was not long since the life-blood of her beautiful, innocent, beloved, and devoted cousin had sprinkled those ruthless walls, once deeply dyed with that of her own royal mother; and who can doubt that Elizabeth's thoughts rose heavenward, to that far-off land of peace and joy, whither the spirits of Anna Boleyn and of Jane Grey had ascended from the spot that now imprisoned her? The youthful Edward too, her darling brother, whose memory was enshrined in every true bosom, and must have been doubly precious to that of his loyal sister, was in glory: and I must think she found sweet solace in contemplating the flowers that, despite the dark and scowling barriers which enclosed them, looked up in unruffled composure, unclouded cheerfulness, and rejoiced in the modicum of sunshine that reached their confined dwelling-place. They were lively types of a mind contenting itself in God.

One who also lived in Elizabeth's days has well observed

Sweet are the uses of adversity :

And it is probable that in after years of regal splendour, while holding the sceptre of a mighty monarchy, every foe awed into stillness by the prowess of her arms, Elizabeth sometimes sighed for those hours of

lonely captivity within the Tower of London, when she sought and found contentment in God. In the midst of courtly magnificence, she recalled the pure brightness of the simple flowers that bloomed in her prison garden: and, hailed on all sides by the ready tones of practised adulation, she might long for such disinterested devotion as beat in the heart of her loyal little follower, when, unawed by the menaces of frowning reprovers, he uttered the bold declaration, 'I will bring my lady my mistress more flowers!'

It

Elizabeth, in her early years, certainly appreciated the sweet uses of adversity. Her character at that time exhibits many beautiful traits in its quiet submission both to her God and to his delegate-her unsisterly queen. Study, meditation, and prayer, were her daily, hourly resource: her patience was exemplary, her sobriety of thought, deportment, and attire, were remarkable; and the mixture of wisdom with harmlessness gave rich promise in the eyes of those who witnessed the commencement of her course. is the fashion to sit severely in judgment upon this departed sovereign, and to stigmatize her as a perfect model of all that should be shunned: but have these ready censurers considered within themselves the probable effects of a lengthened exposure to such powerful temptations as environed this renowned woman, ere the morning of her days was past, and to the close of a long, glorious reign? We are fearfully presumptuous in thus judging others; and at a distance too of time and circumstance that disqualify us for the task, furnished as we are with little more than facts that have passed through the filtering and discolouring hands of men whose glory was their shame-scoffers at vital religion; haters and calum

niators of the Protestantism which Elizabeth was raised up to establish in these lands.

I do not enter the lists as her advocate: I pretend not to justify her proceedings in regard to the Scottish queen, or other matters where she was clearly blameable. Mary richly deserved her fate, stained as she was with the foulest crimes, and as bitterly hostile to pure religion as ever was her English namesake, but Elizabeth was not warranted in executing judgment on the crowned head of another; and I doubt not her having been secretly influenced as well by feelings of womanly envy, as by those of political expediency. God keep the rulers of this our England from the dictates of the latter! We live in days when the former can inflict comparatively slight public harm. In Elizabeth's time it was otherwise: inheriting not a little of her father's despotic temper, she firmly grasped the supremacy that he had boldly wrested from Rome; being, no doubt, the more tenacious of it, inasmuch as she felt its value. A queen whose girlish days had been passed in what we should now call severe tasks, whose reading was directed by a learned doctor of the sixteenth century, and her mind stored with whatever was most solid in human study, most elevating in spiritual, would have promised well for the people over whom she was to rule. But Elizabeth was doubly taught: what she had learned theoretically, she was called on both to contemplate and to exhibit practically. Darkness and light were spread before her, not merely on the pages of a book, but in their most awful manifestation, as displayed by the one party persecuting unto death those who, on the other side, freely gave their lives to the burning flame in testimony of what they and she

knew to be the truth. It was not hers to be called to this confession: and perhaps her trial was the greater. Immured in a prison which she knew to have been the very shambles of royalty, where her own mother had been butchered, and many others of her royal kin-unjustly taxed with political offences, conscious of the malign feeling that must needs exist in the daughter of Katherine of Arragon against the daughter of Anna Boleyn, and aware that she was by both parties regarded as the sole earthly hope of that which Mary laboured to crush-it was needful that she should reduce to practice those dictates of worldly prudence, and summon to her aid those maxims of sound philosophy, in which she was already well instructed by her wise preceptor. Thus, at the age of twenty-five she ascended the throne, with a character more formed and a mind more matured than could fairly be expected in the case of one, whether male or female, who had trifled away half a century upon the frivolities, or even the insubstantial acquirements of a shallower age.

Without a due share of seclusion, and the habits of deep unbroken thought that it is calculated to form and to foster, the character becomes weak, wavering and peurile. There is no concentration of mind: the attention, perpetually attracted by a succession of unconnected objects and topics, loses that energetic spring that would enable it promptly and steadily to fix on a given point, and there to remain until the occasion that called forth its energies ceased to exist. I can well imagine how the lonely hours passed by Elizabeth in conning her quaint manuscript treatise or black letter folio, or in pacing the narrow bounds of her dark-walled garden, con