"Besides all this, he had upon the pool a Triton, riding on a mermaid eighteen feet long; as, also, Arion on a dolphin, with rare music. And, to honour this entertainment the more, there were then knighted here, Sir Thomas Cecill, son and heir to the lord treasurer, Sir Henry Cobham, Sir Francis Stanhope, and Sir Thomas Tresham. The cost and expense whereof may be guessed at by the quantity of beer then drunk, which amounted to three hundred and twenty hogsheads of the ordinary sort, as I have credibly heard."*

* Hist. of Warwickshire, Dugdale, Thomas's edit. p. 236. One of the last specimens of old English hospitality, upon this princely scale, was exhibited at that magnificent mansion, Longleat, in the late Marquis of Bath's time. When Lord Chancellor Thurlow (the Marquis's particular friend) paid him a visit, the choice party was so large, that one hundred persons sat down daily to dinner in the servants' hall; and the contents of an enormous cask of strongbeer containing several hundred hogsheads, were sunk every day one inch.

Biographical Illustrations.

QUEEN ELIZABETH.

It is a matter of regret, though not of surprise, that the admiration, respect, and regard of the generality of mankind should be engaged by the exhibition of splendid qualities and specious virtues, rather than by the manifestation of those amiable, gentle, and useful graces which constitute the real excellence of the human character. The former recommend themselves to our passions and imagination; they are glaring, noisy, and overwhelming; they take, as it were, the mind by storm while the latter, retiring and un

pretending, appeal silently and modestly to our reason and affections alone. The former pursue their course like the torrent, and catch the fancy by their roar and glitter, though their course be chiefly marked by the destruction which it produces; the latter, like the humble rill, are almost hidden as they steal along, and can be traced only in the fertility and beauty which they spread around. The truth of these remarks is confirmed by the personal character and actions of the larger proportion of those personages whom the page of history has most eulogised; and when heroes, politicians, and famous princes, are tried and appreciated by the principles of religion, reason, and stern morality, they will be found to be "far below the good," and to have ill merited that admiration and celebrity which consecrate their memory.* We cannot

- but think that our own Elizabeth furnishes an example of this undeserved enjoyment of

"If the virtues of patriots and heroes," says Granger, were abstracted from vanity and ambition, they would shrink into a very narrow compass; unmixed virtues are almost as rare as unmixed substances."--Biog. Hist. vol. iii. page 6.

praise and esteem; and that the popularity which she boasted when living, and the respect which has since rested upon her name, have arisen entirely from an undue estimation of certain bold and broad features of her personal character, calculated to surprise and impose upon the imagination, rather than from any virtue of a private or public nature which she actually possessed. That she had great talents and numerous acquirements, cannot be denied. A sound judgment, also, and clear discrimination, when not weakened by partiality, or obscured by passion; a singular promptness of decision, and a rare firmness of resolve, when her affections were not interested in the result; an unequalled boldness of spirit, a cool confidence in the hour of danger, an unshaken endurance under adverse events, and a praiseworthy moderation amid prosperous circumstances, will readily be conceded to her but here her panegyric must close. Foibles and vices make up the remainder of her character; and the private and personal history of Elizabeth, after she assumed the sceptre, is filled with so many acts of

weakness and oppression, baseness and malignity, as oblige us to doubt either the honesty or moral discrimination of her numerous contemporary and posthumous eulogists.

The period of this extraordinary woman's life most favourable to her character (with one fatal exception) was, unquestionably, that which intervened between the death of her father and her elevation to the throne. It was the period of her exercising, in the best and most striking way, that courage, energy, and fortitude, with which she was so highly gifted, and which enabled her to meet, with coolness and dignity, the slights, and insults, and personal dangers, to which she was then exposed. It was the period, also, in which, amid difficulties and alarms, her intellectual powers were most sedulously cultivated, and all her scholastic acquirements obtained; in which we find her, at one time, prosecuting her deep and earnest studies under her tutor, Roger Ascham, and, at another, exercising the duties of the reformed faith in opposition to a Popish court, or reasoning with the subtle Gardiner on her sister's injustice towards her, and resolutely