But, with whatever contempt we may regard the foibles, or however indignant we may feel at the harsher features of the character of Elizabeth, we can contemplate the close of her reign only with emotions of unmixed commiseration. Submission and adulation had offered all their satisfactions to her for nearly half a century; she had the respect of foreign courts, and popularity at home: pageantry, and pomp, and pleasure, had exhausted their arts to soothe her pride, and amuse her fancy; wherever she directed her eye, her look enlightened every countenance with a smile, and, in a literal sense, every knee was bent to do her homage. In the midst of this unexampled halcyon state of prosperity, her soul was converted into a land of desolation: she gradually became peevish, morose, and gloomy; sleep was banished from her eyelids, and peace from her bosom; she loathed her food, rejected medicine, and after a few weeks endurance of all the agonies of a "wounded spirit," unsolaced by recollections of the past, uncheered by hopes for the future, she drew her

last anguished sigh, on the twenty-fourth of March, 1603.

The following picture of her wretched state, at the close of her life, is transmitted to us by an eye-witness, Sir Robert Carey, afterwards Earl of Monmouth, a friend of the dying queen's, who had come to watch for the coneluding pang, that he might be the first to communicate the joyful intelligence to the Scottish King. This he effected, by slipping out of the chamber of death the moment after Elizabeth's expiration; and, at the risk of his neck, (for he had a terrible fall on the last day of his journey,) riding post from London to Edinburgh.*

"When I came to court, I found the queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her; I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety and health, which I wished might long continue. She shook me by the hand, and

* Memoirs of Sir Robert Carey, p. 54,et infra

wrung it hard, and said,

No, Robin, I am not well;' and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days; and in her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved, at the first, to see her in this plight; for in all my life time before, I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded.

"I used the best words I could to persuade her from this melancholy humour; but I found by her, it was too deep rooted in her heart, and hardly to be removed. This was on a Saturday night; and she gave commandment that the great closet should be prepared for her, to go to chapel the next morning. The next day, all things being in readiness, we long expected her coming. After eleven o'clock, one of the grooms came out, and bade make ready for the private closet; she would not go to the great. There we stayed long for her coming; but at the last she had cushions laid for her in the privy chamber, hard by the closet door, and there she heard service.

"From that day forwards she grew worse and worse. She remained upon her cushions four days and nights at the least. All about her could not persuade her either to take any sustenance, or to go to bed."

Historians and politicians have sought for the cause of this awful termination of Elizabeth's career in various external circumstances; such as, regret at her severity to Essex, and the discovery of his penitence by the token of the ring, which should have been delivered to her by the Countess of Nottingham; her secret anger at being obligated to pardon Tyrone; or the keen mortification with which the intrigues of her courtiers and ministers with James of Scotland corroded her bosom : but the christian philosopher will probably attribute her "mind diseased" to another origin-to the "rooted sorrow of a "memory," which dwelt on many an act of foulness and of tyranny; and to "the written troubles of a brain," that could well exercise itself in the comparison between duty and action; in the reflection of how much had been bestowed, and how little had been effected; and in the

calculation of chances for and against the enjoyment of that final state of bliss, "where only the righteous shall shine as the firmament of heaven, and as the stars, for ever and ever."

ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER.

It is a very interesting feature in the novel of Kenilworth, that it introduces the reader to nearly all the remarkable characters of the court of Elizabeth; and clothes the puppets with so much circumstantiality, ́as makes them almost objects of vision as well as of reflection. The men who awed Europe, and at the same time shrunk under the frown of their own queen, are ranged before us in their real stature, persons, dress, and manners; and we regret, or admire, their servility in the presence, and weaknesses or high-mindedness, when for a moment they escape from it, as intensely as if we had mingled personally in the gorgeous group. Of these characters,