6

believe in Paris,-how, then, are you to believe it at Lyons? a thing which makes everybody cry out, 'The Lord have mercy on us;' a thing which is to be done on Sunday, when those who see it will not believe their own eyes, and yet, perhaps, will not be finished till Monday. I cannot expect you to guess it at once. I give you three times to try. Do you give it up? Well, then, I must tell you. M. de Lauzun is to marry next Sunday, at the Louvre,―guess whom? I give you four times to guess it in, I give you six,-I give you a hundred times. Truly,' cries Madame de Coulanges, ‘a very difficult thing to guess. It is Madame de la Vallière ?' 'No, madam, it is not.' 'Mademoiselle de Retz, then?' 'No, it is not, madam; you are sadly provincial.' 'O, we are very stupid, no doubt, you say,—it is Mademoiselle Colbert?' 'Further off than ever.' 'Well, then, it must be Mademoiselle de Créqui?' 'You are not a jot nearer. Come, I see I must tell you at last. Well; M. de Lauzun marries next Sunday at the Louvre, with the king's permission, Mademoiselle-Mademoiselle de-Mademoiselle-guess the name: he marries Mademoiselle, the great Mademoiselle-Mademoiselle, the daughter of the late Monsieur-Mademoiselle, grand-daughter of Henry the Fourth-Mademoiselle d'Eu-Mademoiselle de Montpensier -Mademoiselle d'Orléans-Mademoiselle, cousin-german to the king-Mademoiselle, once destined to the throne-Mademoiselle, the only woman in France fit to marry Monsieur.' Here's news for your coteries. Exclaim about it as you will. Let it turn your heads; say we fib; that it is a pleasant joke; that it is tiresome; that we are a parcel of ninnies. You are welcome: we have done the same by others. Adieu: the letters by the post will show whether I have been speaking the truth or not."

Strange to say, the exquisite taste which guided her own pen was at fault in estimating the merits of contemporary writings. She greatly admired the De Scudery and La Fayette novels, and entertained a mean opinion of Racine's genius. "Racine and coffee," she used to say, "would go out together;" a dual prediction doubly falsified by experience; the popularity of coffee, first introduced in Racine's day, having however found wider extension than that of the author of Andromâque and Athalie. Racine's great dramatic power may be questioned, but as a poet of sentiment he is certainly equal to any France has at any time produced.

The final exit of this charming woman from the gay scenes which she adorned and daguerreotyped by her brilliant genius was through a loathsome portal. She was seized in her seventieth year, at the Château de Grignan, with virulent small-pox, died after a week's suffering, and her remains, refused sepulture in the vaults of the parish church, lest the effluvium therefrom might propagate the dreaded disease, were finally deposited in a deep fosse scooped out at the sanctuary end of the church and closely bricked up. This circumstance saved the tomb of Madame de Sévigné from violation at the hands of the grave-plundering ruffians of 1792, who, stimulated by their hatred of greatness,-which, whether intellectual or material, must be ever the sworn foe of 'Equality,'-and by the high price of lead, made bonfires of the coffined bones found in the church vaults, and the dust, consequently, of the gay and witty Frenchwoman still rests, unprofaned, beneath the tablet which records that

"Ci-gît

MARIE DE RABUTIN-CHANTAL,

MARQUISE DE SÉVIGNÉ,

Décédé le 18 Avril 1696."

104

ISABELLA OF CASTILE.

HE sovereign and the woman-majesty and mildness

THE

have never been more harmoniously blended than in Isabella of Castile, unquestionably the greatest monarch that ever sat upon the throne of Saint Ferdinand, not excepting the canonised king himself. At the birth, on the 22nd April, 1451, of this daughter of John the Second of Castile and Leon, Spain, Gothic, Christian Spain was mainly divided into the often rival kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, with their subordinate regal satellites; the Moslem invader, gradually chased, through seven centuries of desolating, implacable strife, to the mountains of Granada, was there zealously preparing himself for a final desperate effort to retain his hold of what yet remained to him of the vast peninsula once wholly subjected to his sway, with the exception of the hill-fastnesses of the Asturias; and the Councils of Castile and Aragon, composed for the most part of a haughty, soldier nobility, and the equally warlike prelates of the Spanish Church Militant, virtually ruled in the names of monarchs whom they claimed a right in certain exigencies, determinable by themselves, to degrade and depose. These sources of weakness, and provocations to anarchy and misrule, were immensely aggravated and envenomed by the succeeding reign of Isabella's elder half-brother, Henry the Fourth, rightly surnamed the Imbecile-fifteen years of civil discord and internecine strife, and yet, ascending a tottering and disputed throne-disputed both from within and without, by foreign levy and domestic faction—whilst

yet a girl in years, Isabella bore her high faculties with so much wisdom, courage, and prudence, that at her death the Spanish kingdom, become one by her marriage with Ferdinand, the heir of Aragon, and consequent union of the two crowns after a separation of four hundred years— was completely freed of its Moslem invaders,-the imperious nobles were firmly restricted to their high but subordinate position in the state; and by the rigorous administration of affairs, both at home and abroad, a spirit of resolute adventure and commercial enterprise was excited amongst the people which, had succeeding sovereigns inherited Isabella's prudence and judgment with the crown she had rendered illustrious and sacred, must have laid the foundations deep and broad of a national prosperity and progress, independent of and superior to the vicissitudes of foreign conflict and the criminal selfishness of dynastic ambition. The history of Isabella's reign would have been without spot had she not, in reluctant compliance with the zealot-seeming policy of her crafty husband, and the frenzied entreaties of Torquemada, yielded her hesitating assent to the establishment of the Inquisition; a fatal concession to the evil and violent spirit of the time,-(the consequences whereof were only fully developed after Isabella's death had rendered that hideous development possible),—than which nothing could be more utterly at variance with the generous spirit and policy of the patroness of Columbus, of the Queen who commanded her representatives to civilize and treat gently the poor Indians; of the Christian lady of whom Peter Martyr thus earnestly testified :-"I know of none of her sex in ancient or modern times who, in my judgment, is at all worthy to be named with this incomparable woman;" and scarcely requiring, therefore, the evidence of history to

prove that it was an act into which she was criminally betrayed by those upon whose authority and judgment she, in matters of conscience and religion, placed too high a value.

Isabella of Castile had English blood in her veins, being descended from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, whose daughter Catherine, by Pedro the Fourth's daughter Constancia, married Henry the Third of Castile. Her father, John the Second, had been twice married; first, to Maria of Aragon, by whom he left issue one son, afterwards Henry the Fourth; his second wife was Isabella of Portugal, by whom he had two children, Alphonso and the subject of this memoir, who was four years old only when the king, her father, died.

The ceremonies attendant upon the funeral of the late, and the accession of the new, king concluded, the queen-dowager withdrew with her daughter the infanta, to whom the town of Cuellar with its territory had been assigned for an inheritance, to the Convent of Arevalo, where the education of the princess was sedulously superintended by her mother. Spanish writers dwell with enthusiasm upon the beauty, dignity, and grace which distinguished Isabella even when a child; a royalty of nature which, according to them, indicated her as with the visible finger of destiny for the throne, whilst yet both her brothers and their possible descendants interposed between her and the Castilian crown. This prophetic anticipation, which appears to have been widely diffused, was the more eagerly caught up and repeated by the zealously catholic people of Spain, that the infanta was reputed to be as remarkable for piety and reverential regard for holy church as for personal advantages. The young Alphonso, though nearer to the succession, did not occupy