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ELIZABETH WOODVILLE.

VERY attractive episode in the regal annals of Eng

land, particularly to minds of a romantic and imaginative cast, is the story of portionless Elizabeth Woodville, whose "charming figure, fair skin, golden hair, timid beseeching eyes, and soft caressing manners," subdued, whilst she was yet in her teens (amongst other conquests of less mark), and held in indissoluble thrall, the stout heart of valiant Sir Hugh Johns, Knight Marshal of England and France; obtained for her in first nuptials the hand of handsome Sir John Gray, heir to the Earl of Ferrers of Groby, and dashing commander of the Lancastrian Queen Margaret's Cavalry; and finally, when their possessor was more than thirty years of age, the widow of a slain rebel, and mother of two children, compelled King Edward to her feet, a suppliant for the favour of her whose agitating glances and caressing tones won for her a Crown, whilst pleading timidly in behalf of her sons for restoration of the estate forfeited by their father for his unswerving resistance to the pretensions of the House of York; pretensions at length triumphant in the person of the gay and youthful monarch, who, moreover, at the very moment the magical spell of the charming widow's grace and beauty was cast over him, was the affianced suitor of the Princess Bona of Savoy, sister of the Queen of France! Dazzling evidence this of the potency of feminine fascination-a fascination which, in this particular instance, ceased only with the else volatile, capricious husband's life. Then indeed the night of

life fell suddenly-blank, starless, total eclipse, upon its yet glaring summer-noon. In these pages we do not accompany her so far, nor is it needful to the moral teachings of her varied story that we should do so, a sinister catastrophe being clearly presaged by the insolence of power, the allgrasping merciless ambition that not only precedes and prepares a fall, but deepens calamity to despair, which had clearly taken unresisted possession of the mind of Elizabeth Woodville, at the same moment that her eager hand clutched the sceptre, her flushed temples throbbed beneath the pressure of the crown-matrimonial of England.

Elizabeth Woodville's mother was a Frenchwoman, Jaqueline of Luxembourg, who having buried her first English husband, the Duke of Bedford, selected for her second marriage-mate Sir Richard Woodville, of Grafton, Northamptonshire, and reputedly the handsomest man in England. This union, contracted with indecent haste, was not made public till five years after. Their eldest child, Elizabeth, the future queen, was probably born in 1431; and so indignant were the members of the House of Luxembourg at the mésalliance contracted by their relative, that not one of them would visit her in England, or receive her in France, till Elizabeth's marriage with Edward IV.—a circumstance which effected an immediate and thorough revolution in their ideas upon the subject. Jaqueline the wife of an English commoner of slender estate, and Jaqueline the mother of the Queen of England, were obviously two very different personages; and thoroughly impressed with the spirit of the advice given to his son by a dispossessed Lancastrian nobleman, "to, if possible, marry nigh to the Queen's blood, so that he might be sure to get his land again," they hurried over in hot haste to reknit the sundered bond of