he was put into the hands of an ignorant woman, who undertook in a little time to restore him to his former state of health. After the use of her medicines, all the bad symptoms increased to the most violent degree: he felt a difficulty of speech and breathing; his pulse failed, his legs swelled, his colour became livid; and many other symptoms appeared of his approaching end. He expired at Greenwich, July 6, 1553, in the sixteenth year of his age, and the seventh of his reign.

We have already alluded to MARY I as the most calumniated monarch in English history, and we could easily show that such is the fact; but the discussion would be here too long and out of place. Suffice it to say that the two great offences charged against her, the death of Lady Jane Grey, and the persecution for heresy may be thus explained. So far from hurrying the fate of Lady Jane Grey, who, be it remembered, was attainted according to strict course of law, Mary actually personally interfered with her Ministers to save her life, and after pardoning her father, the Duke of Suffolk, merely retained her under her sentence in the Tower. But Suffolk, regardless of the Queen's clemency, instantly raised another rebellion against her, and then it became a matter of salvation with Mary's government to allow the law to take its course against the unfortunate Jane. Mary was reluctant to the last, but she lived at a period when life was very easily sacrificed, and she was overpersuaded. As to the persecution, even without regard to the gross exaggeration of the real facts, it was owing not to the Queen, but to the bloody nature of the religious contest then going on. Toleration was unknown at the time to Catholic or Protestant: both sides preached and practised the burning of their opponents, and hundreds upon hundreds became the miserable victims of a polemic fury which profaned christianity and religion. These dreadful burnings commenced more than a century and a half before Queen Mary's reign. The law which sanctioned them was an act of Henry IV, and his son the great Henry V, whose memory is held so dear, put it often in force. Numbers perished by fire under Henry VIII and Edward VI, and other succeeding kings. Burning, as a punishment, was not actually abolished until the reign of George III. A woman named Catherine Hayes was burnt alive in 1726, for the murder of her husband, the crime being deemed petty treason. The real truth why the horrid custom is more noticed during Mary's rule is, that she, like Richard III, was succeeded by enemies, whose object was to amplify and extend every accusation against her. The persecution was the cruel madness of the age, and should no more be ascribed to Mary, than the executions of witches, which happened in his reign, to Charles II. But our subject lies with the death and not the life of Mary. Her reign was as short as it was sad.

Her health had always been delicate; from the time of her first supposed pregnancy she was afflicted with frequent and obstinate maladies. Tears no longer afforded her relief from the depression of her spirits; and the repeated loss of blood, by the advise of her physicians, had rendered her pale, languid, and emaciated. Nor was her mind more at ease than her body. The exiles from Geneva, by the number and virulence of their libels, threatening her life, kept her in a constant state of fear and irritation; and to other causes of anxiety, had been added the insalubrity of the season and the loss of Calais. In August she experienced a slight febrile indisposition at Hampton Court, and immediately removed to St. James's. It was soon ascertained that her disease was the same fever which had proved fatal to thousands of her subjects; and, though she languished for three months,

with several alterations of improvement and relapse, she never recovered sufficient to leave her chamber. During this long confinement, Mary edified all around her by her piety, and her resignation to the will of Providence. On the morning of her death, Mass was celebrated in her chamber. She was perfectly sensible, and expired a few minutes before the conclusion, on the 17th November, 1558. Her friend and kinsman, Cardinal Pole, who had long been confined with a fever, survived her only twenty-two hours. He had reached his fifty-ninth, she her forty

second year.

One proof of the fierceness of the feeling raised against Mary, is that no credit is given to her for an exclamation with regard to the loss of Calais, which she made on her death bed, and which evinced how acutely she felt aught that diminished the greatness of England. "The name

of Calais" she said "will be found engraven on my heart, when I am dead." Mary is the only sovereign of the house of Tudor, who committed no act of private atrocity, and yet, in history, even her father's reputation compared to hers, is fair and good to see.

The great Queen ELIZABETH, lost, at the hour of death, that courage and fortitude which so characterised her life: yet, unlike her father, she did give proof that she possessed a conscience. Passion or policy had led her to perpetrate many cruelties. The murder of poor Mary Stuart is the worst crime recorded, on clear testimony, against the crown of England; and one cannot but view as a natural consequence the dying terrors of the guilty party, even though a person as sagacious, and as strong minded as Elizabeth really was. The fairest, and most graphic account of this mighty sovereign's demise, is that given by Lingard, who, however, rejects as apocryphal the well known story of the ring, said to have been sent by the Earl of Essex through the Countess of Nottingham, to Elizabeth, but not delivered by the Countess, who revealed her treachery on her death bed. According to Dr. Lingard, the termination of the Queen's life is thus reported.

Elizabeth had surprised the nations of Europe by the splendour of her course she was destined to close the evening of her life in gloom and sorrow. The bodily infirmities which she suffered may have been the conquences of age; her mental afflictions are usually traced by historians to egret for the execution of Essex. That she occasionally bewailed his fate, that she accused herself of precipitation and cruelty, is not improbable: but there were disclosures in his confession, to which her subsequent melancholy may with great probability be ascribed. From that document she learned the unwelcome and distressing truth, that she had lived too long; that her favourites looked with impatience to the moments which would free them from her control; and that the very men on whose loyalty she had hitherto reposed with confidence, had already proved unfaithful to her. She became pensive and taciturn; she sate whole days by herself, indulging in the most gloomy reflections; every rumour agitated her with new and imaginary terrors; and the solitude of her court, the opposition of the commons to her prerogative, and the silence of the citizens when she appeared in public, were taken by her for proofs that she had survived her popularity, and was become an object of aversion to her subjects. Under these impressions, she assured the French ambassador that she had grown weary of her very existence.

Sir John Harrington, her godson, who visited the court about seven months after the death of Essex, has described, in a private letter, the state

in which he found the Queen. She was altered in her features, and reduced to a skeleton. Her food was nothing but manchet bread and succory pottage. Her taste for dress was gone. She had not changed her clothes for many days. Nothing could please her; she was the torment of the ladies who waited on her person. She stamped with her feet, and swore violently at the objects of her anger. For her protection she had ordered a sword to be placed by her table, which she often took in her hand, and thrust with violence into the tapestry of her chamber. About a year later Sir John returned to the palace, and was admitted to her presence. "I found her," he says, "in a most pitiable state. She bade the Archbishop ask me, if I had seen Tyrone. I replied, with reverence, that I had seen him with the Lord Deputy. She looked up with much choler and grief in her countenance, and said, ' O, now it mindeth me, that you was one who saw this man elsewhere;' and hereat she dropped a tear, and smote her bosom. She held in her hand a golden cup, which she often put to her lips: but, in truth, her heart seemed too full to need more filling."

In January she was troubled with a cold, and about the end of the month removed, on a wet and stormy day, from Westminster to Richmond. Her indisposition increased: but, with her characteristic obstinacy, she refused the advice of her physicians. Loss of appetite was accompanied with lowness of spirits, and to add to her distress, it chanced that her intimate friend, the Countess of Nottingham, died. Elizabeth now spent her days and nights in sighs and tears; or, if she condescended to speak, she always chose some unpleasant and irritating subject; the treason and execution of Essex, or the reported project of marrying the Lady Arabella into the family of Lord Hertford, or the war in Ireland and the pardon of Tyrone. In the first week of March all the symptoms of her disorder were considerably aggravated: she lay during some hours in a state of stupour, rallied for a day or two, and then relapsed. The council, having learned from the physicians that her recovery was hopeless, prepared to fulfil their engagements with the King of Scots, by providing for his peaceable succession to the throne. The Lord Admiral, the Lord Keeper, and the Secretary, remained with the Queen at Richmond: the others repaired to Whitehall. Orders were issued for the immediate arrest and transportation to Holland of all vagrants and unknown persons found in London or Westminster; a guard was posted at the exchequer; the great horses were brought up from Reading; the court was supplied with arms and ammunition; and several gentlemen, "hunger-starved for innovation," and therefore objects of suspicion, were conveyed prisoners to the Tower.

The Queen, during the paroxysms of her disorder, had been alarmed at the frightful phantoms conjured up by her imagination. At length she obstinately refused to return to her bed; and sate both day and night on a stool bolstered up with cushions, having her finger in her mouth and her eves fixed on the floor, seldom condescending to speak, and rejecting every offer of nourishment. The bishops and the lords of the council advised and entreated in vain. For them all, with the exception of the Lord Admiral, she expressed the most profound contempt. He was of her own blood: from him she consented to accept a basin of broth but when he urged her to return to her bed, she replied that, if he had seen what she saw there, he would never make the request. To Cecil, who asked her if she had seen spirits, she answered, that it was an idle question beneath her notice. He insisted that she must go to bed, if it were only to satisfy her people. Must sl exclaimed, is must a word to be addressed to Princes?

:

Little man, little man, thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have used that word: but thou art grown presumptuous because thou knowest that I shall die." Ordering the others to depart, she called the Lord Admiral to her, saying in a piteous tone," my Lord, I am tied with an iron collar about my neck." He sought to console her, but she replied, "no: I am tied, and the case is altered with me."

At the commencement of her illness the Queen had been heard to say that she would leave the Crown to the right heir: it was now deemed advisable to elicit from her a less equivocal declaration on behalf of the King of Scots. On the last night of her life the three lords waited upon her; and, if we may believe the report circulated by their partisans, received a favourable answer. But the maid of honour who was present has left us a very different tale. According to her narrative the persons first mentioned to the Queen by the Lords were the King of France and the King of Scotland. The Queen neither spoke nor stirred. The third name was that of the Lord Beauchamp. At the sound her spirit was roused; and she hastily replied, "I will have no rascal's son in my seat." They were the last words which she uttered. She relapsed into a state of insensibility, and at three the next morning tranquilly breathed her last. This occurred on the 24th March, 1603, in the seventieth year of her age and the forty-sixth of her reign. By six o'clock the same day, the lords from Richmond joined those in London; and a resolution was taken to proclaim James as heir to the Queen, both by proximity of blood and by her own appointment on her death-bed.

Providence points out an awe-inspiring lesson in the deaths of the three principal Sovereigns of the house of Tudor-Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth. Unvarying prosperity had attended them while living the avarice of the one, the luxury of the other, and the ambition of the third, had been gratified even to their utmost hope: their cups of vicious desires had overflowed the brim, and yet, when dying how utterly miserable they were! What objects of wretchedness and horror did they become when the hand of God fell upon them! The peasant, nay the meanest of mankind-the very beggar whose soul might perhaps have to wing its flight from a dunghill-would have shrunk in terror from regal felicity such as theirs, coupled with such conclusions. The words of the sacred orator we have quoted above are, if ever, to have signification here. Men should indeed learn moderation when they know how these Tudor monarchs died.

MODERN SPANISH ROMANCE.

SPAIN, how art thou fallen! Thou who but a few hundred years ago stoodst in the very front of Europe,-the conqueror and civilised ruler of vast nations that had oceans between them; thou, the arbiter of all chivalry, rank, gentility, courtesy, and refinement ;-a potentate, too, in literature, without which no nation can be great,-the works of thy Calderon, and De Vega, and Cervantes, the delight and talk of the universe. Thus, indeed, thou wast; and what art thou now?

O what a noble state is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword:

Th' expectancy and rose of the fair world,

The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,

Th' observ'd of all observers! quite, quite down!

A horrid civil warfare, which, since the period of the contest for the succession in the beginning of the last century, down to the present time, has continued to rage with scarcely an interval of peace, proves even more detrimental to the literary than to the political greatness of Spain. Writing, beyond the bombastic and virulent articles in the newspapers, and some trashy publications, such as tales and novels, contemptible in style and subject, appears now obsolete in this devoted country. Yet this is nowise owing to the mental incapability of the people of Spain. The natural characteristics of dignified thought, brilliant and varied imagination, and ready humour, remain as strong as ever. But it is the war, and, we maintain, the war alone, which effects this intellectual desolation. In strong proof of such being the case, the romances to which we are now going to allude, and which are the only two that do credit to recent letters in Spain, were brought out at times when peace shed momentary and flickering rays of its benign influence over the land of Castile. The first of these in priority of publication is "El Conde Candespina, Novela historica original," which issued from the press of Madrid in 1832. Its author is Don Patricio de la Escosura, then an alferez or ensign of artillery in the royal guard. This romance, though, as may easily be supposed, inferior to similar contemporary productions in this country, or in France or Germany, is a tale of no inconsiderable merit. The language is good, the characters are very well drawn, many of the scenes are lively, and the whole has an agreeable tone of nationality. The story dates at the beginning of the twelfth century: it is founded upon the fierce dissensions of Urraca, Queen of Castile and Leon, and her second husband, Alfonso, King of Arragon. The hero of the narrative, Don Gomez, Conde de Candespina, had loved Urraca prior to this unfortunate second marriage, and had been recommended, although unsuccessfully by the assembled nobility of the kingdom, as a consort for the heiress Urraca, more agreeable to her future subjects than a foreigner. During her miserable wedlock with the King of Arragon, Don Gomez is her faithful and zealous cavalier, repeatedly delivering her from Don Alfonso's tyranny; he, however, conceals his undying passion until after her divorce on the