governor of England and Ireland. Camden says that the letters patent were already drawn, when Burghley and Hatton interfered, and put a stop to the matter. Of the foreign princes that have been mentioned, the Archduke Charles persisted longest in his suit: a serious negotiation took place on the subject of the match in 1567, but it came to nothing. In 1571 proposals were made by Catherine de Medicis for a marriage between Elizabeth and her son Charles IX., and afterwards in succession with her two younger sons, Henry, Duke of Anjou (afterwards Henry III.), and Francis, Duke of Alençon (afterwards Duke of Anjou). The last match was again strongly pressed some years after; and in 1581 the arrangement for it had been all but brought to a conclusion, when, at the last moment, Elizabeth drew back, declining to sign the marriage articles after she had taken up the pen for the purpose. Very soon after the death of Leicester the young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, whose mother Leicester had married, was taken into the same favour that had been so long enjoyed by the deceased nobleman; and his tenure of the royal partiality lasted, with some intermissions, till he destroyed himself by his own hot-headedness and violence. He was executed for a frantic attempt to excite an insurrection against the government in 1601. Elizabeth, however, never recovered from this shock; and she may be said to have sealed her own sentence of death in signing the death-warrant of Essex.

Both the personal character of Elizabeth and the character of her government have been estimated very differently by writers of opposite parties. That she had great qualities will hardly be disputed by any one who duly reflects on the difficulties of the position she occupied, the consummate policy and success with which she directed her course through the dangers that beset her on all sides, the courage and strength of heart that never failed her, the imposing attitude she maintained in the eyes of foreign nations, and the admiration and pride of which she was the object at home. She was undeniably endowed with great good sense, and with a true feeling

of what became her place. The weaknesses, and also the more forbidding features of her character, on the other hand, are so obvious as scarcely to require to be specified. Many of the least respectable mental peculiarities of her own sex were mixed in her with some of the least attractive among those of the other. Her selfishness and her vanity were both intense-and of the sympathetic affections and finer sensibilities of every kind she was nearly destitute.

Her literary knowledge was certainly very considerable; but of her compositions (a few of which are in verse) none are of much value. nor evidence any very superior ability, with the exception perhaps of some of her speeches to the parliament. A list of the pieces attributed to her may be found in Walpole's 'Royal and Noble Authors.'

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There has been a good deal of controversy as to the proportion in which the elements of liberty and despotism were combined in the English constitution, or in the practice of the government, in the reign of Elizabeth the object of one party being to convict the Stuarts of deviating into a new course in those exertions of the prerogative and that resistance to the popular demands which led to the civil wars of the seventeenth century, of the other, to vindicate them from that charge, by showing that the previous government of Elizabeth had been as arbitrary as theirs. Upon this question the reader may consult the elaborate exposition with which Hume closes his account of this reign, along with the remarks upon it in the Introduction to Mr. Brodie's History of the British Empire, from the Accession of Charles I. to the Restoration.' There can be no doubt that the first James and the first Charles pursued their object with much less art, and much less knowledge and skill in managing the national character, as well as in less advantageous circumstances, than Elizabeth and her ministers; they did not know nearly so well when to resist and when to yield as she did; but it may notwithstanding be reasonably questioned if her notion of the rightful supremacy of the crown was very different

from theirs. However constitutional also (in the modern sense of the term) may have been the general course of her government, her occasional practice was certainly despotic enough. She never threw aside the sword of the prerogative, although she may have usually kept it in its scabbard.

Her reign, however, take it all in all, was a happy as well as a glorious one for England. The kingdom, under her government, acquired and maintained a higher and more influential place among the states of Europe, principally by policy, than it had ever been raised to by the most successful military exertions of former ages. Commerce flourished and made great advances, and wealth was much more extensively and more rapidly diffused among the body of the people than at any former period. It is the feeling of progress, rather than any degree of actual attainment, that keeps a nation in spirits; and this feeling every thing conspired to keep alive in the hearts of the English in the age of Elizabeth; even the remembrance of the stormy times of their fathers, from which they had escaped, lending its aid to heighten the enjoyment of the present calm. To these happy circumstances of the national condition was owing, above all, and destined to survive all their other products, the rich native literature, more especially in poetry and the drama, which now rushed up, as if from the tillage of a virgin soil, covering the land with its perennial fruit and flowers. Spenser and Shakspere, Beaumont and Fletcher, Raleigh and Bacon, and many other distinguished names gained their earliest celebrity in the Elizabethan age.