influence, and often mortified their self-esteem by lavishing, at the same time, even exaggerated marks of favour on a set of rivals wholly inferior to them in ability and character, but at the same time the representatives of feelings and prejudices which had no little hold on a part of the nation; and which were kept in order and satisfied by this specious representation in Court circles. And although Burghley was in the main a sagacious and rightminded statesman, it was well for England that Elizabeth never dropped the reins of power into his hands; for, with all his merits, he was still the head of a party and the representative of fixed ideas; and party spirit was then the great internal danger of England, and a too stereotyped policy almost as great an external disability. It was not Cecil, but Elizabeth, who, by her subtle and delusive policy, held Philip in her leading-strings, until the time had come when he was compelled to make his great effort against her, under circumstances which, if still very encouraging, were infinitely less so than they had been at any epoch since her accession to the English throne.

Of the better known qualities of Elizabeth I have little need to speak in detail. Her personal vanity, -so open as to be more like a curious affectation than a real weakness-with its amusing and characteristic preference of praise for the youth and beauty which she had not, to a just meed of admiration for

the dignity and grace which she really possessed. Her royal bearing, which was so greatly aided by a stately person, a keen, piercing eye, and an aquiline nose in full harmony with her imperial cast of features. Her urbanity to all classes, the spell which she threw over such spirits as Raleigh and Sydney, and the somewhat rough and boisterous greetings with which she encountered the coarser mother-wit and propitiated the good-will of the lower orders. Her woman's nature so complete and so conspicuous in itself, and yet married to a mind so masculine and so sardonic! The Parliamentary records tell how she could manage a House of Commons nearly as easily as an individual Minister, recognising its place in the Constitution, but ruling its insurrectional energies with a skilful alternation of the curb and the loose rein. But, as in her foreign and general policy, the result is the best proof of the judgment and tact of the means employed. What Sovereign, except one of great intellectual ascendancy, could have evoked at the close of so long a reign, from representative men who felt and thought so differently from her on so many delicate points, that outburst of enthusiastic loyalty and grateful confidence which crowned the last session of her last Parliament ?

Elizabeth presents a character against which much may be said with justice in particulars, and regarding which, as a whole, the verdict in respect of strict morality can scarcely be a favourable one.

X

But the main lines of the picture are firm and not unpleasing, and if virtue is to be measured by greatness of intention-if immorality of practice can be palliated in our judgment by the necessities of an almost unparalleled position of perplexity and danger-and if the disposition to good or to evil is measured by the opportunities offered and the temptations deliberately overcome, perhaps it will be considered that few Sovereigns have passed through such an ordeal, under such original disadvantages of education and peculiar disposition, with so little dishonour to themselves, and so much advantage to the country whose interests they were called upon to consult. to consult. But it is only through her intellectual greatness that we can understand and appreciate Elizabeth's morality such as it was; and it is only on an intellectual basis, using the term in its widest sense, that her reputation as one of the very greatest of English Sovereigns must, after all, be built up and established.

307

JAMES THE FIRST.

EVERY one who attempts to draw a picture of James Stuart must feel a great difficulty in the fact that a master-hand has anticipated him, and that after the remarkable portrait in Sir Walter Scott's 'Fortunes of Nigel,' any sketch by other hands must appear faint and colourless. All that I can do is to place before the reader the salient features of a character of which the popular mind has already a tolerably correct impression.

As to the more prominent and superficial characteristics of James, there can be little fear of going astray, either in the direction of caricature or flattery. These are to be gathered from the pages of nearly every writer of the period, and they are presented in unmistakable features under the hand of the King himself, in his printed works and in his familiar correspondence. All that there can be any hesitation or dispute about is whether certain ambiguous and questionable transactions have or have not a deeper moral significance, and do or do not imply a greater capability for evil. On these points.

however, the evidence we possess is so inadequate and so perplexing, that anyone in forming a decision must rely to a considerable extent on his favourable or unfavourable prepossessions, and it is more prudent to confine oneself to a statement of the difficulty, and to suspend a decided judgment.

James the Sixth of Scotland ascended the throne of England in the thirty-seventh year of his age. His character therefore, whatever it was, might in any case be supposed to have been fully matured, and events had in his case precipitated this development. Anything more unfavourable than the training of early circumstances which he underwent can hardly be imagined. The accredited child of a marriage terminated by a tragedy which has cast a deep stain of suspicion on the memory of one parent; with the taint of possible illegitimacy attaching itself to his own birth; at first the involuntary supplanter and then the successful rival of his own mother, he was from his earliest years placed in a position from which few characters, indeed, could have escaped without serious detriment, and from which his own peculiar character was especially likely to suffer. His sympathies, deprived by the necessities of his position of even the power of expansion afforded by the relations of the family circle, were from the first turned inwards on himself, and the domestic ties which he afterwards formed, as husband and father, implying deference to his superior wisdom and will,