a skin far more amiable than the features it covered, though not the disposition, in which report rendered her ' very debonair.' Other equally good witnesses confirm Bentivoglio's account. Her great passion is for balls and public entertainments, which she herself arranges, and 'which serve as a public theatre on which to display her grace and beauty.' For this she acted goddesses, negresses, and nereids, and displayed herself as the Indian princess or the Turkish sultana.

Thus she had arranged that pageant in Jonson's fine Masque of Queens wherein twelve ladies were exhibited sitting on a throne in the form of a pyramid, eleven of whom represented the highest and most heroical of queens that had ever existed, and the twelfth was Anne, in propriâ personâ, to whom the poor needy poet gives the name of Belanna, and who is unanimously chosen by the other queens to form the apex of their pyramid, as possessing in her single person all the virtues wherewith it had been the glory of each to be separately adorned! At the suggestion of her peculiar taste, too, Jonson introduced into his masque of Blackness twelve Ethiopian nymphs, daughters of the Niger, who have come all the way to Britain (as the country now begins to be called) in search of a wash to whiten their complexions, and who have nothing to do but shew their blackened negress-faces, and dance. Sir Dudley Carleton received an invitation to the latter masque, and one or two facts from his account of it may shew us what the thing generally was. This exhibition took place in the banqueting-house at Whitehall; and the first thing you saw on entering the room was a great engine at the lower end which had motion, and in which were the images of sea-horses with other terrible fishes, that were ridden by Moors. The indecorum was, adds sir Dudley, that there was all fish and no water. But now you saw near these harmless dragons a great shell in the form of a scallop, wherein were four benches; on the lowest of which sat the queen with my lady Bedford, while on the rest were placed the ladies Suffolk, Derby, Rich, Effingham, Ann Herbert, Susan Herbert, Elizabeth Howard, Walsingham, and Bevil.

'Their appearance was rich,' says sir Dudley, 'but too light ' and courtesan-like for such great ones. Instead of vizards, 'their faces and arms up to the elbows were painted black.' This specimen will be enough; though the close of sir Dudley's letter, and of the monstrous exhibition it describes, ought not to be omitted. The night's work was concluded 'with a banquet in the great chamber, which was so furi'ously assaulted that down went the tables and tressels 'before one bit was touched.' Another letter-writer of the time enables us to complete this picture of lumbering and ill-arranged profuseness, of tasteless yet almost barbaric extravagance. The show is put off till Sunday, by reason 'all things are not ready. Whatever the device may be, ' and what success they may have in their dancing, yet you 'should have been sure to have seen great riches in jewels, 'when one lady, and that under a baroness, is said to be 'furnished for better than a hundred thousand pounds. And the Lady Arabella goes beyond her; and the queen 'must not come behind.'

Nevertheless, let it be said of even such entertainments as these, that the occasions which for the most part they commemorated deserved yet more degrading celebration. The two marriages of lady Frances Howard, for example, pollute the memory of every thing and every one connected with them. Seven years after the queen and court had been dragged to the unseemly nuptials of two children of twelve and fourteen (Frances Howard and the earl of Essex), brought about by the king's desire, and celebrated by the poetry of Jonson; the same party were assembled to that marriage of the same Frances Howard, now divorced from lord Essex, with her notorious paramour Carr, the new-created earl of Somerset, which had for its poets Francis Bacon and Mr. Campion, and for its sequel, in less than three years, a trial in Westminster Hall, and the conviction of both bride and bridegroom as attainted murderers. The story of the rise and career of Carr, and his connexion with James, will not bear other than very casual allusion in these pages. With the death of Cecil in 1612 the king lost a restraint that had perhaps unconsciously interposed itself

as a check to his lusts of favouritism; for though the Ramsays, Hays, Humes, and Marrs, had managed very successfully to fatten on his weakness and vices, it is not till Cecil has disappeared that we get sight of the Somersets and Buckinghams. Carr was a poor but handsome young Scotchman, straight-limbed, well-favoured, strong-shoul'dered, and smooth-faced,' when the king's eye fell upon him. He attended him at his rooms in illness, taught him Latin, made him within a few weeks a knight, a lord-treasurer, a viscount, a knight of the garter, and an earl; and taught the highest nobles of his court to veil their coronets before him, and its best-born and most handsome women to cater for his smiles. When Carr and the king appeared together, according to lord Thomas Howard, the king was to be seen leaning on his arm, pinching his cheek, smoothing his ruffled garment, and, while directing his discourse to divers others, still looking at Carr. He beggared the best to enrich him; and when the wife of Raleigh knelt at his feet to implore him not to make destitute the hero he had imprisoned, James spurned her from him with the words, I mun ha' the land! I mun ha' it for Carr!' On the eve of Carr's disgrace, and when they were about to part for ever, the king is described, by one who was present, to have hung lolling about his neck and slabbered his cheeks with kisses, 'at the stayres' head, at the middle of 'the stayres, and at the stayres' foot.' Nor, when the reign of the wretched minion was over, did the exhibition of his

power with the sovereign cease. His life was spared, though a convicted murderer; and though his offices were taken from him, he received a pension of 4000l. a-year. Who can doubt that he was master of a secret which affected James's honour?

6

But what, meanwhile, was the opinion of their ruler becoming prevalent among the English people? An intelligent foreigner will describe it for us. Consider, for pity's sake,' says M. de Beaumont in one of his despatches, 'what must be the state and condition of a prince, whom 'the preachers publicly from the pulpit assail; whom the 'comedians of the metropolis covertly bring upon the stage;

whose wife attends these representations in order to enjoy 'the laugh against her husband; whom the parliament 'braves and despises; and who is universally hated by the 'whole people.' The Frenchman's great master, Henri, shortly before he fell by the hand of an assassin, had spoken of the effects of such contempt when directed against the person of a sovereign, as marvellous and horrible; and in this case also they proved so, though in another generation from his who had made himself so thoroughly despicable. 'Audacious language,' pursues M. de Beaumont, 'offensive pictures, calumnious pamphlets, these usual forerunners of 'civil war, are common here, and are symptoms doubly 'strong of the bitter temper of men's minds; because in this country men are in general better regulated, or by the ' good administration of justice are more kept within the sphere of their duties.' Be it in justice added that the assertion in the same despatches that the queen had been using all her efforts to corrupt the mind of the prince by flattering his passions, and diverting him from his studies and exercises, out of contempt to his father, does not appear to be well founded. An heir apparent, in truth, wants no such teaching. From the experience of all history, we may call it his normal state to be in full opposition to the sovereign. The extravagant recklessness of James, who, before the prince was twelve years old, had surrounded him with an establishment more than sufficient for a sovereign, gave in this instance more effect to the hostility; but in itself it was only natural. As James's cowardly instincts were all for peace, Henry's flushed forth into passionate eagerness for war. As James lived upon the sight of Carr, Henry hated him so bitterly that the favourite was charged, and upon no mean evidence, with the prince's premature death. As James imprisoned Raleigh and laughed at his pursuits, Henry visited him in his prison, proclaimed every where sympathy and admiration for him, got him to write upon subjects in which he was interested and carried him materials for his History of the World. 'What!' was James's frequent comment on this wilful independence of his heir; will he bury me alive?' That, apart from what his position induced, however, the

prince had also worthy dispositions, all authorities seem to agree; and without doubting that the popular regret for his death was hyperbolical, and found vent in the bewailing of expectations that would never have been realised, it is as little possible to question that mere ordinary accomplishments, however high the rank that recommended them, could not have moved so general and so sincere a sorrow. Raleigh wept for him as his only friend; Drayton and Sylvester, whom he had pensioned, had good reason to mourn for him; Browne, Donne, and Ben Jonson made pathetic tributes to his virtues; Heywood and Webster offered earnest elegies; and old Chapman bewails in the prince his most dear and heroical patron.' The only disrespect to his memory was evinced by his father. 'His majesty,' says the prince's chamberlain, being unwilling and unable to stay so near the gates of sorrow, ' removed to Theobalds to wait there the event.' words, he never visited his son on his death-bed. Nor was this all. He forbade the wearing of court-mourning; and had the indecency, within three days after the death, to direct sir Thomas Edmondes at Paris to continue to negotiate poor Henry's marriage-treaty, only substituting the name of Charles. It requires great charity to believe that James disapproved of the crime imputed to Somerset, even though himself no party to it.

In other

The queen, on the other hand, is said to have shed bitter tears; but to have found relief in the preparations and masquings that soon after began, for celebrating the marriage of her daughter with the count palatine of Bohemia. Elizabeth and Charles were now her only children. Two daughters had been born to her since her arrival in England (on the 7th April 1605, and the 22d June 1606), but both, after being christened respectively Mary and Sophia, had died in infancy. With this exception, and a suspected but very innocent flirtation with the young lord Herbert of Cherbury, her life presents few things more that are noticeable. Its general tenor of business and entertainment has been very fully presented to the reader. To offer more details would be to run the same circle of court-occu