are told by poets of her poetical taste and appreciation, and by philosophers of her metaphysical acumen, is to be accepted cum grano. Her own life may be philosophy teaching by example, to some admirers,-Voltaire, for instance, who, nil admirari put by for the nonce, so emphatically admires a sovereign who "crut qu'il valait mieux vivre avec des hommes qui pensent, que de commander à des hommes sans lettres ou sans génie."* But, as Mr. Grote, the historian of Greece, observes, in his account of the liaison between Plato and Dionysius,-to admire philosophy in its distinguished teachers is one thing; to learn and appropriate it is another stage, rarer and more difficult, requiring assiduous labour and no common endowments; while that which Plato calls the "philosophical life," or practical predominance of a well-trained intellect and well-chosen ethical purposes, combined with the minimum of personal appetite-is a third stage, higher and rarer still. Whether Christina, any more than the Sicilian tyrant two thousand years before, had advanced beyond the first stage, admits a doubt. Like Dionysius, however, she dearly loved to have a philosopher about her-to talk with, dispute with, perhaps to scold. She liked the society of men of mark, and cared for no other. "I had early an antipathy," she declares, “to all that women do and say." But to get celebrities of the masculine gender into her company, and to assert her influence over them, and watch its operation, was delightful. Algernon Sydney, for example, from our own shores, whom she met at Hamburg in 1660, and captivated not a little during the long conversations they had together; or Bishop Burnet, with whom she was very facetious," when that fussy, gossipy, good man visited Rome in 1687, not two years before her death. But her predilections for the male sex were themselves rather of a masculine than feminine character. At any rate, whatever her attachments, she determined early in life never to marry. Did strangers sarcastically hint,

Methinks the lady doth protest too much

in protesting that? Those who were no strangers to her strong will and masculine nature might reply,

Nay, but she'll keep her word.

She did keep it. Not without let or hindrance, however; not without appeals from this side and that side-smooth speeches-flattering suggestions-political remonstrances-prime-ministerial objections-and diplomatic overtures of various degrees and dimensions. The Emperor proffered his son. Gustavus himself had nominated the young elector of Brandenburg. Two kings of Poland, Ladislaus and John Casimir, were successively candidates for that not lily-white hand. Oxenstiern, her faithful old right-hand man, is said to have been desirous of marrying her to his favourite son. Other members of her senate had other

"Siècle de Louis XIV.," ch. vi.

† Grote's History of Greece, vol. xi. ch. 74.

Cleanliness was no more the virtue of Christina than (by Horace Walpole's account) of Lady Mary Wortley Montague. When the ex-queen was at Paris, it was noticed, among the other bizarres peculiarities of her dress and appearanceat her first interview, too, with Anne of Austria-that she had no gloves, and that her hands were too dirty for the original colour to be other than matter for pure conjecture.

schemes on the same subject. But Christina tabooed the subject. She would have no master-could endure no rival near her throne.

She would not her unhousèd free condition

Put into circumspection and confine

For the sea's worth.*

She

Whatever obligation she might be under to her kingdom to contract such an engagement, she "thought herself sufficiently absolved from by the settlement of the succession." In vain the states of the realm besought her, in general terms, to marry some one; and then, in particular, to take Charles Gustavus, her cousin; who is said to have acted throughout with the most consummate dexterity (he had been her playfellow in childhood, when she styled him her "little husband," and was the only suitor she appears to have any way cared for); with any other woman, it is thought, he must infallibly have succeeded. But Christina was like no other woman, nor wished to be, or be thought so. named the prince as her successor; let him, and let her people, be content with her thus providing for the succession. Neither he nor her people, however, expressed content at any such arrangement. The prince has left an account of his interview with her on the subject: how she responded to his request for a "categorical" resolution in respect to the marriage, by stating what her anti-conjugal resolution was, explicitly enough: how they hereupon fell into sharp converse-he averring that he desired nothing but marriage; that if hope were bereft him, he would rather content himself with a piece of bread, and never see Sweden again; which her majesty (he continues) took ill, declaring that it was a fanfaronade, and a chapter out of a romance, &c. &c. The conference terminated by her "dismissing" him with the assurance to check any further assurances of his-that it was quite honour enough for him to have been thought worthy of aspiring to the hand of so great a queen.

How many weeks there would have been to their honeymoon, had the match" come off," with a bride of her make and mettle, it were hard perhaps to say. The lady was preposterously unladylike in her manners and tastes. She could not endure the society of the gentle sex-one alone of whom, Ebba Sparre, la belle comtesse, seems to have been to her an object of something like attachment. She put even men out of countenance by her eccentric and audacious talk-so France's Grande Mademoiselle tells us. She laughed boisterously, flung her legs like a thoroughbred Yankee over the arm of her chair, and swore like a trooper, nay, like a whole troop. When she came into the world, there was a goodly crop of hair covering her head, and so harsh and strong was the voice she

*"Othello." Act I. Sc. 2.

† Geijer's History of the Swedes.

Even from Ebba Sparre the queen parted without a tear, when leaving her kingdom. But equally tearless was her farewell of her poor, pining mother, who is described as "sick with grief, mortification, and incessant weeping." Christina corresponded, however, with Ebba from abroad, and even expressed some almost tender feelings regretful of a happier past than her restless present: "Am I still as dear to you as I was?" she asks. "Or have I deceived myself in fancying I was dearer to you than any one else? Oh, if it be so, do not undeceive me, but leave me in the happy delusion that I am beloved by the most amiable being in the world."

raised on the threshold of life, that the national hope of a prince was believed to be accomplished, and indeed Gustavus Adolphus was apprised that it was a son. Christina delighted to be told that at her birth she had been mistaken for a boy. Her father gave her very much a boy's education, and she made the most of it. In no sense could she be called by Pope's phrase "a softer Man;" nor did she at all approximate to the ideal description in which that phrase is employed:

Heaven when it strives to polish all it can

Its last best work, but forms a softer Man;
Picks from each sex, to make the favourite blest,
Your love of pleasure, our desire of rest;
Blends, in exception to all general rules,

Your taste of follies, with our scorn of fools:
Reserve with frankness, art with truth allied,
Courage with softness, modesty with pride.*

Rather she might have been apostrophised, in modern verse, as one that -dost deny

Thy woman's nature with a manly scorn,

And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity t

If not typified by Butler's "Amazon triumphant," before whom there was "a petticoat displayed, and rampant "-to wit, "before the proud viragominx, that was both madam, and a don."‡ Of what quality was the delicacy of her moral sense, one anecdote goes far to show. When Salmasius was at Stockholm, he was one day confined to his bed, by illness, and engaged in reading a now happily forgotten French book, of genuine French immorality, when the door opened, and Christina entered abruptly and unannounced. Monsieur Saumaise hastily thrust beneath the bed-clothes a book even he might well be ashamed to be caught reading-it was De Verville's Moyen de Parvenir-but not before Christina had seen what the sick sinner was about. Her majesty's eye, which nothing escaped, had taken account of this confused and ill-covered retreat of the pernicious book (perfacetum quidem, at subturpiculum libellum). She coolly withdrew the libellum from its temporary retreat, opened it, began to read, and smiled as she read; then called (proh pudor!) for her "maid of honour," the fair Ebba Sparre, and even compelled the reluctant girl to read aloud certain passages which her majesty pointed out, and which crimsoned the reader's cheeks and vexed her inmost spirit with shame and honest anger, while shouts of laughter from the listeners resounded to their disgrace.§ Salmasius was so indifferent a moral character, that one could willingly give Christina the benefit of a doubt originating in mistrust of his veracity-or charitably suppose he was in his anecdotage when he told an anecdote so little to his own credit. But the story is not wanting in verisimilitude, be the veracity of Salmasius what it may. Christina was apt to set the dulce et decorum at defiance. If free from personal immorality, she was at least notoriously deficient in

Pope's Moral Essays, Ep. II.
"Hudibras." Part II. Canto II.

† E. Barrett Browning: Sonnets.

Huet had this story from the lips of Salmasius, and records it in his own Memoirs.

delicacy. True, she has been charged with immorality of the grossest kind. But it is easier to see how, in the case of such a woman, who, as Sainte-Beuve says, affectait le genre et les qualités d'un homme,* rumours of an injurious character might spring up and multiply, generated by scandal-makers and repeated (perhaps vouched for) by scandal-lovers; than to prove what would consign the reckless, wayward, most unconventional queen to a bad eminence of infamy. Flighty and whimsical she was, with a vengeance: our ears deceive us if that is not the buzzing of a big-sized bee in her bonnet. She must have been "cracked" surely, to be light-headed and wrong-headed to such a degree. At almost every fresh journey she took, and every new scheme she started, in her middleage and decline, an observer might have called attention in the spirit and words of Tranio :

Hush, masters, here is some good pastime toward;
That wench is stark mad, or wonderful froward.†

THE CURSE OF TRECOBBEN.

BY HERBERT MURRAY.

I.

I THOUGHT I had never seen so ugly a woman. I quite reproached myself afterwards for the loathing with which I recoiled from her, as she appeared suddenly out of a narrow lane close to my side, and hurried by

me.

Her glance fell on me but for a moment, but it haunted me for weeks, for years after-it haunts me now, it was so terrible. I had never encountered such a look before from any human being, yet I fancied I had seen her before. It was clear, however, that she did not recognise me. I turned to look after her; but the road was winding, and I was only in time to catch a glance of the skirts of her black dress flying wildly in the wind. She was gone.

Not so the memory of this strange vision; those dark, terrible eyes seemed to glare upon me from behind every bush, and the black dress floated in the wind beside me wherever a bramble was stirred by the breeze.

I was on my way to Trecobben, the old house where thirty years before I had first seen the light. Five summers only had passed over my head when I left it-five winters I should have said, for indistinct though my recollections of those early days were, they were cold, and dark, and very wintry nevertheless-and what I had been told of them in afterlife, by those who were old then, and are at rest now, had given them a seeming distinctness to which they had no real claim. I will give a bare outline of the circumstances to which I allude, though I cannot trust

"Causeries du Lundi," t. v.

"Taming of the Shrew." Act. I. Sc. I.

myself to fill the outline in. My father and my mother quarrelled. I never heard why, nor do I know, but I suspect the reason. I never ventured to mention my suspicions to any one, and now there is no one living, as far as I know, who could tell me whether they had any foundation. They were never very happy, I believe, and they were, indeed, ill suited; she was but a child when he married her, and he had seen fifty winters—yes, I feel sure that all our years have been winters for many generations-when I was born. I have no remembrance of any unhappy scenes: probably I was never present on the occasion of a quarrel. I scarcely remember my father or my mother as they were then. She is dead, they say, and now he is gone also. But I must return to that fatal day when I saw the woman on the hill. It was in the middle of August, but evening was coming down, and it was dark and gloomy. One of those dense mists which are so common in Cornwall seemed to enwrap everything, and lay along upon the hills in impenetrable folds. Before me, towards the sea, it was somewhat clearer, and when I reached the top of the last hill, and looked down from the stile where a rudely painted hand upon a whitewashed sign-post directed me to the shortest route-" TRECOBBEN COVE, MILE”—I could just discern the tall wide chimneys and quaint gables of the old house, nestled among the tall trees which clothed both sides of the sheltered valley to within a stone's throw of the yellow beach. No; my supposed recollections of the place were false: it was quite different to what I had pictured it.

But I had no time for such speculations, for my business was urgent. I was on my way to my father's death-bed. For five-and-twenty years his name had been a forbidden subject; forbidden by the aunt with whom I spent my youth; forbidden by myself, when she was taken away, and I was left to struggle with the world all alone. Once every week I had looked in silence and in secret at the list of deaths in the Cornwall Gazette: I had done this as long as I could remember, and this was all. He was rich, I knew, and I at first was poor; but I had made good use of a trifling legacy left to me by my aunt, and had scarcely known want, so that I was never tempted to wish for a share of his wealth. I did indeed often long to see him, but my aunt had always prevented me from going into Cornwall in her lifetime, and I promised her on her death-bed that I would not go to Trecobben unless I was sent for. Doubtless she had a good reason, but what it was I never knew, and never shall in this world. But she was a good woman and a true; I ever trusted her, and I trust her memory now.

66

At last, then, I had come to Trecobben in haste. Two days before, a most unexpected and startling message had reached me while I was taking my solitary dinner: my father was dying, and had sent for me. The last words of the note were, Come, I say come!" It was in a female handwriting, but it was not signed by any one. It was not even addressed, and the messenger could tell me nothing about it. The writing appeared to be disguised-I thought I knew it but I crammed it into my pocket, and within an hour I was on my way. Bristol was soon reached from London, but at that time there was no rail beyond; so I posted the rest of the journey. Within three miles of my destination the poor old skeleton of a horse, which I had engaged at Camelford, broke down