"When she saw the mournful Pietà,

Carved by a hand of most surpassing skill,
And full of holy grief, she wept; and oft
Amid the galleries she stood to gaze

On Raphael's Mother of Fair Love; and oft
On Heaven, as painted by Angelico,

Fresh from his prayers."

But the Pilgrim had another gift more precious even than that of sensibility; she had humility:

"She loved to kneel

On the cold floor, and when some peasant's hand
Raised her to share the rugged bench with her,

She felt defrauded of a suppliant's right,

The lowest place. None there had claims like hers;
They trembled not for country and for friends;

She blest their happiness, and oft her

Fix'd wistfully upon the weeping soul
Who crept to the confessional."

eyes

The result of such dispositions could scarcely be doubtful. She had learned that there was such a thing as a Church, and she had humility, zeal, sincerity, and stedfastness of purpose. She had also, as every page of this pilgrimage proves, an eye that could see, a mind more disposed to grasp noble ideas than to cavil at trifles, and an understanding heart. Courage comes in due time; for courage comes of faith, and a slumbering faith is enkindled by love.

"Love slowly touched her heart; she strove no more,

And yielded to conversion's grace at last.”

She reaches Rome, and kneels before the tombs of the Apostles:

"Tongue cannot tell, nor heart of living man

Can ever guess the mysteries of peace,

When o'er the head of one thus reconcil'd,

In majesty pontifical are rais'd

St. Peter's keys to loose and to absolve."

We know not to whom we are indebted for this very beautiful and interesting work. Its title-page bears no name; and its author, unless very unlike the Pilgrim described, has higher objects of pursuit than poetic fame. That it is full, however, of poetic merit, the extracts which we have given prove in a manner more convincing than any critical remarks of ours could do. Those extracts have been selected less with the view of illustrating the poetic beauty of the work than its moral purpose. The design is as original as it is excellent; and a hundred passages, equally faithful in the delineation of nature and description of art, derive an interest in which de

scriptive poetry is generally deficient from the continuity afforded to them by the connecting thread of the religious narrative. Many a future traveller may learn from this little book how to observe and how to reflect; and a deeper lesson still may be found in it by those (and how many such there are!) who, like the Pilgrim while still a prisoner in the charmed circle of Anglicanism, have already learned to adore their Lord in the Holy Eucharist, and to love His saints, and to aspire after His cross and His rest, and yet know not how to distinguish between a Church and an Establishment. Their obstacles are probably, in most cases, substantially what hers were; and it is well that such should exist. They are but the trial of faith and the test of sincerity. If no such test existed, there would be danger, in these excited times, of Catholicism becoming "the fashion," and of the camp-followers destroying the discipline of the army. "Ye are too many to conquer" is no paradox when addressed to that host whose strength is faith, and whose arms are those of the Spirit. Many a traveller among the scenes depicted in this poem will thank the Pilgrim for recalling in her “pictured page" and musical verse recollections which no one would willingly let die, and entwining them with associations higher than any which mere nature can supply. He will also look forward with deep interest to the promised second part, descriptive of Rome and its holy places.

MISS STRICKLAND'S LIFE OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS. Lives of the Queens of Scotland, and English Princesses connected with the Regal Succession of Great Britain. Vol. III. Life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. By Miss Agnes Strickland. W. Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London.

MISS STRICKLAND needs no introduction to any of our readers. Her reputation as a most lively and faithful biographer was sufficiently established by her Lives of the Queens of England; and the literary world has been long since anxiously awaiting the fulfilment of the promise given in that series, viz. that she would write the life of that "maist bonnie sovereign" Mary Stuart, as a sort of companion picture to that of her bloody rival, Elizabeth Tudor. In the present volume we have only the beginning of the execution of this promise; but if the sequel of the story be told with the same strict impartiality and in the same fascinating style as the commence

ment, the whole will form (for us Catholics at least) a more pleasing and valuable contribution to our historical literature than even Miss Strickland herself has yet made. We need hardly say that Miss S. is no Catholic; but this only makes us welcome the more gladly these brilliant yet truthful biographical sketches, which will be greedily devoured in a thousand different quarters, where the same truths enforced by a Catholic pen would have been read with distrust, or more probably never have been read at all. But it is not merely the general fairness of Miss Strickland's narratives, and the animation of her style, which makes each new work that she issues so welcome to us; they are equally remarkable for the very diligent research which they every where exhibit into the original authorities from whence her materials are derived. She is not one of those writers, of whom there are but too many amongst us, who merely turn over the pages of former historians, select the most striking incidents, and clothe them in attractive language. She is essentially an original writer; she does not, of course, despise the labours of her predecessors, but she is far from following them blindly. She has recourse to the most ancient and authentic documents, whether existing among the private records of some noble family, in the public archives of the state, or already printed in the bulky folios of former chroniclers; and her industry has enabled her to glean many an interesting fact which has escaped the notice of those who have gone before her.

Nowhere can this diligence of inquiry, this nicely-balanced judgment, and this devoted love of historical truth, be more essentially necessary to the success of an undertaking, than it is to one who desires to write a really trustworthy account of Mary Queen of Scots ;" and, as far as we have hitherto had an opportunity of judging, Miss Strickland displays these admirable qualities quite as strikingly in the volume before us as in any of her former series. "More books have been written about Mary Stuart," says her present biographer, "than all the queens in the world put together; yet after all the literary gladiatorship that has been exercised on this subject for nearly three centuries, the point of her guilt or innocence remains undecided, and as much open to discussion as ever." And she proceeds to assign as one cause of this protracted dispute the absence, in former times," of those documents which furnish the most interesting portion of the materials, as well as the most important."

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Every one who has tried to put one of those mathematical toys called a Chinese puzzle together, from which any of the sections, no matter how minute, are missing, has found his labour thrown away;

so has it been with the historian who has endeavoured to write a faithful life of Mary Stuart before the recovery of the lost links in the broken and tangled chain of conflicting evidences. Such productions-although among them we recognise some of the most brilliant argumentative essays in the language-are necessarily imperfect and fragmentary; for it is only now, in the fulness of time, that a succinct narrative of personal facts and characteristic traits could be arranged, containing particulars of every period of her life, from the hour of her birth to the dark closing of the tragedy in the hall of Fotheringay Castle. Mary Stuart has been styled by one of her recent French biographers the eternal enigma of history,' and 'the most problematical of all historic personages.' To writers who endeavour, like him, to combine the characteristics of an angel with the actions of a fiend, such she must ever be. She cannot be described by argumentative essays; she must be portrayed by facts-facts not imputed, but proven; for there is nothing enigmatical, nothing inconsistent in the Mary Stuart of reality. But where the colourings of self-interested falsehood are adopted by unreasoning credulity, prejudice, or ignorance, she appears a strange anomaly, as discrepant with herself as a dove with the ensanguined talons of a vulture; or a fair sheet of paper written with goodly sentences, in the midst of which some coarse hand has interpolated foul words of sin and shame, which bear no analogy either to the beginning or the end."

Miss Strickland, then, undertakes to give us the real facts of Mary Stuart's life, and entreats us to form our estimate of her character from these facts, and not from rhetoric; and certainly a more natural, amiable, and engaging character can scarcely be conceived than that which is presented to us in the facts recorded in the present volume, which does not extend, however, beyond the first twenty years of her life. As this period does not embrace any of the more controverted events in her history, we need merely give our readers a few of the leading points in the narrative, reserving the more difficult and less pleasing task of correcting misstatements, refuting false and calumnious charges, and the like, till the appearance of the second volume, which we trust will not be long delayed.

Mary Stuart was fatherless and a queen almost as soon as she was born; and her first exercise of regal power is dated December 13, 1542, when she certainly was not more than three days old. Her hand was sought in marriage by more than one royal suitor whilst yet she lay an unconscious infant in her cradle, and those whose hands were thus proposed to her had attained a similar maturity in their nurseries at home. She had barely completed her ninth month, when she was enveloped in regal robes, and borne from her nursery sanctuary into the stately church adjacent, where Cardinal Beton

placed the crown upon her infant brow, and the sceptre in the tiny hand which could not grasp it, and girded her with the sword of state, as the representative of the warlike monarchs of Scotland; the said representative, in the present instance, never ceasing to cry for a moment during the whole ceremony. At the age of five years she was obliged to be removed from her royal palace at Stirling to a more secure place of retirement in the picturesque isle of Inchmahome, in the lake of Menteith. Whilst she was learning her lessons, or hunting butterflies, or engaged in some other sports with her juvenile companions on the shores of this peaceful lake, the articles of her marriage-settlement with the Dauphin, Francis de Valois, were being concluded by her mother and the governor and estates of Scotland; and, as a consequence of this arrangement, she was conducted in the following year, together with her tutors, nurse, governess, and pigmy maids of honour, to the palace of St. Germain in France, there to be educated with her future consort, under the immediate eye of the king and queen. At this time she was only six years old; but the royal family of France wrote word to her mother in Scotland, "that she was so wise and good for a child of her tender age, that they saw nothing they could wish altered." She astonished her French companions by the taste and skill which she displayed in all sylvan sports. Not only did she exhibit the greatest glee when she saw the dogs issue from their kennels, and all other preparations for the chase, in that noble hunting-place of the French kings, but she even "dressed her own pet falcon, cast her off and reclaimed her with her own hands." Four years later, Cardinal Lorraine sends the following pleasing account of her to her royal mother:

"The said lady, your daughter, improves and increases every day in stature, goodness, beauty, wisdom, and worth. She is so perfect and accomplished in all things, honourable and virtuous, that the like of her is not to be seen in this realm, whether noble damsel, maiden of low degree, or in middle station; and I must tell you, madam, that the king has taken such a liking for her, that he spends much of his time in chatting with her, sometimes by the hour together; and she knows as well how to entertain him with pleasant and sensible subjects of conversation as if she were; a woman of five-and-twenty."

At the age of twelve or thirteen "she both spoke and understood Latin admirably well," says Brantôme; and the court of France and all the foreign ambassadors witnessed with amazement the ease and grace with which she recited to the king in the great gallery of the Louvre, in the presence of that