the softer sex, are not unseemly in a spinster, so long as they succeed
in making her look young. They are intolerable in a mother of any age.
But we, my dear Christopher, resigned and benevolent old bachelors as we
are, can well appreciate the vanity of the aged heart, that sees not its
youth renewed in any growing dearer self. Nothing denotes the advances
of life, at once so surely and so pleasantly as children springing up
around a good man's table. Perhaps our famous Queen, in her latter days,
though full of honours as of years, would gladly have changed places
with the wife of any yeoman that had a child to receive her last
blessing, whose few acres were not to pass away to the hungry expecting
son of a hated rival. Her virginity was not like that of Jephthah's
daughter, a free-will offering to the Lord. Pride, and policy, and
disappointment, and, it may be, hopeless, self-condemned affection,
conspired to perpetuate it. Probably it was well for England that no
offspring of hers inherited her throne. By some strange ordinance of
nature, it generally happens that these wonderful clever women produce
idiots or madmen.--Witness Semiramis, Agrippina, Catherine de Medicis,
Mary de Medicis, Catherine of Russia, and Lady Wortley Montague. One
miniature of Elizabeth I have seen, which, though not beautiful, is
profoundly interesting: it presents her as she was in the days of her
danger and captivity, when the same wily policy, keeping its path, even
while it seemed to swerve, was needful to preserve her life, that
afterwards kept her firm on a throne. Who was the artist that produced
it? I know not; but it bears the strongest marks of authenticity, if to
be exactly what a learned spirit would fancy Elizabeth--young, a
prisoner, and in peril--be evidence of true portraiture. There is pride,
not aping humility, but wearing it as a well-beseeming habit;--there is
passion, strongly controlled by the will, but not extinct, neither dead
nor sleeping, but watchful and silent; brows sternly sustaining a weight
of care, after which a crown could be but light; a manly intellect,