She paid visits to the baths of Bourbon, for increasing illness, during the three next years. Toward the close of 1669, she had been agitated with impending war between France and England, which she strove to avert. M. Valot, the first physician to Louis XIV., held a consultation at Colombe with her own medical man. The new remedy of opium was then the fashionable medicine. It was vain her own physician declared it was most inimical to Queen Henrietta. M. Valot left the prescription, positively asserting that it would allay her tearing cough. On the evening of August 30, she was better than usual, sat up later, and chatted pleasantly with her ladies. That night she was sleeping sweetly, when the lady in waiting awoke her, to administer the sleeping-draught. Could any thing be more absurd than to wake a patient to administer a sleeping-potion? At dawn, the lady came with another draught, but the first had been fatal; Henrietta was cold and speechless, and never woke again, though she respired for some time. A messenger hurried to St. Germains, and her son-in-law, the Duke of Orleans, came directly; but Henrietta had ceased to breathe, August 31, 1669. Her little grand-daughter, afterward our queen-regnant, Anne, was staying at Colombe for her health at that time. Queen Henrietta was embalmed, and buried at St. Denis, in the royal vault of the Kings of France, her ancestors. Her daughter, the Duchess of Orleans, was too ill and utterly cast down with grief to follow her mother to the grave; but her niece, Mademoiselle Montpensier, attended as chief mourner. Forty days after, a much grander service was performed to her memory, by the nuns of the Visitation, at Chaillot, whose convent she had founded. There her daughter and her husband, the Duke and Duchess of Orleans, attended, in the deepest grief and mourning; and there Bossuet preached that beautiful biographical oration, which has deservedly taken place among the classics of France. Our limits in this edition will not permit more than one passage, which is illustrative of the true character of the queen, though not of that set forth in general English history. "Batten, the captain who cannonaded her at Burlington, was taken prisoner afterward, and condemned to death, without the queen's knowledge; but, seeing him led to execution past her window, full of horror at his impending fate, the queen cried out she had pardoned him long ago, and insisted on his liberation. Batten was not ungrateful, for he helped in the revolt of part of the English fleet to the young king." Pepys, in his diary, often names him as in favour with the Duke of York, when lord admiral, after the Restoration. Henrietta Maria had been the mother of four sons and four daughters; she outlived all her children but Charles II., who left no legitimate offspring; James, Duke of York, afterward the unfortunate James II., and Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, who survived her some months. SIR JOHN SUCKLING