She was really the most affectionate and harmless of little princesses, though, in the cruelty of her fate, one of the most tragic figures of her sad time. Destiny, the great bully, in the absence of any celestial S.P.C.C., often delights in torturing good children, and surely he had never vented his spite on a prettier innocence than this. She was born on the Holy Innocents’ day, actually; and that may have prejudiced the odious tyrant. A counterpane of snow covered the earth at the time, and when the sun of the New Year withdrew it, there was this smiling snowdrop underneath. We pass over the little Princess’s first reception, the splendour and hyperbole of it all. To insist on such in such connection is like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. She was for all human purposes just a desirable baby, most precious in her lovable disposition; and if the States of Holland thought fit, for political purposes, to signalise her minute advent by a congratulatory present to King Charles I, her father, of ambergris, incomparable china, a cunning clock, and several Titians and Tintorettos, those gifts were not to be considered representative of anything but her material values. Her real dearness was moral and inestimable. Only the ambergris, perhaps, symbolised the sweetness of her nature. We dwell on her sweetness, the kind little soul, more fondly than on her reputed learning and her piety. At eight years old she was said, on the authority of Mrs. Makin, her parliamentary governess, to be suitably proficient, Angelica-like, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which languages she could read and write. Well, we don’t believe a word of it, any more than we believe in the precocious pietism allowed her by godly Mr. Stephen Marshall and other long-winded Fifth-Monarchists appointed by the Parliament to preach her and her brothers into a state of dead-with-sleepiness grace. Like a sweet-natured child she struggled dutifully to please her tutors, and the very love in her disarmed and moved them to the utterance of those fond fictions. No doubt she could stammer without a solecism of Balbus and his wall-building, or, in childish cacography, indite her _Déme un beso_ with little rosy fist cramped tight and her lips pursed to the message. But that any tongue but her own spoke naturally in or to her we will not believe.