Eric XIV. of Sweden in early life was stunned by a violent fall, a circumstance which, it is said, in after years accounted for his lack of judgment, and occasional eccentricity of conduct. His highly suspicious turn of mind made him at times morose, and almost maniacal, causing him to interpret “the most natural and insignificant of gestures as some dreadful telegraphing of hideous treason. At such seasons his violence was frantic, and, after a day marked by acts of frightful outrage, he would make record against himself in his journal that he had sinned, and would then start to commit further crime.” By a terrible irony of fate, when deposed by his brother John, he was thrown into a horrible dungeon, and “there were placed over him men whom he had offended, and who claimed to be avenged. The vengeance which they exacted was diabolical, for they aggravated as far as in them lay the horrors of his position--one of them fastening to his crippled limbs a mass of iron which may yet be seen in the museum at Abo.”[4] But can this be wondered at, when it is remembered how Eric when possessed of power had in his moments of frenzy and freaks of passion sent innocent men to the scaffold, and like a lunatic had, after the performance of some diabolical act, wandered about the fields likening himself to Nero, and heaping execration upon his own head. He was his own enemy, and as such incurred his own destruction. Some of the characteristics of one of his successors on the throne--the celebrated Christina--were uncommon, for having been educated by men, and brought up under the guardianship of men, she gradually imbibed a dislike of all that was womanly. Her ambition seems to have been to be as much like a man as possible, and nothing seems to have pleased her more than to don male attire. For womanly refinements, too, she had the most profound contempt, and it only coincided with this trait of character that she expressed her conviction of the utter disability of woman to conduct the affairs of a nation. In short, it is said that there was nothing of the woman in her save her sex, and that her presence, voice, and manners, were altogether masculine. Many of her strange freaks of conduct were attributable to this peculiar whim, in accordance with which she not only swore like a dragoon, but encouraged conversation of a by no means refined character. Thus a writer states that one of his friends used to entertain her with stories of a very unseemly nature, with which she was abundantly delighted, and adds, “Yet because there were some of his narrations which did sometimes require more modest expressions than the genuine or natural, chiefly before a Royal Majesty and in a maid’s presence, as she saw him going about his circumlocutions and seeking civil terms, she would boldly speak out the words, though they were never so filthy, which modesty forbids me to write here.” Indeed, her own acknowledgment that she was never nice of