This queen possessed a vigorous and cultivated understanding; was acquainted with several languages, and composed with facility both in prose and verse. Her needlework, the amusement and solace of her leisure hours, was designed by her as "a commemoration of her love for, and steadiness to, the reformed faith." It is thus described by Boyle: "She very much loved devices, and she wrought with her own hand fine and large pieces of tapestry, among which was a suit of hangings of a dozen or fifteen pieces, which were called THE PRISONS OPENED; by which she gave us to understand that she had broken the pope's bonds, and shook off his yoke of captivity. In the middle of every piece is a story of the Old Testament which savours of liberty--as the deliverance of Susannah; the departure of the children of Israel out of Egypt; the setting Joseph at liberty, &c. And at all the corners are broken chains, shackles, racks, and gibbets; and over them in great letters, these words of the third chapter of the second Epistle to the Corinthians, UBI SPIRITUS IBI LIBERTAS. "To show yet more fully the aversion she had conceived against the Catholic religion, and particularly against the sacrifice of the mass, having a fine and excellent piece of tapestry, made by her mother, Margaret, before she had suffered herself to be cajoled by the ministers, in which was perfectly well wrought the sacrifice of the mass, and a priest who held out the holy host to the people, she took out the square in which was this history, and, instead of the priest, with her own hand substituted a fox, who turning to the people, and making a horrible grimace with his paws and throat, delivered these words, DOMINUS VOBISCUM." We are told that Anne of Brittany, the good Queen of France, assembled three hundred of the children of the nobility at her court, where, under her personal superintendence, they were instructed in such accomplishments as became their rank and sex, but the girls, most especially, made accomplished needlewomen. Embroidery was their occupation during some specified hours of every day, and they wrought much tapestry, which was presented by their royal protectress to different churches. Her daughter Claude, the queen of Francis I., formed her court on the same model and maintained the same practice; Queen Anne Boleyn was educated in her court, and was doomed to consume a large portion of her time in the occupation of the needle. It was an employment little suited to her lively disposition and coquettish habits, and we do not hear, during her short occupation of the throne, that she resorted to it as an amusement. "Ai lavori d'Aracne, all'ago, ai fusi Inchinar non degno la man superba."