afterwards denied permission to visit the French court at Paris, and found among French women her most persistent detractors. Abdications among sovereigns are so rare that the attention of historians has been naturally attracted by the picturesqueness of that of Christina to the detriment of her real title to fame. [Sidenote: =Her political ability.=] In the ten years of her rule over Sweden she conducted a great war to a glorious end, she established her authority by sheer ascendency of character over a narrow and jealous oligarchy, she settled a most difficult constitutional question, that of the devolution of the Crown, in the best way for the nation, by her own firmness of will. She made herself beloved by her people, and easily suppressed the conspiracy of Messenius in spite of its wide ramifications among the democracy. She made Stockholm for the time the most learned and cultured court of Europe. Above all when her own religious convictions forced her into antagonism with the constitution of her country, she never hesitated to prefer the interests of her country to her own dignity. She recognised from the first that in the seventeenth century it was impossible for Sweden to permit her sovereign to be of any religion except that of Luther, and when she had made up her mind to become a Roman Catholic she accepted the inevitable and abdicated her throne. There are few sovereigns who can claim to have done more for their country by activity or by renunciation than Christina. Her abdication was right and unavoidable. The mistake she made lay in not carrying it far enough. She ought to have retired into private life, but this was too great a self-denial for so active a mind and so vigorous a personality. She ceased to be queen of Sweden, but she determined still to be queen. She maintained royal state, she claimed royal rights, she plunged into intrigue, she interfered in politics, she tried to dominate over literature and taste. Deprived of all right to express, and shorn of all power to enforce, her wishes, she soon sank into becoming the common bore of Europe, and found herself politely relegated to her palace at Rome, where she became one of the sights of the city and the leader of a fashionable and artistic côterie.