Yet had the front figure of the history been a noble conception grandly executed all this might have been condoned. One might well have looked at them as a few rough accessories to heighten by their contrast the beauty of the central form. There was place for a splendid creation. No more favorable material for a tragic heroine exists than Mary Tudor--with the single exception of that other Mary who fell beneath the Puritans like a lily before the scythe of the destroyer. Around her history and person circle all the elements of the tenderest pathos, which is of the very essence of tragedy. That Shakspere did not use them is a proof he thought so. For “the fair vestal throned in the west” would have resented such a creation as his quickening genius would have called to life. A queen of noble nature gradually swept away by a resistless current of untoward circumstances, is a history capable of the sublimity of a Greek catastrophe, with the added pathos of Christian suffering. But who have we here? A silly woman, devoutly pious, and endowed with a conspicuous share of the family courage. But she is so weak that her piety has the appearance of superstition, and her fits of courage lose their royalty and fail to rescue her from contempt. Unattractive in person, she falls desperately in love with a man much younger than herself, and her woman’s love, ordinarily so quick to detect coldness in a lover, is blind to the grossest neglect; and yet not so blind but that a few words scrawled on a rag of paper, dropped in her way, could open her eyes on the spot. The tenderness of her love and the importunity of cruel-minded men, transform her almost suddenly from a gentle-natured woman to an unrelenting human tigress. And she, who would not allow the law to take its course on her most dangerous enemies, can exclaim of her sister Elizabeth, “To the Tower with _her_! My foes are at my feet, and I am queen.” Afterwards of Guilford Dudley, the Duke of Suffolk, and Lady Jane Grey-- “They shall die.” And again of her sister-- “She shall die. My foes are at my feet, and Philip king.”