Margaret was soon ransomed by the king of France, and returned to her father in Anjou. Miss Strickland says: “Margaret had lost her beauty with excessive weeping: a dry leprosy transformed this princess, who had been the fairest in the world, into a spectacle of horror.” She died in 1483, aged fifty-one years, into which had been compressed an age of tragedy and sorrow. Three hundred years later, another unhappy sovereign, Maria Louisa, Napoleon’s empress, possessed Margaret’s breviary, in which there was a sentence in Margaret’s hand that told the moral of her life: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” END OF “PICTURES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY.” SUNDAY READINGS. SELECTED BY THE REV. J. H. VINCENT, D.D. [_June 3._] RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE.[K] PART I. By JOHN CAIRD, D.D.[L] To combine business with religion, to keep up a spirit of serious piety amid the stir and distraction of a busy and active life—this is one of the most difficult parts of a Christian’s trial in this world. It is comparatively easy to be religious in the church—to collect our thoughts, and compose our feelings, and enter, with an appearance of propriety and decorum, into the offices of religious worship, amid the quietude of the Sabbath, and within the still and sacred precincts of the house of prayer. But to be religious in the world—to be pious, and holy, and earnest-minded in the counting-room, the manufactory, the market-place, the field, the farm—to carry out our good and solemn thoughts and feelings into the throng and thoroughfare of daily life—this is the great difficulty of our Christian calling. No man not lost to all moral influence can help feeling his worldly passions calmed, and some measure of seriousness stealing over his mind, when engaged in the performance of the more awful and sacred rites of religion; but the atmosphere of the social circle, the exchange, the street, the city’s throng, amid coarse work and cankering cares and toils, is a very different atmosphere from that of a communion-table. Passing from the one to the other has often seemed as if the sudden transition from a tropical to a polar climate—from balmy warmth and sunshine to murky mist and freezing cold. And it appears sometimes as difficult to maintain the strength and steadfastness of religious principle and feeling, when we go forth from the church into the world, as it would be to preserve an exotic alive in the open air in winter, or to keep the lamp that burns steadily within doors from being blown out if you take it abroad unsheltered from the wind. So great, so all but insuperable, has this difficulty ever appeared to men, that it is but few who set themselves honestly and resolutely to the effort to overcome it. The great majority, by various shifts or expedients, evade the hard task of being good and holy, at once in the church and in the world.