Defeated at every point the crownless queen turns for deliverance to Queen Elizabeth. In her great extremity it did not occur to her that she might risk her liberty and perhaps imperil her life by asking the hospitality of England. Ere she took the fatal step her friends and counselors kneeled at her feet and entreated her to go anywhere but there; but their entreaties were in vain; she crossed the Solway, gave herself up to the English deputy warden, and was lodged for the time in Carlisle Castle. Elizabeth, as Scott says in his “Tales of a Grandfather,” had two courses in her power, alike just and lawful; to afford her the succor petitioned for, or the liberty to depart from her dominions as she had entered them, voluntarily. But great as she was upon other occasions of her reign, she acted on the present from mean and envious motives. She saw in the fugitive a princess who possessed a right of succession to the crown of England. She remembered that Mary had been her rival in accomplishments; and certainly she did not forget that she was her superior in youth and beauty. Elizabeth treated her not as a sister and friend in distress, but as an enemy over whom circumstances had given her power. She determined upon reducing her to the condition of a captive. It is a question whether Elizabeth had a right to take cognizance of the charges against Mary. As a matter of fact her guilt was not proven when she demanded her first trial, and Elizabeth so states it over her own signature; but Mary was transported from castle to castle until the ax and the block at Fotheringay concluded the tragedy of her life. As in “The Abbot,” so in “Kenilworth” the principal personage of the story—Queen Elizabeth—is not introduced until the story is well under way. In fact, we are introduced to the characters in the inverse ratio of their prominence. The curtain rises on a swaggering soldier of fortune in a country inn—a fit accomplice and lackey of Sir Richard Varney, perhaps the most despised villain in the pages of fiction. Anthony Foster comes next, a snivelling hypocrite, willing to coin soul and body for money. The stately Earl of Leicester, and his noble rival, the Earl of Essex, with gorgeous retinue pass along the stage before us; and the palace doors open at last upon Queen Elizabeth and her court. In the meantime we have caught glimpses, through the prison doors, of Anthony Foster’s dilapidated mansion, of the poor deluded Amy Robsart—the wedded but not acknowledged wife of the Earl of Leicester; we note the grief and manhood of her former lover, Tressilian, vainly entreating her to return to her home, where her broken-hearted father sits by his lonely fireside, too wretched and broken in spirit to find relief in tears.