Poor, sad old queen, clinging like a child--like the true daughter of her hapless mother Anne Boleyn--to any amusement, excitement, display, that could divert her weary thoughts from her loneliness, from the burdening cares of state; with her bitter jibe at the falseness of affection, yet rising and dancing a measure with her maids of honor. It is as pathetic a picture as one can look upon. So ends the record of the gay wedding at Blackfriars. But alas! within a fortnight the marriage rejoicings were turned into mourning. Our beautiful Bess Russell, the child of the court, the child of the Abbey, was consumptive. She grew rapidly worse, and a fortnight after her sister Anne's wedding she was dead. Her illness indeed, at the last, was so sudden that it gave rise to an absurd story, which was commonly believed one hundred and fifty years ago; namely, that she died of the prick of a needle in her finger which produced gangrene. This however is a mere fable, and only came into existence some seventy years after her death. She was buried in Westminster Abbey--that Abbey under whose shadow she was born, within whose walls she was christened. Well may Dean Stanley call her "the child of Westminster." Her beautiful monument stands in the Chapel of St. Edmund, near that of her father, and of John of Eltham. She sits "in a curiously wrought osier chair," leaning her head upon her hand, and pointing at the skull, on which her right foot rests, with an expression on her face of great sadness and sweetness. On the richly carved pedestal upon which the figure is placed are engraved these words: "_Dormit, non mortua est_"--she is not dead but sleeping--and below on a scroll we read that to the "sacred and happy memory of Elizabeth Russell" this monument is dedicated by her afflicted sister Anne.