friend, whom she would have herself married, had she ever intended to have taken a husband. But being determined to end her life in virginity, she wished the queen her sister might marry him.” It is no wonder that her propensity to gallantry should have been stigmatized by popish writers, or that they should even have ventured to assail her character for chastity: even those of the reformed religion were somewhat scandalized by the levities of their ecclesiastical governess. Her foreign biographer, Gregorio Leti, in his ‘Histoire d’Elizabeth,’ says, “I do not know whether she was so chaste as is reported; for, after all, she was a queen, she was beautiful, young, full of wit, delighted in magnificent dress, loved entertainments, balls, pleasures, and to have the handsomest men in her kingdom for her favourites. This is all I can say of her to the reader.” The charge of personal depravity in so illustrious a sovereign deserves a fuller examination than is admissible within our limits. But it is in a great measure discredited by the circumstance that it originated with those Romish and political enemies, who perseveringly strove to destroy the queen, as the main prop of that fabric they were moving every engine to overthrow. Dr. Sanders and Cardinal Allen, the popes, the Spanish writers and their partisans, make statements, some of them manifestly untrue, others unsupported by respectable testimony. Among her own subjects, the popular scandal turned chiefly on Leicester, Hatton, and Essex; but without a single criminating fact as to either. Bacon states the case candidly, and probably puts it on its true ground: “She suffered herself to be honoured, and caressed, and celebrated, and extolled with the name of love, and wished it and continued it beyond the suitability of her age. If you take these things more softly, they may not even be without some admiration, because such things are commonly found in our fabulous narratives, of a queen in the islands of Bliss, with her hall and institutes, who receives the administration of love, but prohibits its licentiousness. If you judge them more severely, still they have this admirable circumstance, that the gratifications of this sort did not much hurt her reputation, and not at all her majesty, nor even relaxed her government, nor were any notable impediment to her state affairs.” Some writers of secret history have assigned the danger to which it was thought she would be exposed in bearing children as the real reason for her perseverance in celibacy.