These are the problems which agitate us in the study of fiction, and irresistibly impel us to hasten from the prologue to the epilogue--from the exordium to the peroration. And to speed as quickly is usually our desire when we are confronted with the tragedies of history, or with the vouched-for chronicles of human passion and crime. Throw down on the floor Clarendon’s _History of the Rebellion_, it has been said, and the volume will open, automatically, at the page where the execution of Charles I is described. Try to concentrate your thoughts on the history of Marie Stuart; and, coldly, clearly, sternly distinct in the midst of a whirligig of scenes and events--the Louvre, Holyrood, the Kirk of Field, Lochleven and what not--there stands out the image of the Hall at Fotheringay, the black scaffold, the block, the masked headsman; the Dean of Peterborough drearily homilising, and the Puritan Earl of Kent ranting; while the weeping tire-women disrobe the royal victim, her little pet dog snuggling by her, not without difficulty when the axe has fallen to be dislodged from the corse of the kind mistress he loved so well, and who has been stricken down by cruel men, he knows not why. See this, as I see it. It is my purpose to write something on the eventful life and dreadful ending of Queen Marie Antoinette. I try, when I remember the sunshine of her early days--her youth, her beauty, her grace--to put myself in a cheerful frame of mind. I wish to look, at least for a little while, on the bright side of a career which began so splendidly and so happily. I would fain picture to myself the daughter of Maria Theresa, as Edmund Burke saw her at Versailles--smiling, radiant, adored. I would fain hear the clash of the thirty thousand swords which should have leaped from their scabbards to avenge the slightest affront to the peerless consort of the King of France and Navarre. I take from my shelves the _Journal de Madame Eloff_--the ledger containing the milliner and dressmaker’s bills of a perhaps too extravagant young Queen--an endless catalogue of taffetas and satins, gauze and ribbons, high-heeled shoes and embroidered gloves, scent-bottles, reticules, feathers, artificial flowers and fans. From an old Boule cabinet I lift tenderly a dainty little coffee-cup of Sèvres egg-shell porcelain, adorned with an exquisite miniature of her, painted when she had only been two years the wife of the hapless Louis. The cup is half embedded in a setting of velvet _bleu du Roi_; and, alas! when I draw the ceramic gem delicately from the case I see that the cup has no handle.