immortal revolution, will for ever call back the case before the tribunals of earth. The mother of Queen Elizabeth, the mother of Protestantism in England, cannot be suffered--never _will_ be suffered--to benefit by that shelter of merciful darkness which, upon any humbler person, or even upon this person in any humbler case, might be suffered to settle quietly as regards the memory of her acts. Mr. Froude, a pure-minded man, is the last man to call back into the glare of a judicial inquest deeds of horror, over which eternal silence should have brooded, had such an issue been possible. But three centuries of discussion have made _that_ more and more impossible. And now, therefore, with a view to the improvement of the dispute, and, perhaps, in one or two instances, with a chance for the rectification of the '_issues_' (speaking juridically) into which the question has been allowed to lapse, Mr. Froude has in some degree re-opened the discussion. 'The guilt,' he says, 'must rest where it is due. But under any hypothesis guilt there _was_--dark, mysterious, and most miserable.' Tell this story how you may, and the evidence remains of guilt under _any_ hypothesis--guilt such as in Grecian tragedy was seen thousands of years ago hanging in clouds of destiny over princely houses, and reading to them a doom of utter ruin, root and branch, in which, as in the anarchy of hurricanes, no form or feature was descried distinctly--nothing but some dim fluctuating phantom, pointing with recording finger to that one ancestral crime through which the desolation had been wrought. Mr. Froude, through his natural sense of justice, and his deep study of the case, is unfavourably disposed towards the Lady Anne Boleyn: nevertheless he retains lingering doubts on her behalf, all of which, small and great, we have found reason to dismiss. We, for our parts, are thoroughly convinced of her guilt. Our faith is, that no shadow of any ground exists for suspending the verdict of the sentence; but at the same time for mitigating that sentence there arose this strong argument--namely, that amongst women not formally pronounced idiots, there never can have been one more pitiably imbecile.