energetic, not fit to be transcribed by "pen polite," but ending with _hell-fire_.) "With many other opprobrious and hateful words which could not be remembered, because the bearer would deliver it but once, as he said he was commanded; but said, if he had failed in any thing, it was in speaking it more mildly, and not in terms of such disdain as he was commanded." We are not told whether the gallantry of Stanhope suffered him to throw the herald out of the window, who brought him this gentle missive. As for the termagant countess, his adversary, she was afterwards imprisoned in the Tower for upwards of two years, on account of Lady Arabella Stuart's stolen match with Lord Seymour. She ought assuredly to have "brought forth men-children only;" but she left no son. Her three daughters married the earls of Pembroke, of Arundel, and of Kent. The portraits of James V. of Scotland and his Queen, Mary of Guise, are extremely curious. There is something ideal and elegant about the head of James V.--the look we might expect to find in a man who died from wounded feeling. His more unhappy daughter, poor Mary, hangs near--a full length in a mourning habit, with a white cap, (of her own peculiar fashion,) and a veil of white gauze. This, I believe, is the celebrated picture so often copied and engraved. It is dated 1578, the thirty-sixth of her age, and the tenth of her captivity. The figure is elegant, and the face pensive and sweet.[62] Beside her, in strong contrast, hangs Elizabeth, in a most preposterous farthingale, and a superabundance of all her usual absurdities and enormities of dress. The petticoat is embroidered over with snakes, crocodiles, and all manner of creeping things. We feel almost inclined to ask whether the artist could possibly have intended them as emblems, like the eyes and ears in her picture at Hatfield; but it may have been one of the three thousand gowns, in which Spenser's Gloriana, Raleigh's Venus, loved to array her old wrinkled, crooked carcase. Katherine of Arragon is here--a small head in a hood: the face not only harsh, as in all her pictures, but vulgar, a characteristic I never saw in any other. There is that peculiar expression round the mouth, which might be called either decision or obstinacy. And here too is the famous Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, the friend and patroness of Ben Jonson, looking sentimental in a widow's dress, with a white pocket handkerchief. There is character enough in the countenance to make us turn with pleasure to Ben Jonson's exquisite eulogium on her. "I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, _pride_: I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside. Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her; that should with even powers The rock, the spindle, and the sheers controul Of destiny, and spin her own free hours!"