or familiarity was admitted. Debts were rigorously exacted from the dead Leicester and the living Hatton; but the strangest tale of all is that of her pecuniary dealings with the first and noblest Earl of Essex. This gallant nobleman, on his expedition to Ireland, entered into a partnership with the Queen, by which they were to divide its expenses; but as the Earl wanted ready money, he borrowed 10,000l. of the Queen at 10 per cent., and mortgaged various estates, under penalty of annual forfeiture of a manor of 501. yearly rent. The details may be studied in Captain Devereux's volume: suffice it to say, that many a fair manor had to be sold to defray the cravings of the royal moneylender, and that his young successor inherited 'little or nothing towards the reputation of an earl's estate.' Elizabeth was coarse and savage in her personal tastes; we should almost think beyond the standard of her time, though from her capacity she might be fairly expected to have risen above it. We are told that she never mentioned the name of God without a marked pause and the addition of the epithet Creator; but there must be an implied exception of those cases in which the name was employed as the vehicle of the frightful oaths in which she constantly indulged. It was the vice of the age, but a vice from which a woman, a Queen, and such a Queen, might have been reasonably expected to be free; a vice which we can hardly conceive attaching to her sister or to her sister's victim. The same may be said of the barbarous nature of her favourite diversions. The reign of a maiden Queen might well have been selected as the period to wipe out the national disgrace that the pleasures of Englishmen invariably involved pain to some living creature. But Elizabeth delighted in bull-baitings and bear-baitings beyond all recorded example; even the harmless ape was called upon to contribute by its sufferings to the royal diversion. In the nobler sports of the field the skill and the excitement seem to have been less prized than the actual butchery; the stag, hunted down by man and beast, was brought to receive its death-wound from a hand which might more gracefully have been raised to command its deliverance. On some occasions she strangely mingled devotion and cruelty, while she ransacked the frozen zone to find objects for her inhuman pastime. She went to hear a sermon at St. Mary's Spital, two white bears following in a cart-we need not say for what purpose they were destined at the conclusion of the discourse. Did the Church of England contain a divine courageous enough to have filled up the interval with an exhortation from the text-The righteous man regardeth the life of his beast; but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel'? From From the inferior animals the step was in those days counted but small to the inferior types of the human race. Here Elizabeth has the additional guilt, not merely of continuing, but of commencing iniquity. In her reign, and under her auspices, England became first infected with the guilt of the slave-trade. Such were the many failings which disfigured the fair fame of 'Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland; Defender of the true, ancient, and Catholic Faith; most worthy Empress from the Orcade Isles to the mountains Pyrenee.' We have had to deal mainly with her private and personal character; her more strictly political crimes or errors -if the first we must mention deserve either name-the imprisonment and death of the Queen of Scots, the embowellings of the Papist, and the burnings of the Anabaptist, are beyond the limits of our present subject. We have only to conclude with the remark already made, that her very failings form, in truth, the clearest testimony to her general greatness. The more we condemn the woman, the more we must admire the Queen. Vain, irresolute, capricious, mean, cruel, jealous, jeoparding, if not surrendering, the choicest jewel of the female character, she never lost the love and veneration of her people: she has never failed to shine among the most glorious lights in the page of history. How great, then, must have been the intellectual grandeur, the capacity for government, the discernment of merit, which have in the eyes alike of her contemporaries and her successors obliterated moral failings of so deep a dye.! Her faults are not even on the grand scale of criminality which might have seemed in a manner in harmony with the grandeur of her nobler qualities. They are the petty vices and weaknesses of a vain, malicious, and mean-spirited woman. Yet this same woman takes her place, by common consent, among the very ablest of our rulers: forty-five years of glory did England owe to her, between the contemptible administration of her immediate forerunner and her immediate successor; and the longer we contemplate her chequered nature the more we are impressed with the truth of the dictum which we quoted at starting, that in Elizabeth there were two wholly distinct characters, in one of which she was greater than man, and in the other less than woman. * Such was the style of her proclamation. See Strickland, vol. vi. p. 66. ART. ART. VIII.-1. The Speech of Lord Lyndhurst, delivered in the House of Lords on Monday the 19th June, 1854. London. 1854. 2. The Russians in Bulgaria and Rumelia in 1828 and 1829; during the Campaigns of the Danube, the Sieges of Brailow,, Varna, Silistria, Shumla, and the Passage of the Balkan by Marshal Diebitch. From the German of Baron von Moltke, Major in the Prussian service. 1854. THE THERE is an instinct of self-preservation in all communities. That instinct has overcome the aversion to war which is one of the prevailing sentiments of our time. The present conflict with Russia is regarded in England as essentially a people's war, upon the principle affirmed in the brief old maxim that princes fight for victory, the people for safety.' The issues. of this strife, no matter how glorious to our arms, involve no gain to our power. The contest demands immediate and costly sacrifices: the sacrifices are yielded without a murmur. It proffers. no accession of dominion; dominion was proffered as the reward of peaceful connivance. Egypt and Candia did not tempt our diplomacy, and the knowledge of the meditated bribe has inflamed still more the resentment of the nation. Yet the danger we apprehend from the enemy does not menace us in our more evident and material interests apart from the general cause of the human race. We fear no invasion of our shores-there is no ancient grudge of rival commerce. Even an attempt on our Indian possessions seems to us too remote and chimerical for substantial alarm. Nor, on the other hand, is the dormant mili tary spirit aroused by the remembrance of hereditary contests. Here, our remembrances are of alliances, not warfare. It may be said that political differences supply the place of hostile reminiscences; that between England and Russia there is the necessary antagonism between free opinion and despotic rule. Unques tionably such antagonism exists, and contributes towards that enthusiasm for the war, which, nevertheless, it could never in itself have created. All educated men recognise the same distinction as the Greeks did between the established order of states and the individual ambition of rulers. The Greeks called Polycrates, who subjugated his native Samos, a tyrant; they did not call Xerxes a tyrant, but the Great King. National animosities when purely political are felt rather for those who have risen to be autocrats than those who receive autocracy in right of birth, and exercise it by the sanction of the governed. Yet the Emperor of France is popular, and his alliance, the boast of the former government, is the strength of the present; while all men, educated or ignorant, join in their dread of the Czar, who is called father' by his people, and who, till recent events, enjoyed a high reputa tion even among free states for constitutional temperance in the exercise of hereditary power. Nor is the war with Russia popular alone amongst those portions of our community who consider themselves the warmest admirers of democratic liberty, and would fain be the iconoclasts of all images embodying the idea of irresponsible authority. While Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright have done what lay in their power to damp the ardour of the populace they have been accustomed to sway-while Whigs have been hesitating and Reformers timid-the chiefs of that party held to be the least fascinated by abstract theories of liberty, and most disposed to respect the forms of established convention, have been the first to insist upon vigour in the prosecution of the war and guarantees in the re-establishment of peace. We must look then to some cause for the favour which a conflict at once so vast and so indefinite-so onerous in exactions—so barren in profit 'to dominion and commerce-has found with all classes and sections of our people. The cause is concentered in one word-a word that comprises a thought more important than dominion or commerce-than hereditary rivalship-than even liberty itself-for it is the end and development of liberty; that word is Civilisation. The people have felt that this is a war in which all states that can boast to be civilised-all that desire fair expanse for internal energies, and complete independence of foreign obstacles in the way of domestic progress, have a vital and permanent interest. We repeat that the popular feeling enlisted in this contest has been the instinct of self-to preserve what?-Civilisation. No sympathy so intense and universal is ever in the main erroneous, It is to the multitude what the advocates of mesmerism contend that clairvoyance is to the uninstructed individual—often: erring in detail, and blundering in the remedy prescribed, but strangely correct in the general diagnosis of disease. Here, what is detected by clairvoyance is approved by science. What the people obey as instinct, all true statesmen confirm as policy. That which the throne of the Western Cæsars was to Theodoric, the throne of the Eastern Caesars would be to Nicholas. The barbarian would pass from the outskirts of civilization into its citadel; the destinies of the world would be gradually changed; and if, as in those primal conflicts of nature typified in the old Greek theogony, light were to return at last, and a Helios come to replace the Hyperion it had dethroned, it would be as a new sun looking over a new condition of the earth. The consequence to Europe of such a calamity it would be impossible to exaggerate. Russia, at this time, happily for mankind, is proverbially inert and feeble for the purposes of aggression. A mode of conscription so odious that her recruits must be kept in chains until they are broken into drill-a length of march across her own dominions that exhausts and decimates her armies before they arrive at the place of action-the necessity of transporting vast magazines of food, with a commissariat as defective as is that of all nations where human life is held in contempt-these and many other causes, too well known to require detail, justify that report of her weakness as an invading power, which the four great military authorities of Europe made to their respective states. Give her Constantinople-let the Osmanlis be expelled or exterminated-and these causes cease, or become but of trivial importance. On the frontiers of the civilised world, amidst the granaries of the East, distances vanish; Nature supplies the defects of the commissariat. It is one thing to march an army from Moscow, another to launch it upon Europe, fresh and vigorous, from the barracks of Stamboul. No country in the globe unites like Turkey in Europe facilities for extension of empire and security from assault. The difficulties which a Russian army has now to encounter in the invasion of Turkey may give some notion of what Turkey would be in the hands of a Russian conqueror: earth could scarcely afford a mightier stronghold for a mightier ravager. Ever since the time of Peter the Great the tendency of Russia is invariably towards maritime outlets for its gigantic resources: but what outlet like the Bosphorus ? to use the words we have seen ascribed to a Russian writer, 'St. Peter thirsts for the bath of St. Constantine.' That the Czar should have disavowed all immediate intention to occupy permanently the capital of the Bosphorus is natural enough; that the policy of any statesman should have been influenced by such disavowal seems to us not more an unwise credulity in the professions of an individual who had every motive to deceive, than a blindness to the inevitable action of natural circumstances upon national ambition. Take from the cabinets of France or England any one of their most sagacious ministers, place him in the councils of the Russian Czar, suppose him asked for his opinion as a politician what should be the object to which Russia should aspire for the fullest development of her own resources, and the most commanding influence over the fate of her neighbours would he not answer, Constantinople'? It is true, if you permit him a conscience, he might say with Aristides, on the proposition for destroying the fleets of the Hellenic allies, 'the most advantageous, but not the most honourable.' Individuals have conscience, dynasties have none. No political calculator puts forth his ultimate objects: he seeks, |