king's firm friend;

Hampton Court attributed to the same artist. She has here all the Stuart countenance; an amiable but melancholy look, her crown on her head, and is robed in ermine. There is also a head of the king; of Gustavus Adolphus, the Honthorst, the painter to the court of Bohemia, by himself; a great number of the officers who fought in the king's wars; the queen's daughter as an abbess; Charles II. and James II., and their queens; Princes Rupert and Maurice, and Dukes of Richmond and Brunswick again; Duke of Richmond again, full-length; Prince Henry. In the Bohemia Room, you have the queen again, full-length, with six daughters and four sons. In the Vandyke Room, are the Countess of Bedford, the daughter of Lord Harrington, who was educated with the Princess Elizabeth; two daughters of Elizabeth. On the Staircase are Rupert and Maurice again; a fine portrait of Lord Craven, and another in armour; Duchess of Orleans, daughter of Charles I., by Vandyke. In the Library, Charles II. in buff and cuirass; the Duchess of Cleveland, said to be by three masters, Lely, Dobson, and Kneller. In the Drawing Room, full-lengths of the King and Queen of Bohemia, by Honthorst. The king is represented in armour, with a surcoat of velvet lined with ermine. The sceptre is in his hand, and the crown, which was a most uneasy one to him, on his head. It is a fine portrait, expressing great mildness of character. Elizabeth is in black, richly adorned with pearls. We have here again Charles I., by Mytens; and full-lengths of Maurice and Rupert, in their youth, in buff. In the Beauty Parlour, so called from the portraits

of the beauties of Charles II.'s court formerly hanging there, are now Charles I. and his queen, three-quarter-lengths, by Vandyke, painted at the request of Elizabeth. They are crowned, and Henrietta is presenting Charles with a laurel-wreath. The king was evidently drawn in an hour of domestic comfort; and his countenance is more cheerful and happy than you see it any where else. In the Hunting Parlour, are the beauties of Charles II.'s court. They are said, many of them, to be by Lely, but they are merely small heads, and not very striking.

Perhaps so many portraits of the Stuart family are not to be met with in any one place besides, as these which were chiefly collected by the affection of Elizabeth. There is none, indeed, like the grand equestrian Vandykes of Charles I. at Warwick Castle, Windsor, and Hampton Court; but there are many of a high character, and some nowhere else to be found. These render a visit to Combe well worth making; but besides these the Abbey contains many admirable subjects by first-rate masters. Vandyke, Reubens, Carravagio, Lely, Kneller, Brughel, Teniers, Mereveldt, Paul Veronese, Rembrandt, Holbein, and Albert Durer. Amongst them I may particularly mention fine and characteristic portraits of Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Thomas More, General Monk, Lord Strafford, Vandyke by himself, Honthorst by himself; heads of the Saxony Reformers, by a Saxon artist; Lot and his daughter, by Michael Angelo. There is also a very curious old picture of a lady with a golden drinking horn in her hand, and a Latin legend of Count Otto, who hunting in the forest, and seeing this lady, asked to drink out

of her horn, for he was dreadfully athirst; but on looking into it, he was suspicious of the liquor, and pouring it behind him, part of it fell on his horse, and took off the hair like fire.

The Gallery is a fine old wainscoted room; the cloisters are now adorned with projecting antlers of stags, and black-jacks. There are old tapestry, old paintings, old cabinets, one made of ebony, tortoise-shell and gold; and the house altogether has that air, and those vestiges of old times which must, independent of its connexion with the Queen of Bohemia, give it great interest in the eyes of the lovers of old English houses, and of the traces of past generations.

Mrs. Jameson, in her interesting "Visits at Home and Abroad," thus speaks of Elizabeth and of the most striking event in her history, that of occasioning the celebrated "ThirtyYears' War."

"MEDON.-Do you forget that the cause of the ThirtyYears' War was a woman?

"ALDA.-A woman and religion; the two best or worst things in the world, according as they are understood and felt, used and abused. You allude to Elizabeth of Bohemia, who was to Heidelberg what Helen was to Troy.

"One of the most interesting monuments of Heidelberg, at least to an English traveller, is the elegant triumphal arch raised by the Palatine Frederic V. in honour of his bride-this very Elizabeth Stuart. I well remember with what self-com

her name.

placency and enthusiasm our Chief walked about in a heavy rain, examining, dwelling upon every trace of this celebrated and unhappy woman. She had been educated at his country seat, and one of the avenues of his magnificent park yet bears On her, fell a double portion of the miseries of her fated family. She had the beauty and the wit, the gay spirits, the elegant tastes, the kindly disposition of her grandmother, Mary of Scotland. Her very virtues, as a wife and a woman, not less than her pride and feminine prejudices, ruined herself, her husband, and her people. When Frederic hesitated to accept the crown of Bohemia, his high-spirited wife exclaimed, 'Let me rather eat dry bread at a king's table than feast at the board of an elector;' and it seemed as if some avenging demon hovered in the air, to take her literally at her word, for she and her family lived to eat dry bread; ay, and to beg it before they ate it; but she would be a queen. Blest as she was in love, in all good gifts of nature and fortune, in all means of happiness, a kingly crown was wanting to complete her felicity; and it was cemented to her brow with the blood of two millions of men. And who was to blame? Was not her mode of thinking the fashion of her time, the effect of her education?

Who had

Put in her tender heart the aspiring flame

Of golden sovereignty?

THE poetry of Scott has been eclipsed by his prose. He had the singular fortune to see his poetic fame diminished by a cause which carried with it its own consolation,-the vast success of those prose romances which came after his metrical ones,-prose in outward form, but abounding in all the elements of poetry, in such force and extent as gave him no mean claim to the title of the second Shakspeare. 'Twas a proud circumstance, and one which can happen rarely in the