me, against the life of the queen. An agent of
the police gave notice of an intention to poison her. The queen did not
believe it. She believed that her enemies meant to break her spirit by
calumny; but she had no fear of poison. Her head physician, however,
chose to take precautions. He desired one of her ladies to have always
at hand a bottle of fresh, good oil of sweet almonds, which, with milk,
is an antidote against corrosive poisons. He was uneasy at the queen's
habit of sweetening draughts of water from a sugar-basin which stood
open in her apartment. He was afraid of this sugar being poisoned. The
lady therefore kept a great quantity of sugar pounded in her own
apartment, and always carried some packets of it in her bag, from which
she changed the sugar in the basin, several times a day. The queen
found this out, and begged she would not take the trouble to do this, as
she had no fear of dying by that method. Poor lady! She said sometimes
that, but for her family's sake, she should be glad to die by any means.
She was indeed unhappy; but she had not yet learned how much more
unhappy had been multitudes of her people before they hated her as they
now did. She grieved to see her daughter growing up grave and silent,
and her little boy of five years old surrounded by sorrowful faces, and
subject to terrors at an age when he should have been merry, and smiled
upon by everybody near him: but she knew nothing of the affliction of
thousands of mothers who had seen their children dying of hunger on
heaps of straw, in hovels open to the rain; or of the indignation of
thousands more who had seen their lively, promising infants growing
stupid and cross under the pressure of early toil, and in the absence of
all instruction. All this had happened while she was paying 15,000
pounds for a pair of diamond ear-rings, and using her influence in
behalf of bad advisers to the king. She might wish to die under her
sorrows; she little knew how many had died under their most intolerable
sufferings.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER EIGHT.

THE ENTERPRISE.

The longer the revolution went on, exhibiting more and more fully the
incapacity of the king, the more were the intoxicated people tempted to
exult over him, sometimes fiercely, and sometimes in mockery. It is not
conceivable that they would have ventured upon some things that were
said and done, if the king had been a man of spirit; for men of spirit
command personal resp