that he did more good with his words and presence, without striking
a stroke, than a great part of the army did with fighting to the
utmost.

It is an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of
Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet
AEschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a
ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his
teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of
Athenian heroes. Captain Bethune, without call or need, making his
notes, merely, as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom of the page, that
'it reminds him of the familiar lines--

For Widdrington I needs must wail,
As one in doleful dumps;
For when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps.'

It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the ballad of Chevy
Chase. It is the most deformed stanza[W] of the modern deformed version
which was composed in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration
of the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for serious poetry,
they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than a burlesque; the
associations which they arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous doggrel.

When to these offences of the Society we add, that in the long laboured
appendices and introductions, which fill up valuable space, which
increase the expense of the edition, and into reading which many readers
are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing which assists the
understanding of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate--when
we have declared that we have found what is most uncommon passed
without notice, and what is most trite and familiar encumbered with
comment--we have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them and go on
with our more grateful subject.

Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that of the
Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English constitution were limited
in the highest degree, was, notwithstanding, more beloved by her
subjects than any sovereign before or since. It was because,
substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it was given to
her to conduct the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of
change, and the