ithout any result? Assuredly not. By her
active intervention the English Government obtained the privilege that
the palace of its ambassador at Madrid should enjoy the right of an
asylum against all the proceedings of the Inquisition, and the same
privilege was acquired for British vessels in the ports of Spain. A
Protestant nation thus opened in the capital of the Catholic King a
perpetual refuge against the rigours of the Holy Office. It was a great
innovation; it was the first blow dealt by the spirit of modern times
against that of those Spanish institutions which represented the most
faithfully the blind and almost barbarous religion of the Middle Ages.

It is difficult to decide whether it was a misfortune or an advantage to
her to figure in the gallery of the ducal memoir-writer, Saint Simon.
That portrait, sketched with a breadth and freedom by which her womanly
character has somewhat suffered, depicts her as devoured by a thirst for
power, without even allowing the important services which she rendered
to the two nations to be so much as suspected. The great master has not
given us a bust-portrait of Madame des Ursins, but a full-length
likeness, with that lavish excess of colour flung upon the canvas which
imparts more life than truth, more of relief than perspective to the
majority of his pictures. If in that brilliant delineation the great
lady shines with a somewhat theatrical majesty, the national object
which she pursued is in no wise indicated--a grave though natural
omission on the part of a man in whom a passionate fondness for details
almost always blinds him to the collective point of view, and who is not
the first of portraitists only because he is the least reliable of
historical painters. He, nevertheless, in her case, always manifests the
feeling that she is worthy of a careful, special, and patient study, and
he points out such study for the edification of posterity. "She reigned
in Spain," he remarks, "and her history deserves to be written."

We will now reproduce his elaborate portrait of the Princess. "Rather
tall than short of stature, she was a brunette with blue eyes whose
expression incessantly responded to everything that pleased her; with a
perfect shape, a lovely bosom, and a countenance which, without
regularity of feature, was more charming even than the purely
symmetrical. Her air was extremely noble, and there was something
majestic in her whole demeanour, and a grace so natural a