ysician, hardly courtly to
fallen majesty, replied, "Madam, fear not that; for you are already
mad." Henrietta had lived to contemplate the awful changes of her reign,
without comprehending them.

Waller, in the profusion of poetical decoration, makes Henrietta so
beautiful, that her beauty would affect every lover "more than his
private loves." She was "the whole world's mistress." A portrait in
crayons of Henrietta at Hampton-court sadly reduces all his poetry, for
the miraculous was only in the fancy of the court-poet. But there may be
some truth in what he says of the eyes of Henrietta:--

Such eyes as yours, on Jove himself, had thrown
As bright and fierce a lightning as his own.

And in another poem there is one characteristic line:--

---- such radiant eyes,
Such lovely motion, and such sharp replies.

In a MS. letter of the times, the writer describes the queen as "nimble
and quick, black-eyed, brown-haired, and a brave lady."[203] In the MS.
journal of Sir Symonds D'Ewes, who saw the queen on her first arrival in
London, cold and puritanic as was that antiquary, he notices with some
warmth "the features of her face, which were much enlivened by her
radiant and sparkling black eye."[204] She appears to have possessed
French vivacity both in her manners and her conversation: in the history
of a queen, an accurate conception of her person enters for something.

Her talents were not of that order which could influence the revolutions
of a people. Her natural dispositions might have allowed her to become a
politician of the toilet, and she might have practised those slighter
artifices, which may be considered as so many political coquetries. But
Machiavelian principles, and involved intrigues, of which she has been
so freely accused, could never have entered into her character. At first
she tried all the fertile inventions of a woman to persuade the king
that she was his humblest creature, and the good people of England that
she was quite in love with them. Now that we know that no female was
ever more deeply tainted with Catholic bigotry, and that, haughty as she
was, this princess suffered the most insulting superstitions, inflicted
as penances by her priests, for this very marriage with a Protestant
prince, the following new facts relating to her first arrival in England
curiously contrast with the mortified feelings she must have endured by
the violent suppression of her real ones.

We mu