all who crowded to do homage to her charms. And yet
her heart must have been somewhat hard--and that we know it was
not--if she could have inhaled the air of France, or trod its sunny
soil, without recollections which must have dimmed her eye at the
thoughts of the past, even whilst breathing a thanksgiving for the
present. Somewhat less than five years ago, she had been taken thither
a weeping bride; youth, nature, inclination, nay, hope itself,
sacrificed to that expediency by which the actions of monarchs are
regulated. We are accustomed to read these things so much as mere
historical memoranda, to look upon them in their cold unvarnished
simplicity of detail, like the rigid outlines of stiff old portraits
which we can scarcely suppose were ever meant to represent living
flesh and blood--that it requires a strong effort to picture these
circumstances to our eyes as actually occurring.

In considering the state policy of the thing--and the apparent
national advantage of the King of England's sister being married to
the King of France--we forget that this King of England's sister was a
fair young creature, with warm heart, gushing affections, and passions
and feelings just opening in all the vividness of early womanhood; and
that she was condemned to marry a sickly, querulous, elderly man, who
began his loving rule by dismissing at once, even while she was "a
stranger in a foreign land," every endeared friend and attendant who
had accompanied her thither; and that, worse than all, her young
affections had been sought and gained by a noble English gentleman,
the favourite of the English king, and the pride of his Court.

Surely her lot was hard; and well might she weepingly exclaim, "Where
is now my hope?" Little could she suppose (for Louis, though infirm,
was not aged) that three or four short months would see her not only
at liberty from her enforced vows, but united to the man of her heart.

Must there not, while watching the tilting of her graceful and gallant
husband, must there not have been melancholy in her mirth?--must there
not, in the keen encounter of wits during the banquet or the
ball--must there not have mingled method with her madness?

Who shall record, or even refer to the hopes, and feelings, and
wishes, and thoughts, and reflections of the thousands congregated
thither; each one with feelings as intense, with hopes as individually
important as those which influenced the royal King of France, or