essions, had failed to disperse the anxiety of
thought. Few can peruse the interesting life of Isabella of Castile
without being struck by the fact, that even as her public career was
one of unmixed prosperity for her country and herself, her private
sorrows and domestic trials vied, in their bitterness, with those of
the poorest and humblest of her subjects. Her first-born, the Infanta
Isabella, who united all the brilliant and endearing qualities of her
mother, with great beauty, both of face and form, became a loving
bride only to become a widow--a mother, only to gaze upon her babe,
and die; and her orphan quickly followed. Don Juan, the delight
and pride and hope of his parents, as of the enthusiasm and almost
idolatry of their subjects, died in his twentieth year. The hapless
Catherine of Arragon, with whose life of sorrow and neglect every
reader of English history is acquainted, though they sometimes forget
her illustrious parentage; her sorrows indeed Isabella was spared, as
she died before Henry the Eighth ascended the English throne. But
it was Juana, the wife of Philip, and mother of Charles V., whose
intellects, always feeble, and destroyed by the neglect and unkindness
of the husband she idolized, struck the last and fatal blow. And she,
whom all Europe regarded with unfeigned veneration--she whom her own
subjects so idolized, they would gladly have laid down a thousand
lives for hers--she fell a victim to a mother's heart-consuming
grief.[A] Who then, after perusing her life, and that of how many
other sovereigns, will refuse them, the meed of sympathy, because,
raised so far above us in _outward_ things, we deem the griefs and
feelings of common humanity unknown and uncared for? To our mind,
the destiny of the Sovereign, the awful responsibility, the utter
loneliness of station, the general want of sympathy, the proneness to
be condemned for faults or omissions of which they are, individually,
as innocent as their contemners, present a subject for consideration
and sympathy, and ought to check the unkind thoughts and hasty
condemnation, excited merely because they are placed in rank and
circumstances above us. A King of kings has placed them there, and a
Universal Father calls them His children, even as ourselves.

[Footnote A: Isabella had been previously attacked by dangerous
indisposition, from which, however, the natural strength of her
constitution would have enabled her in some degree to rally; but