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commemorative of her worth and condemnatory of the inhumanity

exercised towards her dead body, composed by eminent scholars of the university of Oxford, were posted upon the church doors. As might be expected from men who had escaped, as from a shipwreck cr earthquake, the barbarous and shocking cruelties of the preceding reign, these verses, which are printed in the work already referred to as our chief authority in this sketch, are written with something ke sensations of shuddering horror at the persecuting and sanguiLary spirit that had raged, and with strong feelings of gratitude to Providence for the deliverance of the nation, when brought to the leink of ruin by Popery and tyranny. The first of them, written by James Calfhill, begins thus:-"The Pope at that time ruling supreme, the violent herd of wolves entered and destroyed the pious Bock of the Lord. The mitred leaders entered, tyrants entered, filling houses with slaughter and blood. Nor could the bodies of living saints, burned on the dreadful funeral pile, satisfy these savage beings; they cast out heretical corpses, not long buried, from their resting places, and exercised their ferocity on rotten bones. Neither honourable feeling, nor reason, nor piety, could subdue their outrageous violence. A woman who, an exile from her native country, brought great honour and succour to our city-a woman on whose life there was no stain, and who, when on her death-bed, had given a clear testimony of her faith in God, being torn from her grave and despoiled of, what is above all, her honourable reputation, suffered the most shameful indignities, by being thrown into a filthy place.” The writer next compares these cruel persecutors to Achilles, who, Laving slain Hector, dragged the dead body of the Trojan hero at his hariot round the walls of Troy, and only restored it to Priam, Hector's father, for honourable interment, on receiving a large pecuniary sm. Next passing to the altered auspicious state of affairs, he

Nor could that truculent treading down power continue long, Christ being the avenger. Better fortune, exceeding their expectaas, has now returned to the wretched, and fostering piety possesses 1 Homer's Iliad, book xxii.

its ancient abode. Therefore, now receive, O Katharine, the honour of thy old sepulchre-now possess that to which thy piety entitles thee."

In another of these poems the author says, "The heathen dreaded violating an old sepulchre, whilst yet reason was their sole teacher. Romulus and Solon prohibited by law any even to speak ill of the dead. Darius, having dared to violate the tomb of Semiramis, did not find gold, but was met with this inscription, 'Ah miserable man! ah! you would be unwilling to disturb the hidden receptacles of the dead, were you not wickedly persuaded by idleness, the belly, and riches.' But ye Popish devotees, members of the tyrant Antichrist, commit crimes more hideous than Darius. He, pitifully laughed at, lost the gold; ye heap up wealth by means of disinterred bones. He was deceived; ye practice deception upon all, in giving putrid bones to be the objects of our worship. But, O ye shavelings, ye gave not the bones of Katharine Martyr to be honoured, ye dug them up to be dishonoured in a dunghill. Say, what has she deserved? What crimes has she, being dead, committed? If while in life she did mischief, she has done nothing of the kind since her death. 'She committed crimes,' you say, 'in not offering incense to Baal; when alive she was guilty of heresy.' O happy Mrs. Martyr! taken away by a propitious death; hadst thou, on whom, when dead, punishment has been inflicted for the heretical noxiousness of thy life, been forcibly taken, when living, out of the desolated flock, thou shouldst have been burned a martyr, even as thou wert Martyr by name?" The author closes by exulting at the thought that the Papists had been unable, by fire and sword, and all their persecuting appliances, to prevail, God having interposed for the deliverance of the oppressed.

Thus did the Reformers, on the accession of Elizabeth, vindicate the dead, whose sepulchres the persecutors in their frantic rage had violated.

The Papists having been twitted by the Protestants for the base treatment of Mrs. Martyr's remains, as an apology for their conduct they laboured to bring discredit upon her reputation. This called

forth rejoinders, in which her honest name was amply vindicated. Dr. George Abbot, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, in an excellent work against the Romanists, defends her memory from their malignant defamatory attacks. He testifies both to her worth and ingenuity, and his testimony is of greater value as resting on information derived from persons to whom she was personally known. "She was," says he," reasonably corpulent, but of most matron-like modesty; for the which she was much reverenced by the most. She was of singular patience, and of excellent arts and qualities. And, among other things for her recreation, she delighted to cut plumbstones into curious faces, of which, exceedingly artificially done, I once had one, with a woman's visage and head attire on the one side, and a bishop with his mitre on the other, which was the elegant work of her hands. By divers yet living in Oxford [1604] this good woman is remembered and commended, as for her other virtues so for her liberality to the poor, which by Mr. Foxe, writing how she was treated after her death, is rightly mentioned. For the love of true religion and the company of her husband, she left her own country to come into England in King Edward's days."1

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UEEN ELIZABETH'S history is inseparably connected with the general history of the Reformation in her day. Whatever were the defects of her character and government, she was certainly an extraor dinary woman, and the instrument, in the hand of Providence, of preserving the reformed cause from extermination, not only in England, but in all its European establishments. A full narrative of her life we do not, however, here propose. This would carry us far beyond the limits of the present undertaking. Only some of the most prominent points in her history can be glanced at.

Elizabeth, second daughter of Henry VIII, by his queen, Anne Boleyn, was born at the royal palace of Greenwich, on the 7th of September, 1533.1 At her birth her fortune seemed bright and auspi cious; but the frenzied temper of her father soon overclouded even her

1 State Papers, vol. i., p. 407.

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infancy with calamity; and in early life, till she ascended the throne, she was exposed to much mortification, suffering, and danger. She had not completed the third year of her age, when the cruel fate of her mother deprived her of the affection of her father, who became alienated from the daughter of the queen whom he had murdered; and by the Parliament which met in June, the month after her mother's execution, her father's divorce from her mother was ratified; and she, as well as Mary, daughter of Katharine of Aragon, was declared illegitimate, and excluded from the succession to the crown, which was settled on the king's issue by Jane Seymour, or by any subsequent wife he should marry. Henry, however, soon after the birth of Prince Edward, restored both her and Mary to the right of secession by his obedient Parliament, and he specially recognized their right in his will.

Upon her father's marriage with Katharine Parr, Elizabeth, as we have already seen, prosecuted her studies under the superintendence of that queen,' who was so eminently qualified to imbue her mind with the principles of virtue, piety, and wisdom, to develope her powers of understanding, and to give refinement to her manners. Upon her father's death she was committed to the care of Katharine, but within a short time, the conduct of the unprincipled Lord Admiral Seymour, Katharine's fourth husband, who had presumed to take unbecoming liberties with the young princess, rendered it necessary to remove Elizabeth from the house of her mother-in-law. After Katharine's death he contemplated marrying Elizabeth, whose heart he bad certainly succeeded in gaining; but the lords of council interposed their negative, and laid the princess under stricter surveillance.

Elizabeth was first taught the Greek and Latin languages by William Grindal, an accomplished scholar, and the beloved friend of Roger Ascham, under whom he had prosecuted the study of classical learning at Cambridge during a period of seven years; and from an excellent capacity and steady application, aided by the assiduous ex2 Ibid., chap. iii., p. 232.

1 See Life of Katharine Parr, chap. ii., p. 203. 'Ibid., chap. iii., p. 237.

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