was no doubt composed by Lord Burghley himself. It commences thus:

"If it is asked who is this old man in a kneeling posture, venerable from his gray hairs, arrayed in robes of state, knight of the order of the garter; who also are these two noble ladies, splendidly attired in their robes, and who are those at the heads and feet of these ladies kneeling? you will learn all these particulars from the following discourse of the old man :

"She whose image is farthest off was-alas! was-my Mildred, a wife exceedingly endeared to me, the other was my most beloved daughter, Anne. Mildred, my wife, lived with me most affectionately for a period of forty-three years, and was a sharer of all my fortunes, both in prosperity and in adversity, during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI., Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth, who now most happily sways the sceptre.""

old

In a similar strain, which partakes somewhat of the garrulity of age, he goes on, at great length for a monumental inscription, describing his wife; his daughter Anne, with her children; his son Thomas, afterwards Earl of Exeter, with his children; his son Robert, afterwards the celebrated Earl of Salisbury, who had been recently married; and his daughter Elizabeth, who, as stated in the inscription, died immediately on the death of her husband, William Wentworth; the whole pervaded by a tone of deep, solemn feeling, and of ardent, conjugal and paternal affection-of affection particularly towards his deceased wife and his daughter Anne. Having described the virtues of Anne, he adds, "At length, to the great grief of myself and of her mother, being snatched away from us, she yielded up the spirit to God who gave it, upon which I and my wife,

1542.

Thomas was Burghley's son by his first wife, Mary Cheke. He was born 5th May,

* Robert was married in August, 1589, about four months after his mother's death, with his father's consent, to Lady Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Lord Cobham, and one of the ladies of the queen's privy chamber.

The entire inscription is printed in Crull's Antiquities of Abbey Church of Westminster, vol. i., pp. 71-78.

with many tears, caused her body to be placed under this monumental stone. Not long after, the mother followed the daughter, and although I never seriously think of her without tears, yet some things present themselves which seem somewhat to mitigate my grief." He then proceeds to specify her devotion to the study of the Scriptures and of the Greek fathers, her liberality in encouraging learning, her charity to the poor, and her worth as a wife and mother. Having next described the three small female figures at the heads of Lady Burghley and her daughter, and the statue of the youth at their feet in the attitude of kneeling, he says, "But to what purpose is it for me to go on? I will make an end of speaking and lamenting, and will affirm this only, that this spectacle is to me so full of grief, that although the sweet children of fairest promise that are left me, offer some mixed consolation, yet neither these four, exceedingly dear as they are to me, nor my beloved eldest son Thomas, nor all who have sprung from him, and who are now alive, grandsons and grand-daughters to the number of eleven, to whom also I add the sweet little boy, William Paulet, son of my grand-daughter, Lucy Cecil, by William Paulet, son and heir of the Marquis of Winton, will ever efface the sadness which cleaves to me from these distressing events." As a striking proof of the intensity of his affection for his deceased wife, and daughter Anne, he again and again, in the remaining part of the inscription, returns to speak of their virtues, as if, in his sorrow, he could find no greater luxury than in lingering, in melancholy thought, upon these objects of his attachment, and in constantly speaking about them.

The virtues and talents of his wife in particular were never erased from his memory. About two years after her death, still feeling the vacancy she had left in his heart and house, and that, from his advanced age, he must soon be called to follow her, he expressed a wish-as, after such a lengthened period of laborious and anxious service he was well entitled to do-to resign his office, and to spend the remainder of his days in retirement. The queen, who had afforded him such decisive and long-continued proofs of confidence

and attachment, could not think, without the deepest regret, of the final loss of his invaluable services, the more especially as she could discern in him no traces of impaired mental vigour, and, at her earnest solicitation, he was diverted from his purpose, and continued to his death to direct, with the same ability and success as ever, the affairs of government, maintaining the authority of the sovereign and the public tranquillity, notwithstanding the opposition of a powerful Roman Catholic faction.

ANNE COOK E,

ister.

LADY BACON.

NNE COOKE was the second daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, by his wife, Anne Fitz-Williams. She was born about the year 1528, probably at Giddy Hall, in Essex. Under the eye of her parents she received the same learned and religious education as her sister, Lady Burghley; nor was she inferior to her sister in natural talents, in acquired accomplishments, and in Christian worth. She was, in particular, exquisitely skilled in the Latin, Greek, and Italian tongues. These qualifications procured her, at an early age, the honourable appointment of governess to Edward VI., whose education, in co-operation with her father and Sir John Cheke, she superintended; and to her instructions may not unreasonably be attributed, in part at least, the early piety and uncommon attainments of that young prince. The care taken by his preceptors to imbue his mind with the principles of the Protestant religion, has, indeed, been made a ground of reproach by writers of a certain class,' who have congratulated themselves on his early death, from the apprehension that, judging from the papers on religious questions which he left behind him, had his reign been prolonged, England would have been cursed with the calamity of a polemical monarch.

1 D'Israeli, in his Amenities of Literature, vol. ii., p. 145,

Passing the early part of her life amidst the conflict between Popery and Protestantism, which was agitating England, the new system seeking to overthrow the old, and the old seeking to exterminate the new, and having been instructed by her parents in the reformed faith, she had her attention early turned to theological inquiries; and entering, with all the ardour of a strong and active mind, into the study of the great points in dispute between Protestants and Romanists, she mastered that controversy. In these inquiries she had ample assistance from numerous publications then in circulation, from the sermons preached in defence of the truth, from the New Testament in the original Greek, which she was able to read, from the whole Scriptures in the vernacular tongue, and from intercourse with learned men.

Her father's house being the resort of the most eminent Reformers of that period, both English and foreign, she had thus an opportunity of meeting with many personages celebrated for learning, eloquence, and piety. Among the foreign Reformers who frequented her father's house was Bernardino Ochino, an Italian divine,' whom persecution had driven from his native country, and who, after various wanderings in Switzerland, Germany, and France, had repaired to England in the end of the year 1547, being then in the sixtieth year of his age, on the invitation of Archbishop Cranmer, and exercised his talents as a 7 preacher among the Italian Protestant refugees in London. This divine, who possessed highly popular gifts as a preacher, having published a volume, consisting of twenty-five short sermons, in Italian, about the half of which relate to the abstruse doctrine of election, treated, however, in a popular form, and the rest to miscellaneous subjects, Anne displayed her industry and skill in the Italian language by translating the sermons into English. In undertaking this task, she was partly influenced by the reputation which Ochino had acquired as a pulpit orator in his own country, where persons of all ranks and sexes, monarchs, bishops, and cardinals, some of them frenzied persecutors of the Protestants, had listened with almost un

1 His birthplace was Siena, a city of Tuscany.