niary help for any one case recorded, but rather to enlist general sympathy to prevent similar trials; she will, however, thankfully receive any offers of employment calculated to meet the demand presented.]

(To be continued.)

XV.-ELIZABETH, PRINCESS PALATINE.

PART I.

AMONG the lively pictures which are scattered through the letters of Sorbière, one of the liveliest is the bird's-eye view he gives his readers of the Dutch retreat of Descartes, and his visit to him there in 1642. Philosophy could not have found a more charming solitude, we think, as we read of the little castle at Cyndegeest, with its garden and orchards; and beyond, the rich Netherland meadows, broken by clumps of trees, above which many a tower and spire rises from the level landscape. Past the castle flows the old Rhine, a silent highway from Cyndegeest into the outer world. Descartes takes a boat and visits Utrecht and half a dozen other towns in one day. And moreover, beyond those woods on the horizon lies the Hague, within an easy walk from Cyndegeest, past Dutch countryhouses white and glittering, past their trim Dutch gardens, gay, just as they are in our own time, with every species of bulbous floriculture. Then the Hague itself,-it must indeed be a handsome town to make the Frenchman forget his Paris so far as to pronounce it inferior to no capital in Europe. Such a swarming, busy crowd, so much picturesque variety of costume on the quays and in the market-place; and "at this time," he tells us, "the Hague is proud with the state of three courts." First, the military court of the Prince of Orange, with its two thousand nobles and their retainers, riding through the leafy avenues in the glory of their buffalo-skin waistcoats, their high boots, long swords, and orange-colored scarfs. Next, the court of the States-General; grave Dutch gentlemen, wearing the suits of black velvet, the broad collars, and square beards, which Netherland art has made familiar to our eyes. 'And," adds Sorbière, we may well consider the court of the Queen of Bohemia and her daughters to be that of the muses and the graces, whither the beau monde flocks from all parts to pay homage to the talents, the virtues, and beauty of the princesses."

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One of the sisters then living with their widowed mother at the Hague, while the five brothers were trying to push their fortunes in the world, is only remembered through her melancholy death, which . happened in the midst of the rejoicings on her marriage with the

Prince of Transylvania, but the three others had each her especial characteristics, and her chosen pursuit; they were respectively renowned as the first scholar, the first artist, and the first lady among all the princesses of Europe. The youngest, Sophia, "the first lady,' and destined to be the ancestress of "the first gentleman in Europe," gave early promise of the high qualities she displayed in after life. The second, Louisa, was then a beautiful sunny girl, with much more of the Frenchwoman than the German in her temperament: for her artistic tastes, the queen had greater sympathy than for the severer studies of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth. Tradition, for

no portrait is preserved of her, reports this princess as by no means so beautiful as Louisa and Sophia, though a noble figure, a face remarkable for the intelligence and mildness of its expression, clear blue eyes, and a profusion of golden hair, make up our visionary picture of her into what could hardly have been less than beauty. Her talents and acquirements might have rendered any woman illustrious, and were, during many dark years of misfor.une, the lustre of her house. She read, wrote, and spoke several lan'guages, both ancient and modern, and her mind had full as great an aptitude for science and literature; her learning was always made graceful by modesty, and a sweet humility tempered a judgment unusally solid. Such was the princess whom Descartes found at the age of twenty leading a studious retired life in her mother's little court, and whose philosophic friend and monitor he forthwith became. While he remained at Cyndegeest, he directed her studies in person; and when the enmity of Boetius and the followers of the old school drove him from the neighborhood of Utrecht, he kept up an active correspondence with his pupil. His letters, which may be considered for the most part philosophical essays, have been preserved, but after his decease the princess destroyed her share of the correspondence, chiefly, no doubt, on account of its confidential character; for it is easy to see from the master's letters, which afford a faithful reflex of the inward and outward life of his pupil, that she laid bare many an "unsunned grief" to the sympathy and counsel of her truest as her wisest friend. Descartes was a great letter-writer, but these are decidedly the most interesting of all his epistles, both for their own merits, and our consciousness of the salutary influence such teaching must have exercised over the princess. The chief axiom of the Cartesian ethics is that the greatest good, and consequently the highest happiness, rests entirely and independently of outward circumstances in the mind itself, and is to be obtained by self-culture, and mastery over the passions: this axiom the master makes the text of the correspondence. The aim of his teaching was to lead his pupil, to take, not the most true and noble alone, but the happiest views of life and its events. Throughout he inculcates a noble self-dependence, by which, he says, the wise man becomes master not only of impressions from without, but in some degree even over such real calamities as sorrow and

sickness. He maintains that a calm and wholesome state of mind induces bodily health; he even recognises in content of mind some subtle power to render fortune herself more favourable,—a cheerful belief, which he supports from the authority of Socrates, and bases on moral and psychological grounds. Everyday grievances are to be considered as household enemies, from whom we cannot part company, and must therefore be all the more on our guard against. Our true safeguard against these troubles is, that we divert the mind and imagination from dwelling upon them, dealing with them through the understanding alone. Like most persons of an imaginative temperament, the princess was prone to escape from the petty cares and trials of everyday life into the speculative and transcendental. Against this last infirmity of noble minds Descartes sedulously sets himself. He gives a freer range to her studies, warns her constantly from the shifting sands of metaphysics, directing her attention to the more practical departments of philosophy, especially the natural sciences. Nor was he less a warm and faithful friend than a lofty teacher. Every fresh calamity which befel her house wrings words of good cheer from him to the princess, who, if she could not always take comfort from the philosophy, must have found some measure of it at least in the deep sympathy and earnest friendship of the philosopher.

Elizabeth's condition fully needed whatever, soothing and abstracting influences are to be found in high pursuits. Born at Heidelberg, December 26th, 1618, she was the eldest daughter of the Elector Frederick V. and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I. of England. The misfortunes of her family commenced the October after her birth, when the Elector, urged by his wife's ambition, left the Palatinate to take possession of the Bohemian throne. Most of our readers are familiar with the history of the short-lived reign of the Winter King, as Frederick was called, because he only kept one Christmas in his capital. Frederick had not a single quality by which he might have retained the crown he had grasped, and speedily alienated the affections of his new subjects. Stunned by the single defeat sustained by his generals before Prague, he gave up his kingdom without further resistance; and, stripped of his hereditary States by a Spanish invasion, fled, a dishonoured and penniless exile, to hide his head under the protection of the Dutch republic.

The troubles of her house fell lightly on Elizabeth during her childhood. She had, when her parents left Heidelberg for Bohemia, been consigned to the charge of her grandmother, Juliana,-a princess distinguished in her day for superior talents and force of character. Under her care Elizabeth grew a studious, thoughtful child, shy and reserved to strangers, but very sweet and frank in her manner to those she loved, until her tenth year, when she joined her parents at the Hague, and found herself for the first time among a large family of younger brothers and sisters, on whom the queen seems

to have lavished all her affection, and to have kept but a scanty measure back for the child who had been a stranger to her mother from her cradle. She found a warmer welcome, however, from her eldest brother, Prince Frederick Henry. The brother and sister more resembled each other in talents and disposition than the rest of the family; they were tenderly attached, and the boy's letters are still extant, in which he sends his favorite sister little tokens of affection from Leyden, and expresses his hopes of seeing her "restored to all good fortune in Heidelberg." The first grief Elizabeth ever knew was when the prince, at the age of fifteen, was drowned in the Zuyder Zee, before the eyes of his unhappy father. The king two years afterwards, in 1631, a disappointed, brokenhearted man, followed his son to the grave, leaving to his children an unsubstantial patrimony of high-sounding titles, and of claims well-nigh as empty as those titles.

In 1633, the peace of Prague gave a death-blow to the hopes cherished by his widow, that her eldest son, Charles Louis, would be reinstated in his father's electorate. This treaty not only barred the succession to her family, but expressly specified her jointure, and the scanty maintenance doled out to her children, to be solely owing to the emperor's clemency, and not based on any legal claim. While the Palatine family were smarting under this fresh humiliation, a suitor presented himself to the young Elizabeth in the person of Ladislaus, King of Poland, who opened his wooing by a pledge to the queen, in case he should become her son-in-law, to do battle for the ancestral rights of Charles Louis. The Queen of Bohemia eagerly hailed this gleam of hope, and her daughter, though as indifferent as a princess of fifteen would naturally be towards a lover of eight and thirty, dutifully acquiesced. But the wooing did not prosper; a fanatical party in the Polish Diet insisted that their sovereign should not marry a heretic. Among the orthodox princesses of Europe he was free to make his choice, but no heretic queen ever had sat, or should sit, on the throne of Poland. We give part of a speech on the question in a stormy council, as a curious specimen of the time and people. The orator, addressing Ladislaus himself, said, "The Mother of God has taken yourself and your kingdom under her august protection; marry a heretic, and the blessed Virgin and prosperity will forsake you together. Heretics are not to be trusted,"-here the speaker pointed significantly to a Calvinistic fellow-noble," they all go down to eternal perdition, and will drag you with them,-an ugly place for a king to be found in." In vain Ladislaus, who had set his heart upon this marriage, mainly for the sake of alliance with the royal family of England, stormed, entreated, and even wept by turns before his nobles; in vain he sent one ambassador to London to beg that Henrietta Maria would get her heretic niece over to England and convert her into a good Catholic, and another to the Hague, to induce Elizabeth to change her creed; the princess on her side

steadily refused to yield the point, and the Polish Diet being equally firm, after three years of negotiations the match was finally broken Elizabeth, who had meanwhile tranquilly pursued her studies, always expressing displeasure at the respect with which her family treated her in consideration of her prospects, showed no small satisfaction when the matter was thus decided, and proclaimed her fixed resolution never to encourage another suitor, but to devote her future life to her favorite pursuits. Had the bachelor princes of Europe foreseen what great inheritance Elizabeth Stuart's eldest daughter would have conveyed to her descendants, her learned leisure would hardly have been so uninterrupted; but no prophet of those days could foretell the events which made the son of her sister Sophia heir to the British crown.

In her determination and her studies Elizabeth was by no means solitary among her countrywomen. For the most part, history shows us that while men impress a special stamp upon their age, the general character of women is determined by the popular opinion of their time and country. So, during the preceding century, that of the Reformation, when theologians held that woman had not been, equally with man, made after the image of their Maker, and taught her inferiority in every respect as an article of faith, the culture, both intellectual and moral, of women was at its lowest ebb in Holland and Germany. The next century was better disposed to do them justice; the scholars of the day invited feminine sympathy in their pursuits, and the question, whether the two sexes might not with advantage co-operate in literature and science, was matter of public debate in the universities. Nor were the other sex slow to obey the challenge. There arose, chiefly among the higher orders of society, what may be fairly called a learned class; for the most part women of vigorous intellect, of manly mind, great simplicity of character, deep religious feeling, and thoroughly imbued with the stern Protestantism of the age. The Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek were their daily study; they were treated with great courtesy by the learned, who received them as pupils, as intellectual friends and companions. To this class several personal friends of Elizabeth belonged. Such were Anna Fischer, Susanna de Baerle, whose Latin verses the world has long forgotten, though she deserves to be remembered as the mother of Christian Huygens, the inventor of the pendulum, and the discoverer of the rings of Saturn. Foremost among these was the once famous Anna Schurmaun, whom the princess proposed to herself as a model, and with whose encyclopædiac acquirements she might well be dazzled. To profound learning Anna Schurmaun united unusual skill in many elegant accomplishments; she was versed in the languages both of the east and west. Several of her writings, verse and prose, in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, are extant; but for the beauty of her wood carvings, her flower painting, and embroidery, in which the needle vied with the pencil, we must take