thine!" tenderly continued the mild St. Agnes. "Thou hast lent her to the Lord, and he will keep her for thee; and perchance, even in this world, when all thy princely offspring beside this little one are parted from thee by their several fortunes, thou mayest resort for comfort and sympathy to the filial heart, which will not cherish thee less dutifully, because thou hast preferred for thy child a heavenly inheritance before a perishable kingdom; and hast lain the sacrifice, unspotted by the world, thus early at the feet of thy Creator."

These words of the lady abbess of Dartford nunnery, were uttered in a prophetic spirit. By thus yielding up to God, and her sense of religious duty, the child of her tenderest affection, Elizabeth was unwittingly laying up for herself a source of sweetest comfort and consolation, against the evil days when a black and final eclipse fell on her greatness and her joys; and the descendant of royalty—the wife of a king, the mother of princes, the queen of a mighty nation—was held captive within the realm which had owned her for its sovereign, on the throne of which her daughter Elizabeth still sat with nominal sovereignty.

The mean and rancorous spirit of Henry VIIth never forgave the real or imputed wrongs of Richmond; nor had he consented but with extreme reluctance, and as the only means of securing himself on the throne of England, to mingle his Lancastrian blood with the hated stream of York, by a marriage with Edward's

daughter. His secret antipathy to that ill-fated princess manifested itself, throughout their union, by a series of unkindnesses and contemptuous slights that would probably have proceeded to more openly insulting lengths, had not the cautious monarch politically abstained from all measures which might tend to agitate the question of his dubious rights to the crown, and those of Elizabeth, more cordially admitted by the English nation.

But on the queen dowager, the especial object of his aversion, he wreaked without fear or scruple the avengeful malice of his hateful temper.

On the frivolous pretence of punishing her for the imputed crime of having yielded up to Richard's guardianship the persons of her five daughters, Henry condemned the unfortunate Elizabeth to perpetual imprisonment in the abbey of Bermondsey; by a refinement of cruelty, rejecting her earnest petition to be allowed the choice of her prison, and permission to retire to Dartford nunnery, where (though the friend of her youth had lately been removed by death) the society of her daughter, her still dearest and most dutiful child, would have rendered more than endurable the lot of her captivity. But within the gloomy walls of Bermondsey was the widowed queen fated to languish out the remaining years of her joyless existence; deprived even of the filial sympathy and pious cares of her four married daughters (the royally mated, but wretched wife, Elizabeth, and her three sisters), all united to English subjects; and strikingly exemplifying, by the

contrast of those inferior alliances to the splendid marriages early contracted for them by the deceased Edward, how impotent is the will of man and the power of princes, when Providence is pleased to annul his decree and set at nought their councils.

Not content with immuring the queen dowager in a conventual prison, the mean-souled Henry farther indulged his inveterate dislike, by restricting her (under colour of guarding against intrigue and secret influence) from all intercourse with her married daughters, beyond the miserable comfort of receiving from them, at long intervals, a cold and short visit of heartless ceremony. And such is the baneful influence of worldly cares and courtly policy over the best affections of our nature;-and such, alas! is the proneness of human hearts, seared by selfishness and ambition, to shun and to forget the unfortunate and the absent, that there was little of bitterness to any, but the worse than childless mother, in Henry's tyrannical restriction; and her daughters gradually relaxed even in the poor unfrequent proofs of filial duty and affection, wherewith it was still permitted them to cheer the captive loneliness of their royal parent. After the lapse of a few years, it was well nigh forgotten-not only by the nation at large, but by her immediate family and more familiar friends-that Elizabeth--the widowed queen of Edward IVth, the stepmother of England's reigning monarch, and of three proud and puissant nobles-still languished out the years of her desolate