, and has not had the advantage of a poetical historian to light him up in our imagination. I mean the great Prince of Conde. Now, though he is very unlike Shakespeare's Coriolanus, yet there is resemblance enough between them to make the comparison very amusing. There was much of Coriolanus' indomitable pride and horror of mob popularity when he offended Beaufort and his kingdom in the halles, when, though as 'Louis de Bourbon' he refused to do anything to shake the power of the throne, he would not submit to be patronized by the mean fawning Mazarin. Not that the hard-hearted Conde would have listened to his wife and mother, even if he had loved them as Coriolanus did, or that his arrogance did not degenerate into wonderful meanness at last, such as Coriolanus would have scorned; but the parallel was very amusing, and gave me a great interest in Conde. And did you ever observe what a great likeness there is in the characters of the two apostates, Julian and Frederick the Great?'

'Then you like history for the sake of comparing the characters mentioned in it?' said Anne.

'I think so,' said Elizabeth; 'and that is the reason I hate abridgements, the mere bare bones of history. I cannot bear dry facts, such as that Charles the Fifth beat Francis the First, at Pavia, in a war for the duchy of Milan, and nothing more told about them. I am always ready to say, as the Grand Seignior did about some such great battle among the Christians, that I do not care whether the dog bites the hog, or the hog bites the dog.'

'What a kind interest in your fellow-creatures you display!' said Anne. 'I think one reason why I like history is because I am searching out all the characters who come up to my notion of perfect chivalry, or rather of Christian perfection. I am making a book of true knights. I copy their portraits when I can find them, and write the names of those whose likenesses I cannot get. I paint their armorial bearings over them when I can find out what they are, and I have a great red cross in the first page.'

'And I will tell you of something else to put at the beginning,' said Elizabeth, 'a branch of laurel entwined with the beautiful white bind-weed. One of our laurels was covered with wreaths of it last year, and I thought it was a beautiful emblem of a pure-hearted hero. The glaring sun, which
