 and be assured, my breast must be cold as the earth which then will cover it, ere that feels one wound which lodges the fair Matilda's heart.— Oh, let me worship the wife ordination of Providence! If amidst all the evils

fate and imprudence have overwhelmed me with, I still weakly feel a regret at pronouncing a last adieu, what must I have endured had I been the chosen! but why by such remembrance disturb her I love!—Yet dear is the sensibility, adored Matilda—Oh let the tears which now enrich your cheeks, be wholly Sydney's!
And they were wholly Sidney's! A sad presentiment heightened the anguish of his parting, by telling me we never more should meet. It remains not for my weak pen to paint the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney; It has employed the noblest. Even envy and malice dropt involuntary tears, while friendship was exhausted in vain lamentations. As to me, I set no bounds to me sorrow, and every reason which once confined my esteem for him to my own bosom, dying with him, I mourned as for a darling brother; and thus perpetuated the secret hatred of his window, who, weak woman, envied me even the melancholy privilege of bewailing him.

Anxiety for the fate of Lord Leicester, which this event must necessarily excite, too soon gave way to a still nearer care. In vain I imputed my continual indispositions to grief: time confirmed an apprehension which had frequently alarmed me immediately after my Lord's departure. I found but too plainly, that imprudent love had produce a new misfortune, and that I bore about a living testimony of my marriage, from which the worst consequences might arise.
Ah, unhappy babe, thy mother's anguish foreran thy birth! Deprived by a sad combination of circumstances of a welcome from thy mother, throbs of terror were thy first symptoms of existence. This accumulation of misfortune seemed to benumb me reason. I knew not what to resolve on. I saw myself almost in my royal mother's melancholy predicament when I was born. "Alas, perhaps I may to-morrow be entirely so, I would cry to myself; let me fly then while yet my prison gates are open." —The eye of

Elizabeth became yet more dreadful to me; I fancied every moment it dived into my heart, and death for ever seemed to surround me in forms yet dearer to me than my own.
My sister's better sense easily discerned how dangerous and how vain a project flight must prove. "You, she would say,
