pose: You were the first, I might almost say, the heavenly example of preferring truth to the spirit of party. For though you had sent for the man, on account of his extraordinary eminence as a scholar and his defence of royalty, and received him with the utmost respect; yet upon the publication and your very impartial perusal of my Reply,' when you found that he stood convicted of the grossest corruption and vanity, of having advanced many frivolous and many extravagant positions (beside many palpable self-contradictions, which on your personal application to him, it is said, he was unable either to explain or to justify) you discontinued from that time your particular attentions to him, lowered your estimate of his talents and his learning, and against the general expectation obviously showed yourself most favourably disposed toward his adversary. For what was urged by him against tyrants, you maintained, had no reference to you: whence you enjoyed both the feeling, and the credit, of having always acted from the best of motives. Your conduct, indeed, satisfactorily proves, that you are not a tyrant; and this explicit declaration of your opinion still more clearly evinces, that you do not feel yourself to be one. O happiness beyond my hopes!-for I affect no eloquence, except that which is connected with the persuasive power of truththat, when I had fallen upon such a period of my country as rendered it necessary for me, in the defence of an arduous and invidious cause, to seem to impugn the rights of all kings, I should have met with so illustrious, so trulyprincely an interpreter of my integrity, to bear witness that I had assailed with my censures not kings, but tyrants, their bitterest and most pestilential foes! O magnanimous Queen! guarded and fortified on every side by a degree of virtue and wisdom more than human! Not only thus to peruse a work, which might seem at the first glance directed against your royal right and dignity, with an impartial and unruffled mind, an incredible candor of feeling, and an undisturbed serenity of countenance; but also to pronounce such a verdict against your advocate, as to be generally supposed to have adjudged the victory to his opponent! With what respect, what veneration ought I not always to treat you, whose high virtue and magnanimity (to yourself so honourable) have to me proved so fortunate, as to have exempted, me from all discreditable suspicion with other sovereigns, and by this important and infinite kindness bound me to your service for ever! How much ought the subjects of other princes to value, and your own both to value and to hope from your justice and equity, when in an affair appearing directly to involve your royal dignity, you were thus observed deciding with as little agitation and as much composure about your own rights, as you do about those of your people! You have, likewise, judiciously formed a prodigious collection of books, and other literary monuments; not as if you yourself could thence derive any information, but that your subjects might by them be enabled to appreciate your virtue and wisdom; wisdom, which if she had not taken entire possession of your mind, and presented herself as it were to your actual view, could never by any intensity of study have generated in you such an unparallelled attachment. Hence it is, that we discover with so much astonishment your celestial vigour of understanding, your perfect quintessence of intellect, in those high northern latitudes; unshrunk and unquenched by the frosts of a cheerless and tempestuous climate, and wholly insensible to the influences of a rough and intractable soil. That land of mines on the contrary, with all a stepmother's harshness to others, to you a genial parent, appears to have produced you by one mighty effort, a mass of virgin gold. I should call you the daughter and heiress of the great Adolphus,* * Christina succeeded her father, Gustavus Adolphus, on the throne of Sweden in 1633. After a reign of twenty one years, however, she resigned it to her cousin Charles Gustavus, reserving only to herself an annuity of 20,000 crowns; and, upon his death in 1660, wished in vain to re-ascend it. In 1689, she died at Rome, the religion of which through the influence of the Jesuits she had embraced before her resignation; were you not to be placed above him in proportion as wisdom surpasses strength, and the arts of peace the pursuits of war. Henceforth, exclusive commendations shall no longer be lavished upon the Queen of the South. The having previously, in compliment to the reigning Pontiff, (Alexander VII.) assumed the additional name of Alexandra." * 1 Kings. In reference to this Sovereign, Bochart (one of the Swedish school) wrote the following distich: Illa docenda suis Solomonem invisit ab oris: Undique ad Hanc docti, quò doceantur, eunt. The reader may not be displeased to see half a dozen others, written by M. Sarrau on receiving either from Vossius, or from Christina herself, a gold medallion bearing on it's obverse her head as Pallas Galeata, with an olive-branch before her, and on the reverse a Sun. I. Attica falsa fuit, sed vera hæc Arctica PALLAS; II. Si coluisse voles PHOEBUM et coluisse MINERVAM, III. Objectam PALLAS GALEATA aspectat olivam: IV. Imperio digna hæc facies armata MINERVE, V. SOL, radios expande tuos; ecce æmula terris North, likewise, has now it's queen; worthy not only to visit the sage king of Israel, or any one that may hereafter resemble him, but to be herself visited by others as a model of every royal virtue, and a heroine deserving of universal regard to whose high deserts no earthly eminence is equal, since her lowest praise is that she is a queen, the sovereign of so many nations. But it is not her lowest praise, that she herself feels it to be so, and meditates something much loftier than empire-a circumstance, which alone raises her above most kings. She may then, if such be the sad destiny of Sweden, renounce the crown; but she can never lay aside the queen, having proved herself worthy to sway the sceptre not of Sweden alone, but of the universe. For my digression into the well-earned panegyric of this excellent princess, I trust I VI. Attica quæ quondam fuerat, nunc Arctica, PALLAS (Sarrav. Epist. ccxxx.) • That this panegyric was not well-earned,' will perhaps be concluded by many of those, who may read Warton's Not. ib. p. 488, and the affecting story of her treatment of the Marquis Monaldeschi. Milton's partiality to her, however, we may farther collect from the verses written under a por trait of the Protector, which was sent to her as an official compliment. Those lines, Bellipotens virgo, &c. (Wart. ib.) ascribed to Milton positively by Newton and Birch, and inde H |