The Sun.
London, England, 1859-04-08 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Queens of Scotland. By Agnes Strickland.
Vol. VIII. Blackwood and Sons.

Herewith terminates Miss Agnes Strickland's
superb and protracted series of royal biographies.
It is a noble design, nobly executed. Upon its
completion we would here very earnestly proffer its
author our most cordial felicitations. From its
Commencement to its conclusion we have watched
its progress with unflagging interest. We have
noted, in its instance, the perpetual evidences of
the conscientious devotion to one end, and that a
very noble one, of the energies of a mind rarely
gifted—a mind unwarped, as far as we can judge,
by a single prejudice, resolute in research, genial
in imagination—an intellect at once poetic and
antiquarian. Sixteen noble volumes have now been
contributed by Miss Agnes Strickland to our
national historical library. Those volumes are now
permanently, established upon the bookshelves ot
the United Kingdom as classic as authoritative.
They help to throw a broad and vivid flood of light
upon the annals writ in bolder characters by the
hands of men like Hume, and Lingard, and Mac-
aulay. It was surely the happiest notion in its way
—that of penning the memoirs of the Queens
of England, and of the Queens of Scotland, and of
the English Princesses connected with the Royal
succession of these islands ! That notion was hap-
pily conceived, moreover, by the very woman in
every essential respect qualified for the production
of the proposed biographies. And the idea was
appropriately formed by her, and has been trium-
phantly carried into effect by her, during the peace-
ful reign of one of the greatest, certainly the best-
beloved, of all our female Sovereigns. When Miss
Strickland brought to a close the first—and we
cannot, of course, but still designate it the principal
—division of the Royal bioraphies, that popularly
known and honoured as "'The Lives of the Queens
of England," the authoress gave to her readers a
distinct, and at the time a most welcome promise,
that she proposed afterwards "to fill up several
unavoidable chasms in the history of female British
Royalty," by means of a. sequel to be entitled, in
its turn, "Lives of the Queens of Scotland and.
English Princesses connected with the Royal
Succession of Great Britain." That promise
has now, in truth, been most faithfully
fulfilled.' Its successful performance is visible in
these eight luminous volumes—" the parallel links
of the chain here carried down," as our authoress
remarks in her closing sentence, " to the death of
Queen Anne, and the accession of the reigning
dynasty to the throne of the Britannic Empire in
the person of George 1., the eldest son of Sophia the
Electress of Hanover, on whose posterity the
royal succession was settled by Parliament as
the only Protestant branch of the royal
House of Stuart, now happily. represented by, their
august descendant our Sovereign Lady Queen Vic-
toria." It is one of the most remarkable, as •it is
also one of the most distinctly proven facts in our
national history that—notwithstanding all the
apparently total and abrupt changes.of dynasties—
an unbroken chain of relationship connects the
whole sequence of our sovereigns, from Wil-
liam the Conqueror down to her present Most
Gracious Majesty Victoria, Queen of Great
Britain and Ireland, and of all the depen-
dencies thereof in Europe, Asia, Africa, America,
and Australasia. And ever. further back, say ge-
nealogists, reign by reign to Alfred the Great, back
even to the fabulous days of Arthur Pendragon..
Descending, however, from that momentary glance
at the mythic epoch, when, ' according to the
nursery rhyme,
"Good King Arthur ruled the land,
Ruled the land, ruled the land,"

we find ourselves lauded by this eighth volume at thi
last dynastic starting point in this stately march
of the English royal succession. Miss Strickland's
two concluding biographies being here appropriately
—Elizabeth Stuart, the Fist Princess Royal of
Great Britain, and Sophia the Ele2tress of Hanover,
with whose name, we have of us beconie so very
intimately acquainted by means of its perpetual
repetition in the Oath of Abjuration. Englishmen
after Englishmen, generation after generation, by
hundreds and by thou Sands, have -been repeating
these familiar words,—" And I do faithfully
promise to maintain, support, and defend, to the
utmost of my power, thinencasei Succession
ieado:f
Et &c.,eec tCr:oirs
aswnondf•
stands which
limitedsuecess to the hbeyPar
Hanover, and the heirs of her body being Protes-
tants." Here, charmingly told, is the melancholy
history of thq life of that august lady, Speaking
of her occupation in , thus bringing her elaborate
design to its projected conclusion, our authoress
writes thus at the outset of this at once her eighth
and her sixteenth volume of royal biographies:—
It has been but the development of one purpose unswerv-
ingly pursued—that of tracing, by means of two series of
royal female biographies, the progressive march of civilisa-
tion and the interior life and domestic history of our coun-
try. Commencing with the Queens of England at the
earliest period when female influence was acknowledged in
the government of a court, our first series was brought
clown to the reign of the last monarch of the elder line,
and the accession of the present dynasty, whose hereditary
claims to the succession are derived from the two Princesses
whose lives occupy this volume namely, Elizabeth Stuart,
Princess Royal of Great Britain, afterwards Queen of
Bohemia, and Sophia, Electress of Hanover, the grand-
daughter and great-granddaughter of Mary Stuart; with
their lives, this, the second series of our royal biographies,
will close.
And with them, as we have said, they do close ac-
cordingly. The following is surely .a graceful
glimpse enough, in her early years, of Sophia the
Electress :
Among all her sisters, Sophia most resembled her ances-
tress Mary Queen of Scots in elegant height of stature,
delicacy of features, limbs, and complexion, and, above all,
in the sweet hilarity and charm of happy temper which
fascinated and delighted all that approached her. Both
her mother and her learned sister, Elizabeth, took infinite
pleasure in teaching this gracious and lovely child. She
became nearly as skilful with the pencil as her sister Louisa,
though her career of after activity prevented her from
sharing her artistical renown. Her master was the sane,
the kind and faithful Gerard Honthorst, the protege of their
grandfather and uncle, James I. and Charles I. Sophia .
was the companion of Louisa in her studies of the glorious
school of Flemish painting, as she was of her sister Eliza-
beth in her deep learning, under the care of Descartes.
Those who have read the letters of Sophia will remember
that she occasionally illustrates natural objects, when men-
tioned by her, with a sketch by her ever-ready pencil.
As a contrast to this, take the following graphic
record of the peculiar circumstances of her death
in 'her extreme old age, in her garden at Heren-
hausen
Meantime the aged Electress Sophia showed no symp-
toms of affliction of mind or body. She took her daily
walks at Herenhausen among her'trees and flowers. The
morning of June Bth, 1714, had been sultry, with fitful
claps of thunder; nevertheless Sophia took her usual walk
when the sun declined, attended by her granddaughter-in-
law, the Princess Caroline. A hasty summer-shower, with
the sun still shining, began to fall. Sophia threw the train
e w‘o‘rds sunk down. The Princess
ward, The Princess said, "Is not your Royal Highness
of her ouen robe over her headl
bfeolri
esvhee shelter, r
a,
but life had fled. Her death
1327plieedd for-
ward,
caught w kii
Electress,ntg her
tooea
and
da quickly cthhi
tyfhe?ell'
s'
occurred by the sun- dial in the garden at Herenhausen just
as the shadow fell on the hour of six.
And as equally, if not still more interesting and
remarkable—take the commemorative note upon
the opposite page, recounting the extraordinary •
circumstances attendant upon the demise of her
favourite savant,

THE GREAT LEIBNITZ :
Leibnitz did not long survive his patroness; hcvdied at
Hanover, November 14, 1716, in harness, for a pen was in
one hand, and a book in the other, and proofs before him.
He was seventy years of age, a great sufferer with gout and
stone, although abstemious in his habits. No wonder he
suffered, for he has been known to be three weeks without
Hefac
face was
witho f a middlenii
ld
studious air. About the age of fiftyhe began to think of
stature,leaving hthisinarmin-cphearisronev, evneryte gpoletaosibn. eo.d.in
marriage—made an offer to a lady, who said "she would
further consider the matter." "So will I," replied the
German Newton; but he never renewed his love-suit to
her or any other fair demurrer. He was buried on the
esplanade at Hanover—not in consecrated ground, we fear ;
—yet that broke no squares with Sophia's philosopher.
A monument, in the form of a small Grecian temple, was
raised over his remains by command of Caroline when Prin-
cess of Wales, which bears this simple inscription, " Ossa
Leibnitii." He loved money, and left 600,000 crowns, only
20,000 of which were put out at interest ; the rest of his trea-
sure was found hoarded among chaff and other horse-food in
corn-sacks about his storeroom and granary. The house that
Leibnitz died in had been purchased for him by his generous old master, Ernest Auguste, who likewise settled a stipend
to keep it in repair. It is one of the quaintest and most
curious buildings in the ancient part of an old city, remain-
ing still an object of veneration to the citizens of Hanover,
and is pointed out elevated above the noise of the main
street, Schmiede Strasse, on which it is nevcrneless
situated. The philosopher studied and wrote in a g irret
which looks out from under a gible. In the royal library
is the chair in which ho was found dead, and before it is the book he held when the last summons came. In 1790 a
public monument was raised by the people of Hanover to
their sage, surmounted with a portrait bust. It stands on
a mound fenced off by a railing on one side of Waterloo-
place.

As appropriate embellishments to the volume there
are fac-similes of the autographs of both Sophia
and Elizabeth, together with a frontispiece likeness
of the former, copied from the portrait presented to
Lord Raby, and a vignette of the latter served at
table by the grotesque and awkward Taborites.
Again, on closing the work, we would offer the ac-
complished biographer our sincere and cordial
felicitations upon a completion of it in every respect
so worthy of her "high. argument," and of her
own already eminent reputation.