with all force to attain the port, and with a joyful cry salutes the descried land; that the traveller is never quiet nor content, till he be at the end of his voyage; and that we, in the mean while, tied in this world to a perpetual task, tossed with continual tempests, tired with a rough and cumbersome way, cannot yet see the end of our labour but with grief, nor behold our port but with tears, nor approach our home and quiet abode but with horror and trembling. This life is but a Penelope's web, wherein we are always doing and undoing; a sea open to all winds, which, sometimes within, sometimes without, never cease to torment us; a weary journey through extreme heats and colds, over high mountains, steep rocks, and theivish deserts.And so we term it, in weaving this web, in rowing at this oar, in passing this miserable way. Yet lo, when death comes to end our work; when she stretcheth out her arms to pull us into this port; when, after so many dangerous passages and loathsome lodgings, she would conduct us to our true home and resting place; instead of rejoicing at the end of our labour, of taking comfort at the sight of our land, of singing at the approach of our happy mansion; we would fain, (who would believe it?) retake our work in hand, we would again hoist sail to the wind, and willingly undertake our journey anew. No more then remember we our pains; our shipwrecks and dangers are forgotten; we fear no more the travels nor the thieves. Contrariwise, we approach death as an extreme pain, we doubt it as a rock, we fly it as a thief. We do as little children, who all the day complain, and when the medicine is brought them, are no longer sick; as they who all the

week run up and down the streets with pain of the teeth, and seeing the barber coming to pull them out, feel no more pain. We fear more the cure than the disease; the surgeon than the pain. We have more sense of the medicine's bitterness, soon gone, than of a bitter languishing, long continued; more feeling of death, the end of our miseries, than the endless misery of our lives. We fear that we ought to hope for, and we wish for that we ought to fear."

If this be not a partial specimen, we may very safely pronounce the Countess to have been a correct, nervous, and spirited writer of prose; who wielded her native language with the ease and dignity of a veteran scholar, and far excelled her brother in this department of literature. Almost every writer who has incidentally mentioned Lady Pembroke, has compared her with Sir Philip Sidney, for personal resemblance, and similarity of taste, of talent, and of disposition. A contempory, whose name is not at hand, relating an incident in the life of her younger son, in which he failed to resent an insult offered to him, remarks, that the Countess, then at an advanced age, on hearing of this want of spirit in her offspring, tore her hair; that she possessed the lofty character of her brother, who had no advantage over her, but by the chance of nature in being a man, which was more than compensated by the feminine beauty of her person. Of the truth of this latter remark, we can only judge by the portraits which have been handed down to us. From these, we should be led to suppose that her features, though strongly marked, and full of expression, were of too masculine a character to be consistent with female grace.

The excellent engraving published by Mr. Park from a scarce print, represents her no longer young, with a long, thin, and muscular face, a mouth slightly turned up at the angles, a firm, thin, and well defined upper lip, a projecting chin, large prominent eyes, and the nose of an ancient hero. Her hair is turned back, and curled into innumerable small ringlets, behind which a circle of fur is so disposed as to resemble a halo of rays. She wears the large open laced ruff of her time, and an ermined mantle to denote her rank; the more completely to exhibit her character, her left hand displays an open book. She looks the very queen of learning, the president and patroness of literature.

We will now attend her ladyship to the region of Parnassus, and first exhibit her in competition with the divine Spenser, bewailing the untimely death of her noble brother. In that poet's "Astrophel," Lady Pembroke's elegy is introduced by the following stanza:—

And first his sister, that Clarinda hight,

That gentlest shepherdess that lives this day;
And most resembling both in shape and spright
Her brother dear; began this doleful lay;
Which lest I mar the sweetness of the verse,
In sort as she it sung I will rehearse,

Aye me! to whom shall I my case complain,
That may compassion my impatient grief?
Or where shall I unfold my inward pain,
That my enriven heart may find relief?
Shall I unto the heavenly powers it show,
Or unto earthly men that dwell below?

To heavens? ah! they alas! the authors were
And workers of my unremedied woe;
For they foresee what to us happens here,

And they foresaw, yet suffered this be so.

From them comes good, from them comes also ill;
That which they made, who can them warn to spill?

To men? ah! they alas! like wretched be,
And subject to the heaven's ordinance,
Bound to abide whatever they decree;

Their best redress is their best sufferance.
How then can they, like wretched, comfort me,
The which no less need comforted to be?

Then to myself will I my sorrow mourn,
Since none alive like sorrowful remains,
And to myself my plaints shall back return,
And pay their usury with double pains:
The woods, the hills, the rivers shall resound
The mournful accents of my sorrow's ground.

Woods, hills and rivers, now are desolate,

Since he is gone the which did all them grace; And all the fields do wail their widowed state, Since death their fairest flower did late deface:

The fairest flower in field that ever grew

Was Astrophel! that was we all may rue.

What cruel hand of cursed foe unknown

Hath cropt the stalk that bore so fair a flower?
Untimely cropt, before it well were grown,
And clean defaced in untimely hour:

Great loss to all that ever him did see,

Great loss to all but greatest loss to me.

Break now your garlands, O ye shepherd lasses,
Since the fair flower that them adorned is gone;
The flower that them adorned is gone to ashes;
Never again let lass put garland on :
Instead of garland, wear sad cypress now,
And bitter elder, broken from the bough.

Nor ever sing the love-lays which he made;
Who ever made such lays of love as he?
Nor ever read the riddles which he said

Unto yourselves to make you merry glee:
Your merry glee is now laid all abed,
Your merry maker now, alas! is dead.

Death, the devourer of all world's delight,
Hath robbed and reft from me my joy;

you,

Both you and me, and all the world, he quite

annoy.

Hath robb'd of joyance, and left sad Joy of the world, and shepherds pride, was he; Shepherds! hope never like again to see.

O death! that hast of us such riches reft

Tell us, at least, what hast thou with it done? What is become of him whose flower hore left Is but the shadow of his likeness gone? Scarce like the shadow of that which he was, Nought like, but that he like a shade did pass.

But that immortal spirit, which was deck'd
With all the dowries of celestial grace;
By sovereign choice from the heavenly quires select,
And lineally deriv'd from angel's race,

O what is now of it become? aread!
Aye me! can so divine a thing be dead?