Greek, in which language Christina soon mastered the most celebrated writers, and even made herself acquainted with the fathers of the church. Nicolaus Heinsius esteems it the first felicity of his life to have been born in the same age as the queen; the second, to have been known to her; the third and most conspicuous, and that which he desires to proclaim to posterity, that he was not entirely displeasing to her. She employed him chiefly to procure for her precious manuscripts and rare books from Italy,--a commission which he executed with fidelity and success. The Italians began to complain that ships were laden with the spoils of their libraries, and that all the appliances of learning were carried off to the extreme north. In the year 1650 Salmasius appeared at the court of Stockholm. The queen had sent him word that, if he did not come to her, she would be forced to go to him; he resided in her palace for a year. Lastly, Des Cartes also was induced to visit her; every morning at five he attended her in her library, and it is affirmed that to his astonishment he heard his own ideas expounded, and deduced from Plato, by his youthful and royal pupil. It is not to be denied that in her conferences with learned men, no less than in her discussions with the senate, she displayed a most felicitous memory, a quick apprehension, and acute penetration. 'Her intelligence and her talents are highly remarkable," exclaims Naudæus, with astonishment; "she has seen every thing, read every thing, she knows every thing."

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Christina was indeed a wonderful product of nature and fortune. Α young and noble lady, she was utterly free from personal vanity. She took no pains to conceal that she had one shoulder higher than the other; though she had been told that her greatest beauty consisted in her luxuriant fair hair, she did not even pay the commonest attention to it: she was wholly a stranger to all the petty cares of life; so indifferent to the table, that she was never heard to find fault with any kind of food; so temperate, that she drank nothing but water. She never could understand or learn any sort of womanly works; on the other hand, she delighted to be told that at her birth she was taken for a boy; that when a little infant, instead of betraying terror at the firing of guns, she clapped her hands and behaved like a true soldier's child. She was a most intrepid rider; putting one foot in the stirrup, she vaulted into the saddle and went off at speed; she shot with unerring aim; she studied Tacitus and Plato, and sometimes entered

with more profound sagacity into the genius of those authors than philologists by profession; young as she was, she was capable of forming an independent and discriminating judgment on state affairs, and of maintaining it triumphantly amongst senators grown grey in commerce with the world. She threw into her labour the fresh and buoyant spirit which accompanies native perspicacity of mind; above all, she was penetrated with a sense of the high mission to which she was called by her birth; of the necessity of governing by herself. Never did she refer an ambassador to her minister: she would not suffer a subject of hers to wear a foreign order; she could not endure, she said, that one of her flock should bear the mark of another's hand. She knew how to assume a port and countenance before which the generals who made Germany tremble were dumb; had a new war broken out, she would assuredly have put herself at the head of her troops.

With a character and tastes of so lofty and heroic a stamp, it may easily be imagined that the mere thought of marrying of giving a man rights over her person-was utterly intolerable to her; any obligation of that kind which she might be supposed to lie under to her country she believed she had fully exempted herself from by fixing the succession: immediately after her coronation she declared that she would rather die than marry.

But could such a position as hers be maintained? There was something in it overstrained and forced-deficient in the equipoise of a healthy state of being, in the serenity of a natural existence content within itself. It was not inclination for business which precipitated her into it with such ardour; she was urged on by ambition and by a sense of her sovereign power and dignity-but she found no pleasure in it. Nor did she love her country; neither its customs nor its pleasures, neither its ecclesiastical nor its temporal occupation, nor its past history and glory, which she could not understand or feel: the state ceremonies, the long speeches to which she was condemned to listen, the official occasions on which she had personal duties to perform, were utterly odious to her; the circle of cultivation and learning, within which her countrymen remained stationary, seemed to her contemptibly narrow. Had she not possessed the throne of Sweden from childhood, it might perhaps have appeared an object of desire to her; but, as she had been a queen as long as she could remember, all those longings and aspirations of the mind of man, which stamp the character of

his future destiny, had taken a direction averted from her own country. Fantastic views and a love of the extraordinary began to obtain dominion over her; she recognised none of the ordinary restraints, nor did she think of opposing the strength and dignity of a moral symmetry, suited to her position, to passing and accidental impressions; in short, she was high-minded, intrepid, magnanimous, full of elasticity and energy of spirit; but extravagant, violent, studiously unfeminine, in no respect amiable, unfilial even, and not only to her mother,—she spared not even the sacred memory of her father when an opportunity offered of saying a sarcastic thing. Sometimes, indeed, it appears as if she knew not what she said. Exalted as was her station, such a character and demeanour could not fail to react upon herself, and to render it impossible for her to feel contented, attached to her home and country, or happy.

This unsatisfied and restless spirit frequently takes possession of the mind most strongly with regard to religion. Its workings in the heart of Christina were manifested in the following manner.

The memory of the queen dwelt with peculiar delight on her teacher, Dr. Johann Matthiæ, whose simple, pure, and gentle spirit gained her earliest affections, who was her earliest confidant even in all her childish affairs. Immediately after it had become manifest that no one of the existing ecclesiastical bodies would overpower the other, the expediency of a union of them was recognised by some few rightthinking men. Matthiæ was one of those who cherished this wish, and published a book in which he agitated the question of the union of the two protestant churches. The queen was strongly inclined to his opinion; she conceived the project of founding a theological academy, which should devote itself to the work of reconciling the two confessions. But the fiery zeal of certain inflexible Lutherans immediately rose up in arms against this project. A superintendent of Calmar attacked Matthiæ's book with fury, and the estates took part against it. The bishops admonished the queen's council to watch over the interests of the established religion of the country, and the high chancellor went to the queen, and made such vehement representations to her, that tears of vexation came into her eyes.

She now probably thought she perceived that it was not a perfectly disinterested zeal which set her Lutheran subjects in motion. She thought they wanted to cheat her with that peculiar idea of the Divine

Being which they placed before her, only that they might make her the tool of their own purposes. Their representations of God seemed to her unworthy of the divine nature.

The tedious sermons which she had long heard with so much weariness, and which she was compelled by the ordinances of the kingdom to listen to, now become insufferable to her. She often betrayed her impatience; she shifted her chair, and played with her little dog; but these signs of restlessness only served to strengthen the inexorable determination of the preacher to keep her the longer.

The temper of mind which such conduct on the part of the ministers of religion was calculated to generate, and which gradually alienated her from the religion of her country, was confirmed by the presence of learned foreigners. Some were Catholics; others, for example Isaac Vossius, gave occasion to suspect them of infidelity; Bourdelot, who had the greatest credit with her, having carried her successfully through a dangerous illness, and who was a man exactly fitted for a court,— full of knowledge and of powers of entertainment, and devoid of pedantry,-jested at every thing,-the pretensions of the learned and the sanctity of established creeds, and passed for a complete antisupernaturalist.

The young princess gradually fell into a state of insoluble doubt. It appeared to her that every positive religion was an invention of man; that every argument told against the one as much as against the other: that, in fact, it was indifferent which a man embraced.

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Yet she did not fall into absolute irreligion; she retained certain unshaken convictions: in her royal solitude of a throne she had found it impossible to dispense with thoughts of God; she even imagined that her station placed her one step nearer to his presence. Thou knowest," exclaims she, "how often, in a language unknown to vulgar souls, I have prayed to thee for grace to enlighten me, and vowed to belong wholly to thee, though I should sacrifice life and happiness." She connected this with her other peculiar ideas. I renounced all other love," says she, "and devoted myself to this alone."

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But would God have left man without the true religion?—an expression of Cicero's that the true religion could be but one, and that all the others must be false,-made the greatest impression on her mind,

The only question was, which was the true one?

It is no part of our present purpose to investigate arguments or to sift evidence. Christina repeatedly said that she found no essential errors of doctrine in Protestantism. But as her aversion to that form of Christianity arose from an original and ultimate feeling, which had only been rendered more intense by circumstances, so likewise, with an inclination as little to be explained or reasoned upon, she gave herself up with full and entire sympathy to Catholicism.

She was nine years old when she first heard any distinct account of the peculiar doctrines of the Catholic church; when she was told that it held celibacy to be meritorious, "Ah," exclaimed she, "how admirable that is! that is the religion I shall embrace." This called forth a serious rebuke, but she only persisted the more obstinately in her determination.

With this were associated other impressions of a congenial nature. "When one is a Catholic," said she, 66 one has the consolation of believing what so many noble spirits have believed for sixteen centuries; of belonging to a religion that has been attested by millions of miracles, by millions of martyrs; above all," added she, "a religion that has produced so many illustrious virgins who have overcome the weaknesses of their sex, and consecrated themselves to God."

The constitution of Sweden is based upon Protestantism; the glory, the power, the European position of that country are inextricably bound up with it, and it was thus imposed on Christina as a sort of necessity. Disgusted by a thousand accidental circumstances, feeling that it touched no chord of her mind or heart, she broke loose from it with all the wilfulness of her character and station; the opposite system, of which she had but a dim and vague knowledge, attracted her; the infallible authority conferred on the pope she regarded as an institution in accordance with the benevolence of the Deity, and every day became more decidedly inclined to it; it seemed as if she felt that need of selfdevotion, which is inseparable from the nature of woman, appeased by this surrender of her reason; as if faith in her, like love in others of her sex, was born of that secret and vague emotion which hides itself from the world's censure, and grows stronger the more profound its concealment, and in which the heart of woman, resigned and resolved to sacrifice every thing to it, delights for its own sake.

It is at least certain that Christina, in the advances she made to the