clearly is a Protestant and most appropriate symbol of the royal duty, and of the best means of performing it.

In her first communication with her parliament, there is an allusion of this princess to one part of the coronation ceremony, which we must not omit to notice. The Commons, after granting a liberal subsidy, ventured to recommend the queen to marry. In reply she told them, that as the application was general, without presuming to direct her choice as to a husband, she could not take offence at it; but that any further interposition on their parts would have ill become them to make, or her to bear: that even while she was a private person, and exposed to much danger from the malice of her enemies, she had always declined that engagement, as an encumbrance; much more at present must she persevere in that sentiment, when the charge of a great kingdom was committed to her, and her life ought to be devoted to its interests: that as England was her husband, wedded to her by this pledge (and here she exhibited her finger with the CORONATION RING upon it), English

men were her children; and while she was employed in rearing or governing such a family, she could not deem herself barren, or her life useless and unprofitable: that if she ever entertained thoughts of changing her condition, the care of her subjects' welfare would be uppermost in her thoughts; but should she live and die a virgin, she doubted not but divine Providence, seconding their counsels and her own measures, would be able to prevent all dispute with regard to the succession; and that, for her part, she desired no higher character or fairer remembrance of her should be transmitted to posterity, than to have this inscription engraved on her tombstone, "Here lies Elizabeth, who lived and died a maiden queen!"

The accession of JAMES I. to the throne was distinguished by nothing remarkable connected with our subject, except the numerous creations of peers and other titles. He is said, during the first six weeks after his entrance into the kingdom, to have bestowed knighthood on 237 persons. It was at this period

that an advertisement was affixed to the door

of St. Paul's cathedral, offering to teach a new art of memory, to enable the people to recollect the names of the additions to the nobility.

There has been a recent publication of Sir Edward Walker's "Account of the Preparations for the Coronation of King CHARLES II.;" but his "minute detail" adds nothing important to the history of that splendid ceremony, unless we so account the "double feli'citie" of the prince and people, " that as hee was the object of innumerable multitudes of his subjects, so by no accident from TowreHill to his own palace, no one suffered the least prejudice; and that the sunne shined gloriously all that day and the next until after his coronation, not one drop of raine falling in all that time, as very much had done at least ten dayes before, and as many after those two great solemnityes *."

Sandford, the " most dutiful author and collector" of the details of JAMES II.'s coronation, has furnished the only complete text-book of

* Walker's Circumstantial Account, 8vo. 1. p. p. 78.

"the

our subject. Mr. Taylor, and all subsequent writers, follow him throughout the entire ritual of the church service, and in "every thing relating to practice." In an address to "the King," he speaks of " the pomp, the dignity, and the many glorious circumstances which accompany this matter and occasion," "being such as would endanger the tempting of another man to swell a dedication to the bulk of a History;" and dilates upon boundless antiquity of the imperial descent," with the splendour," both in war and peace," of the kingly progenitors of His Majesty not forgetting the "series of miracles," which he asserts to have been still following in that descent, and to have been specially "wrought in favour of His Majesty's life and government." "If I should presume to follow the impulse of my zeal," he adds, "I should enlarge myself upon this theme; but being conscious, that it is as little my faculty as it is my province, and that long importunities from a subject to his sovereign are neither good

* Taylor's Preface, p. x.

discretion nor good manners; I will take care not to be needlessly troublesome, by being over officiously thankful," &c. This is modest. enough for the introduction of a folio on the royal occupations of one day.

The book describes the preparations for the coronation, the performances, and the subsequent claims arising out of the performances of the day: but it is as stiff and stately throughout as in the dedication. Omitting no one Christian name of a dowager peeress, nor of any “individual person who went in the grand proceeding," nor even of "such who ought to have gone," it furnishes not a single personal anecdote of the day, nothing that stirs our sympathies: the king is a sort of demi-god, " most high, most mighty, and most excellent," and his nobles a number of well ordered automata moving round him. They speak all the day "out of a book held before" them. Nothing is heard, even at dinner, but grace and defiance from the bishop and champion.

Something human, however, appears in their appetites. In the Journal of Prepara