It is an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet AEschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of Athenian heroes.  Captain Bethune, without call or need, making his notes merely, as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom of the page, that “it reminds him of the familiar lines,—­

“For Widdrington I needs must wail,
As one in doleful dumps;
For, when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps.”

It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the ballad of Chevy Chase.  It is the most deformed stanza * of the modern deformed version which was composed in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration of the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for serious poetry, they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than a burlesque; the associations which they arouse are only absurd, and they could only have continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous doggerel. ____ * Here is the old stanza.  Let whoever is disposed to think us too hard on Captain Bethune compare them.

“For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
That even he slayne sholde be;
For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
He knyied and fought on his knee.”

Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad, gives up this stanza as hopeless. ____

When to these offences of the Society we add, that in the long laboured appendices and introductions, which fill up valuable space, which increase the expense of the edition, and into reading which many readers are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing which assists the understanding of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate, when we have found what is most uncommon passed without notice, and what is most trite and familiar encumbered with comment:  we have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them and go on with our own more grateful subject.

Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that of the Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English constitution were limited in the highest degree, was, notwithstanding, more beloved by her subjects than any sovereign before or since.  It was because, substantially, she was the people’s sovereign; because it was given to her to conduct the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of change, and the weight of her great mind and her great place were thrown on the people’s side.  She was able to paralyze the dying efforts with which, if a Stuart had been on the throne, the representatives of an effete system might have made the struggle a deadly one; and the history of England is not the