great Alfred. But the virtues of Matilda of Scotland, her holy spirit, and her graces of mind and manners, had been inherited, not by her daughter, who had been removed, in her tender childhood, from under the maternal influence, but by her niece and name-child, Matilda of Boulogne, who was, undoubtedly, educated under her wise superintendence, and exhibited all the excellence of her prototype. The younger queen Matilda was, however, not only one of the best, but the greatest woman of the age in which she lived; and so perfect was she in that which we have shown to be the most important of all royal accomplishments,—-the art of pleasing, that art in which her haughty cousin, the empress, was so little skilled, that her winning influence was acknowledged, even by that cold-hearted statesman priest, Henry de Blois, and was of more effectual service in her husband's cause than the swords of the foreign army which Stephen had rashly called to the support of his tottering throne." Vol. i, p. 236.

From the conquest of England, by William of Normandy, we have seen how intimately connected were the histories of England and the independent provinces of the north of France. Upon the death of Stephen, Henry II., the young, handsome and accomplished son of the empress Matilda, was acknowledged, by the universal consent of the AngloSaxons, as well as Anglo-Normans, king of England. Eustace, the son of Stephen, died before his father; there was, therefore, no one to compete the crown with him; and, after the troubles and civil war, which had desolated England for so many years, the people must have longed for the repose of peace.

With the reign of Henry II., commences the connection of England with the south of France, this prince having married Eleanora the divorced wife of Louis VII.

There is no Queen in English history, whose life has been so blended with romance and poetry, as Eleanora of Aquitaine. She is celebrated, either for good or for ill, in many an ancient lay, and Shakspeare has made us familiar with her name. Shakspeare's Eleanor, however, is not the real Eleanor of history, for that we must turn to the interesting memoir in Miss Strickland's work:

“Important effects, not only on the domestic history of the court of England, but on the commerce and statistics of our country, may be traced to its union, by means of this queen, with the most polished and civilized people on the face of the earth, as the Provençals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries indisputably were. With the arts, the

idealities, and the refinements of life, Eleanora brought acquisitions of more importance to the Anglo-Norman people, than even that 'great Province dower,' on which Dantè dwells with such earnestness.

"From the kingdom of Provence, the language which prevailed all over the south of France was called Provençal; it formed a bond of national union among the numerous independent sovereigns, under whose feudal sway this beautiful country was divided. Throughout

the whole tract of country, from Navarre to the dominions of the Dauphin of Auvergne, and from sea to sea, the Provençal language was spoken,—a language which combined the best points of French and Italian, and presented peculiar facilities for poetical composition. It was called the langue d'oc, the tongue of 'yes' and 'no,' because, instead of the 'oui' and 'non' of the rest of France, the affirmative and negative were oc and no. The ancestors of Eleanora were called, par excellence, the lords of 'oc' and 'no.' William IX., her grandfather, was one of the earliest professors and most liberal patrons of the art. His poems were models of imitation for all the succeeding troubadours."

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"The descendants of this minstrel hero, were Eleanora, and her sister Petronilla. They were the daughters of his son, William, Count of Poitou, by one of the daughters of Raymond of Thoulouse." Vol. i.

p. 246. It was the design of William, the grandfather of Eleanora, to unite Aquitaine to France, and a marriage was, there fore, agreed upon between the beautiful heiress and the son of the French king, afterwards Louis VII.

In turning from the feuds amongst the fierce barons of England, their civil wars, their contests for power or for freedom, to the sunny south, we feel like one, who, having witnessed the tornado committing its ravages amongst the giant trees of a primeval forest, and heard the crashing of the mighty limbs, or beheld the loftiest of the forest torn up by the roots, and hurled to the ground with the thundering crash which apparently made the very earth tremble, should suddenly be transported to a beautiful garden, where the loveliest flowers delight the eye, and sweet-scented shrubs perfume the gale,-where the air is balm, and sunlight makes all things joyous and bright.

Byron has remarked, that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' In reading the life of Eleanora of Aquitaine, we are struck with finding, in that romantic age, how near to truth the poets and romance writers of that age approached. The romances of the middle ages would be, naturally, considered by one who was unacquainted with the character and spirit

of the times, as the pure creations of a vivid imagination: but they are not so. The great poet embodies the spirit of his era; and Childe Harold is not more the type of the reflective and metaphysical character of the nineteenth century, than were the poems of Tasso, of Spencer, and Ariosto, of that of the twelfth and thirteenth.

"Eleanora was very beautiful; she had been reared in all the accomplishments of the south; she was a fine musician, and composed and sang the chansons and tensons of Provençal poetry. Her native troubadours expressly inform us, that she could both read and write. The government of her dominions was in her own hands, and she frequently resided in her native capital of Bourdeaux. She was perfectly adored by her southern subjects, who always welcomed her with joy, and bitterly mourned her absence, when she was obliged to return to her court at Paris.

"The political sovereignty of her native dominions was not the only authority exercised by Eleanora, in 'gay Guienne.' She was, by hereditary right, chief reviewer and critic of the poets of Provence. At certain festivals held by her, after the custom of her ancestors, called courts of love, all new sirventes and chansons were sung or recited before her, by the troubadours. She then, assisted by a conclave of her ladies, sat in judgment, and pronounced sentence on their literary merits. She was herself a popular troubadour poet. Her chansons were remembered long after death had raised a barrier against flattery, and she is reckoned among the authors of France." Vol. i., p. 249.

The provinces which Louis of France obtained by his marriage with this princess, were among the richest and most beautiful in France; they consisted of Poitou, Gascony, Biscay, Guienne, and a considerable territory extending beyond the Pyrenees. It was soon after the marriage of Eleanora that St. Bernard preached the crusade. Louis and Eleanora, with their whole court, attended the preaching of the pious enthusiast. King Louis caught the spirit of the times, and resolved to take up the cross, and march to the deliverance of the Holy Land. While Elenora, young, giddy and beautiful, flattered and beloved, at the summit of earthly prosperity, fired by the spirit of adventure which marked the times, and which, in her undisciplined mind, she, no doubt, confounded with the spirit of piety, resolved to accompany her husband to the Holy Land, and lead in person the forces of her hereditary dominions to the relief of Jerusalem:

"When queen Eleanora received the cross from St. Bernard, at Vezalai, she directly put on the dress of an Amazon, and her ladies all actuated by the same frenzy, mounted on horseback, and forming a lightly armed squadron, surrounded the queen when she appeared in public, calling themselves queen Eleanora's body-guard. They practised Amazonian exercises, and performed a thousand follies in public, to animate their zeal as practical crusaders. By the suggestions of their young queen, this band of mad women sent their useless distaffs as presents to all the knights and nobles who had the good sense to keep out of this insane expedition. This ingenious taunt had the effect of shaming many wise men out of their better resolutions; and to such a degree was this mania of the crusade carried, that, as St. Bernard himself owns, whole villages were deserted by their male inhabitants, and the land left to be tilled by women and children." Vol. i., p. 251.

We cannot enter into an account of the romantic adventures of Eleanora during her crusading expedition. It was here that her levity or her crime awakened the jealousy of her husband, and he meditated an immediate divorce. On his return to France, however, his wise ccunsellors represented to him the injury his kingdom would sustain from relinquishing the rich southern provinces.

After four years of mutual disgusts, queen Eleanora herself applied for a divorce, which was granted, March 18, 1152, and on the 1st of May, only six weeks after, she bestowed her hand and her rich possessions on Henry, the son of the empress Matilda, who was then only in his twentieth year; whilst Eleanora, still beautiful, and in the prime of her womanhood, had attained her thirty-second.

The death of Stephen, soon after this marriage, put Henry in peaceable possession of the English throne. Miss Strickland gives an interesting account of the state of London at that period:

If the example and conduct of the first Provençal queen was neither edifying nor pleasing to her subjects, yet, in a commercial point of view, the connection of the merchants of England with her Aquitanian dominions, was highly advantageous. The wine trade with Bordeaux became considerable. In a few months after the accession of Eleanora, as queen-consort of England, large fortunes were made by the London traders, who imported the wines of Gascony from the port of Bordeaux, and, above all, by the example of the maritime cities of Guienne. The VOL. I.—NO. 2.

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shipping of England was governed by the ancient code of laws, called the code of Oleron." Vol. i., p. 263.

A favourite subject with the early English poets was the love of Henry for the fair Rosamund Clifford; and we all remember how, in our childhood, we have gazed upon the pictures of the beautiful queen Eleanora, with one hand holding the cup to the lips of her lovely victim, and with the other a drawn dagger. Miss Strickland has shown, that Henry's connection with the fair Rosamund commenced before his marriage with Eleanora, and that it terminated soon after her arrival in England, as Rosamund was professed a nun, at Godstow, in the second year of Henry's reign, that she passed a life of penitence and piety, and died twenty years after her separation from the king.*

The contest which Henry entered into with the church, forms so remarkable a feature in his reign, that we must devote a few words to it. We have seen how fatal to the interests of the four preceeding Norman kings had been a similar dispute, and the tragic termination of the present one, by the murder of Becket, gives it additional interest. Hume, who has endeavoured to cast every possible stigma on the catholic church, in a great measure, justifies Henry. Protestant writers, generally, finding how strongly the church was supported by the people, have considered this as a proof of the ignorance of the people, and of the despotic influence which the clergy exerted over their minds. Now, if we refer to the canons which we have already quoted, and which confirmed the tithes to the church, we shall see that the people were not, altogether, disinterested parties. One third of the tithes were devoted to the support and maintenance of the poor, and besides these, there were the revenues of numerous estates, bequeathed by noble and pious persons for charitable purposes. When, therefore, the king seized the revenues of the church, he was considered by his subjects as robbing the poor of that which was destined for their support. It should also be remembered that at that time there were no inns, and that travellers, whether of high or low degree, found in the convent food and lodging. The wealthy, in return, augmented the contents of the poor box,

* We have somewhere seen it stated, we believe in Rapin, that the circumstances of Eleanora's poisoning Rosamund Clifford rest on no better authority than a ballad written above a hundred years after her death.