which suggests the above conclusion. The fits of despondency into which she fell alternated with passion which vented itself in the most violent language. Her habits of wandering about her palace at night, and of sitting for hours on the floor, with her knees drawn up to her face, and her further habit of perpetually looking out for miracles, and regarding the most ordinary occurrences as miraculous, all point in the same direction, and we may fairly, as well as charitably, believe, that at any rate from the time that she recognised the fact that she could bear no child, and that Elizabeth must be her inevitable successor, Mary Tudor was no longer responsible for her actions. So considering, we may regard her as the most pitiable of human beings; otherwise she can hardly be relieved from the opprobrium which for three centuries has been attached to her name.
Little enough of the acts and deeds of Mary's Government took any permanent place in the constitution or laws of England. Most of her work was to undo that of her two immediate predecessors—her father and brother. Hers, in its turn, was mainly undone by her sister and successor; yet is there no sovereign who ever sat on the English throne, unless it be Henry VIII. himself, who has produced a greater or more permanent effect upon the subsequent history of the country. The loathing which Mary's persecution produced in the minds of Englishmen did more to establish the Reformation in England than any other single cause. 'You have lost the hearts of twenty thousand that were rank Papists within this twelvemonth,' wrote a lady to Bonner. The courage and the faith which ennobled and made heroes of 'prentices and herdsmen produced its natural effect, and the combined
