diet or other habits. They may make a man look very great and philosophic to his own mind; but they are not fit for a being to whom custom has been truly said to be a second nature. Dr. Cheyne may tell us that a drowning man cannot too quickly get himself out of the water; but the analogy is not good. If the water has become a second habit, he might almost as well say that a fish could not get too quickly out of it.

Upon this point, Bacon says that we should discontinue what we think hurtful by little and little. And he quotes with admiration the advice of Celsus: that "a man do vary and interchange contraries, but rather with an inclination to the more benigh extreme." "Use fasting," he says, "and full eating, but rather full eating; watching and sleep, but rather sleep; sitting and exercise, but rather exercise, and the like; so shall nature be cherished, and yet taught masteries."

We cannot do better than conclude with one or two other passages out of the same Essay, full of his usual calm wisdom. "If you fly physic in health altogether, it will be too strange for your body when you need it." (He means that a general state of health should not make us over-confident and contemptuous of physic; but that we should use it moderately if required, that it may not be too strange to us when required most.) "If you make it too familiar, it will have no extraordinary effect when sickness cometh. I commend rather some diet for certain seasons, than frequent use of physic, except it be grown into a custom; for those diets alter the body more, and trouble it less."

"As for the passions and studies of the mind," says he, "avoid envy, anxious fears, anger fretting inwards, subtle and knotty inquisitions, joys and exhilarations in excess, sadness not communicated" (for as he says finely, somewhere else, they who keep their griefs to themselves, are "cannibals of their own hearts"). "Entertain hopes; mirth rather than joy" (that is to say, cheerfulness rather than boisterous merriment); "variety of delights rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature."

CHAPTER VIII.

Charles Brandon and Mary Queen of France.

THE fortune of Charles Brandon was remarkable. He was ar honest man, yet the favorite of a despot. He was brave, handsome, accomplished, possessed even delicacy of sentiment; yet he retained the despot's favor to the last. He even had the perilous honor of being beloved by his master's sister, without having the least claim to it by birth: and yet, instead of its destroying them both, he was allowed to be her husband.

Charles Brandon was the son of Sir William Brandon, whose skull was cleaved at Bosworth by Richard the Third, while bearing the standard of the Duke of Richmond. Richard dashed at the standard, and appears to have been thrown from his horse by Sir William, whose strength and courage, however, could not save him from the angry desperation of the king.

But Time, whose wheeles with various motion runne,
Repayes this service fully to his sonne,

Who marries Richmond's daughter, born betweene
Two royal parents, and endowed a queene.

Sir John Beaumont's Bosworth Field.

The father's fate must have had its effect in securing the fortunes of the son. Young Brandon grew up with Henry the Seventh's children, and was the playmate of his future king and bride. The prince, as he increased in years, seems to have carried the idea of Brandon with him like that of a second self; and the princess, whose affection was not hindered from becoming personal by anything sisterly, nor, on the other hand, allowed to waste itself in too equal a familiarity, may have felt a double impulse given to it by the improbability of her ever being suffered to become his wife. Royal females, in most countries, have certainly none of the advantages of their rank, whatever the males may have.

Mary was destined to taste the usual bitterness of their lot; but she was repaid. At the conclusion of the war with France, she was married to the old king Louis the Twelfth, who witnessed from a couch the exploits of her future husband at the tournaments. The doings of Charles Brandon that time were long remembered. The love between him and the young queen was suspected by the French Court; and he had just seen her enter Paris in the midst of a gorgeous procession, like Aurora come to marry Tithonus. Brandon dealt his chivalry about him accordingly with such irresistible vigor, that the dauphin, in a fit of jealousy, secretly introduced into the contest a huge German, who was thought to be of a strength incomparable. But Brandon grappled with him, and with seeming disdain and detection, so pummelled him about the head with the hilt of his sword, that the blood burst through the vizor. Imagine the feelings of the queen, when he came and made her an offering of the German's shield! Drayton, in his Heroical Epistle, we know not on what authority, tells us, that on one occasion during the combats, perhaps this particular one, she could not help crying out, "Hurt not my sweet Charles," or words to that effect. He then pleasantly represents her as doing away suspicion by falling to commenda. tions of the dauphin, and affecting not to know who the conquering knight was—an ignorance not very probable; but the knights sometimes disguised themselves purposely.

The old king did not long survive his festivities. He died in less than three months, on the first day of the year 1515; and Brandon, who had been created Duke of Suffolk the year before, reappeared at the French court, with letters of condolence, and more persuasive looks. The royal widow was young, beautiful, and rich; and it was likely that her hand would be sought by many princely lovers; but she was now resolved to reward herself for her sacrifice, and in less than two months she privately married her first love. The queen, says a homely but not mean poet (Warner, in his Albion's England), thought that to cast too many doubts

Were oft to erre no lesse

Than to be rash: and thus no doubt

The gentle queen did guesse,
That seeing this or that, at first,
Or last, had likelyhood,

A man so much a manly man
Were dastardly withstood.

Then kisses revelled on their lips,
To either's equal good.

Henry showed great anger at first, real or pretendea; but he had not then been pampered into unbearable self-will by a long reign of tyranny. He forgave his sister and friend; and they were publicly wedded at Greenwich on the 13th of May.

It was during the festivities on this occasion (at least we believe so, for we have not the chivalrous Lord Herbert's Life of Henry the Eighth by us, which is most probably the authority for the story; and being a good thing, it is omitted, as usual, by the historians) that Charles Brandon gave a proof of the fineness of his nature, equally just towards himself, and conciliating towards the jealous. He appeared, at a tournament, on a saddle-cloth, made half of frize and half of cloth-of-gold, and with a motto on each half. One of the mottos ran thus:

The other:

Cloth of frize, be not too bold,

Though thou art match'd with cloth of gold.

Cloth of gold, do not despise,

Though thou art matched with cloth of frize.

It is this beautiful piece of sentiment which puts a heart into his history and makes it worthy remembering.

CHAPTER IX.

On the Household Gods of the Ancients.

THE Ancients had three kinds of Household Gods-the Daimon (Dæmon) or Genius, the Penates, and the Lares. The first was supposed to be a spirit allotted to every man from his birth, some say with a companion; and that one of them was a suggester of good thoughts and the other of evil. It seems, however, that the Genius was a personification of the conscience, or rather of the prevailing impulses of the mind, or the other self of a man; and it was in this sense most likely that Socrates condescended to speak of his well-known Dæmon, Genius, or Familiar Spirit, who, as he was a good man, always advised him to a good end. The Genius was thought to paint ideas upon the mind in as lively a manner as if in a looking-glass; upon which we chose which of them to adopt. Spenser, a deeply learned as well as imaginative poet, describes it in one of his most comprehensive though not most poetical stanzas, as

That celestial Powre, to whom the care

Of life, and generation of all

That lives, pertaine in charge particulare;
Who wondrous things concerning our welfare,
And straunge phantomes doth lett us ofte foresee,

And ofte of secret ills bids us beware:

That is our Selfe, whom though we do not see
Yet each doth in himselfe it well perceive to bee.

Therefore a God him sage antiquity

Did wisely make.-Faerie Queene, book ii., st. 47.

Of the belief in an Evil Genius, a celebrated example is furnished in Plutarch's account of Brutus's vision, of which Shakspeare has given so fine a version (Julius Cæsar, Act 4, Sc. 3). Beliefs of this kind seem traceable from one superstition to