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six hundred thousand pounds' worth of
jewels on his ignoble person. The pretty
bride passed six happy years as Electress
before the insurgent Bohemians offered her
husband their ill-starred crown, which he
would have put by but for her insistent
ambition. Hardly was he crowned when
he was compelled to flee for his life from
his new kingdom, while the Spaniards seized
his old domain of the Palatinate, he wandering
a crownless king, a homeless man,
until, still young, he died of sorrow at witnessing
the miseries of his people. The
brave-hearted ELIZABETH lived on to the
age of sixty-five, dependent on the alms of
her brother princes, losing, one after another,
her seven brilliant sons, seeing every
hope of her happy youth fade into emptiness,
but destined, through her youngest
daughter, SOPHIA, to bring the coveted
crown to her descendants, the Brunswicks,
who, through her, laid claim to the English
throne.
August 20, 1153, is the feast-day of St.
BERNARD, Abbot of Clairvaux, "the last of
the Fathers," one of the greatest men of the
Middle Ages; less well remembered, perhaps,
for his asceticism, for his piety, for his
learning, for his goodness, for his eloquence,
wonderful as were all these, than for having,
in a persecuting age, refused to persecute
the Jews. A Jewish contemporary
says of him: "Had not the tender mercy of
the Lord sent priest BERNARD, none of us
would have survived."
On August 21, 1762, died Lady MARY
WORTLEY MONTAGU, that remarkable beauty,
wit, and genius, who made the age her
debtor by introducing the practice of innoculation,
yet who advises her granddaughter
to conceal whatever learning or sense she
may possess as sedulously as she would deformity,
no character being so utterly contemptible
in fashionable England, she say,
as that of a woman of intelligence and cultivated
judgment.
On the 22d of August , 1485, died King
RICHARD III., valiantly fighting on Bosworth
Field, where the terrible Wars of the
Roses ended, and England, under the TUDORS,
began a new life.
On the 23d, in 1305, WILLIAM WALLACE,
the Scottish patriot, was cruelly executed
at Smithfield, after a mock trial had proved
him guilty of high treason against a king to
whom he owed no allegiance.
The 24th of August, 1572, witnessed the
murder of Admiral COLIGNY, and the beginning
of that cruelest episode of modern history,
the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
On the 25th, in 1770, starved to death the
wonderful boy-poet THOMAS CHATTERTON,
who, at eighteen, had written history, legend,
balland, and song, and who, being an
impostor, was not the less a genius.
On the 26th, in 1635, died that most precocious
and prolific Spaniard LOPE DE VEGA,
who was reputed to have dictated poetry at
the age of five, who printed plays fill
twenty-six quarto volumes, and whose
manuscripts are three times as extensive.
The 27th is memorable as the day of CAESAR'S
landing in England, 55 B.C. Twenty-five
years later, on the 13th of the month,
that splendid queen who was a mightier
force than CAESAR, since she subdued him,
the Egyptian CLEOPATRA, wooed Death in
the high Roman fashion, and made him
proud to take her.
On the 31st of August, 1688, died the travelling
tinker JOHN BUNYAN, author of the
Pilgrim's Progress, of which MACAULAY said
that it was perhaps the only book concerning
which the verdict of the ignorant majority
had come to be the deliberate judgment
of the educated minority.
And so departs the summer, full of days
and honors.

SEPTEMBER
This ninth month of the modern year
was the seventh by the old reckoning,
and hence bore the appropriate name
of September. Although OCTAVIUS chose to
bestow the dignity of his title upon August,
his birth-month has not lacked sponsors. A
complaisant senate proposed the name of
TIBERIUS, but that strange, inscrutable old
man--"the keenest of observers, the most
artful of dissemblers, the most terrible of
masters"--declined with thanks. Fifty
years later DOMITIAN, a gentleman entirely
untroubled by any shrinking modesty, imposed
on it his own family name--GERMANICUS.
"Imperious CAESAR, dead and turned
to clay," however, had but scant posthumous
honors. Hardly half a century later the
ever-polite senate complimented PIUS ANTONINUS,
the admirable, by calling September
fr him. But virtue and vice went alike
unremembered in that swift, brilliant, brutal
age, and with only the golen reign of
MARCUS AURELIUS intervening, the detestable
COMMODUS, who considered himself an
avatar of Hercules, substituted Herculaeus
for Antonius. How soon this alterable
month shed its new honors does not appear,
but about the year 275 the good Emperor
TACITUS conferred on it his name, expecting,
no doubt, to live in memory with JULIUS
and AUGUSTUS. Dead as the men who cherished
them are all their small ambitions, and
with a venerable inappropriateness we still
write plain September at the top of our letters
through the too brief splendor of its
thirty golden days.
The 1st of September is dedicated to St.
GILES, patron saint of cripples and beggars.
Wherever his churches were built they were
placed on the outskirts of the town, near to
the chief thoroughfare, for the greater case
of his poor following. The old Longon
Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, testifies to
this gracious custom.
On September 2, 1666, broke out the great
fire of London, that terrible configuration
which the zealots really believed to foreshadow
the end of the world, and which
burned over four hundred and thirty-six
acres, blotting out four hundred and thirty
streets, more than thirteen thousand houses,
eighty-nine churches, and many public buildings,
and destroying property to the amount
of fifty-four millions of dollars--an almost
irrecoverable loss for those days. On the
monument raised in commemoration of the
disaster a bitter inscription accused the papists
of setting the fire, and although there
had never existed a vestige of evidence to
warrant such a suspicion, it was not until
1831 that this cruel slander was obliterated.
The 2d, 3d, and 4th of September will live
in evil fame as the period of the French
prison massacres in 1792. On that brilliant
autumn Sunday rumor had announced the
fall of Verdun, and the Prussians in full
march, with gallows ropes, with fire and
(?). It was whispered that the imprisoned
loyalists were ready to revolt. The
decision of DANTON sent the half-crazed
mob, drunk with fear, passion, power, to the
gates of La Force, L'Abbaye, and the rest.
Into a lane of pikes, axes, sabres, the shrinking
prisoners were driven, and when the
third day of horror closed, eight thousand
innocent men and women lay bleeding and
dead on the stones of the streets--most illustrious,
most pathetic, figure among them,
perhaps, that of the beautiful Princesse de
Lamballe, who earlier in this Reign of Terror,
had escaped to England, but whose love
and loyalty brought her back, in the vain
hope to save her queen and friend, MARIE
ANTOINETTE.
In 1751 September lost eleven days in the
change from the Old Style to the New, the
time between the 2d and 14th being dropped
bodily, and the 3d becoming the 14th, to the
great convenience of later generations and
the no small disturbance of the contemporary one.
On the 3d of Septembre--a day curiously
connected with his successful fortunes, died,
in the year 1658, that great genius and narrow,
dominant man, OLIVER CROMWELL.
The 4th of the month, B.C. 520, was the
birthday of PINDAR, the greatest lyric poet of
Greece, the friend of ALEXANDER, the pupil
of the famous CORINNA, who is said to have
competed successfully five times with him
for public honors, and to have given him that
most excellent advice specially pertinent
now to a certain school of young poets--to
"sow with the hand, and now with the whole
sack."
On the 5th of September, 1569, in the prison
of the Marshalsea, died Bishop BONNER
--"Bloody BONNER" of Queen MARY'S day--
who, by virtue of his ecclesiastical office, sentenced
two hundred victims to the stake,
and imprisoned many more. Sixteen years
later this day brought into life ARMAND DU
PLESSIS, Cardinal DE RICHELIEU, who was to
wield a power greater than that of kings,
who humbled the haughty French nobility,
strengthened the authority of the crown,
restored the balance of power in Europe by
curbing the dangerous supremacy of Austria,
founded the French Academy, fostered
the arts and sciences, and yet died so generally
hated that the people lighted bonfires
on hearing that his end was come. On
his fifty-third birthday, and four years befoe
his death, was born that other potent
spirit, LOUIS XIV., whose long reign of seventy-two
years was the golden age of
France.
September 6, 1769, that memorable year
of birthdays, the first Shakspearean commemoration
was held at Stratford-on-Avon,
under the auspices of "little DAVY GARRICK."
The owner of SHAKSPEARE'S house,
a splenetic clergyman, having town down
that edifice and destroyed his mulberry-tree,
the lovers of the poet's memory offered
their three days' celebration of odes, processions,
addresses, choral singing, and spectacular
pageant in protest and loyalty.
September 7, in 1533, was the birthday
of Queen ELIZABETH; in 1621, of the great
CONDE; in 1707, of Comte de Buffon; in
1709, of Dr. SAMUEL JOHNSON--four lives full
of interest to their own times and to ours.
On the 8th, in the year 1474, was born the
great Italian poet ARIOSTO; and on that day,
in 1560 and in 1650, ended the few days and
full of trouble of two of the loveliest figures
of their time, sweet AMY ROBSART and the
fair young Princess ELIZABETH, whose palaces
had been prisons, and whose progresses
were but hasty flights from one loyal castle
to another.
September 9, 1513, saw the disastrous
battle of Flodden Field, remembered to this
day in Scotland with a bitterness of shame.
On the 11th, in 1649, eight months after
the execution of King CHARLES, CROMWELL
fought his sanguinary battle of Drogheda,
and laid Ireland, submissive if not loyal, at
the feet of the Parliament.
On the 12th of September, 1683, JOHN
SOBIESKI, King of Poland, dealt a fearful
blow to the dreaded power of the Turks,
than an almost irresistible soldiery, by the
raising of the siege of Vienna.
On the 13th of the month, thirteen years
before his royal mistress, was born WILLIAM
CECIL, Lord BURLEIGH, for twenty years
ELIZABETH'S most prudent, vigilant, and