MR. HEP WORTH DIXON'S TWO QUEENS.*

SPRING brought with it again Mr. Dixon's periodical, and though it bears another name, and treats of scenes on a new soil, the contents remain, as before, unsatisfactory. He tells us that the purpose of this work is "to group around the figures of two crowned and starless women the events of which they were the leading types and memorable victims," and we conclude that this purpose grew out of some such a holiday trip as produced the Switzers and Free Russia; he divides his attention pretty evenly between England and Spain, and beyond the common peculiarities of Mr. Dixon's compositions, the book is harmless and readable. The choice of title is not a happy one, but Mr. Dixon generally fails in that respect. A History of Two Queens indicates absolutely nothing ; the names are supplied on the title-page, but from the contents we could hardly have guessed that the two Queens were Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn ; if it requires two thick volumes to carry Katharine through her early life as far as her marriage with Henry VIII., we are afraid to contemplate the number necessary to depict her after-life as wife and Queen, her trial and divorce, and the reign of her successor. The work would have gained in interest for English readers had it contained more of England and her worthies, and less of Spain and her "friends of light ;" more about Katharine herself and her immediate surroundings, and less about the Inquisition and the intrigues of the reigning houses in Spain and Portugal. There can be no reason for Mr. Dixon dragging his readers at starting through all the Spanish nobodies who happened to exist at the period when Katharine was born ; he does not show how these unfamiliar per- sonages brought their influence to bear upon the special events of the time, but strings together as many as he can find, with Dixonian comments upon them. But as he decrees that to understand the passion of his two Queens' lives " we must stand amidst the conflicts out of which they came and into which they merged," an introduc- tion to all the combatants in those conflicts became necessary. With regard to relationships between the more prominent persons in the book, he adopts a system of allusions that is most bewildering ; not satisfied with calling people by their every-day names, he invents fresh ones ad nauseant. The Princess Isabel is generally described as the " Child of Sin," very often as the " Moping Widow," sometimes as the " Curse of Portugal," and is indiscriminately spoken of as the daughter of Fernando, the sister of Katharine, the aunt of Juana, the wife first of Alfonso, and then the wife and niece of Manoel. If Mr. Dixon persists in this • History of Two Quarts. By William Hepworth Dixon. Vols. I. and II. London: Hurst and Blacken. 1873.

capricious nomenclature for his own satisfaction, he should, for the satisfaction of his readers, draw out a genealogical table showing the connection between the Royal families of England, Spain, and Portugal ; without one, Mr. Dixon's book is altogether unintelligible. Let him take a lesson in more ways than one from Mr. Prescott, whom it has pleased Mr. Dixon totally to ignore,

but whose Ferdinand and Isabella would have been instructive to him during the progress of this work, and might have taught him

not to give to his chapters such ridiculous endings as, "It was Fernando's breath that drove him out," and " It was Fernando's axe that clove his neck." We cannot compliment Mr. Dixon on his accuracy, though we have not noticed so many errors as usual, nor such grave ones ; a feeling of distrust always comes over us when we take up one of his books, and it is impossible not to feel that what we read is the writing rather of a romancist than of a historian, that effect is the one object of the writer, and that accuracy is nothing to style. We are sure that when once Mr. Dixon has wound himself up to write one of his brilliant paragraphs, it would never do for him to pause in the flow of words to inquire into its correctness; such a check would be fatal to the impressiveness of the picture, but it would perhaps yield more careful writing, and writing pleasanter to read than the uncomfortable metre Mr. Dixon so often affects.

Mr. Dixon writes :—" When Henry found his Queen was near the time when she might hope to bear a son, he had removed her from the Tower, in which the Kings of England had been mostly born, to Winchester, the legendary seat of Arthur." It is not clear whether he means the Tower of London (or, as he prefers calling it, " Her Majesty's Tower "), or the Tower of Windsor, but in either case he is in error, for out of the seventeen kings who had reigned in England from the Conquest to the time of which he is writing, not one had been born in the Tower, and only two at Windsor. And we wonder who formed "the pair of ancient Britons" who stood beside the font. Was one of them Queen Elizabeth, grandmother and godmother to the infant ? We should like to know, too, where Mr. Dixon ascertained that Henry VII.

was so anxious for his " second Arthur "—' the boy was a girl '— to be born, not like the first at " Camelot," but in " that old palace of his race," the Tower ; and it is scarcely probable that in mid-winter, and when the Queen was in such delicate health, the King should have held water parties for her on the Thames, or that she should have been rowing from Richmond stairs to Hampton Court.

In another place, Mr. Dixon tells us that no king had rendered reverence and obedience to the reigning Pontiff in appearance since the days of Henry III., and in reality since the days of John. Did he never hear of the Act passed in the reign of Richard II., which declared that Urban had been lawfully elected Pope, that he was the true Pope, and that liegemen of the English Crown who obeyed any other should incur outlawry and forfeiture of lands and goods? And does he not know that Edward II. paid tribute to the Pope, and obeyed him in perse- cuting the Templars? This looks like obedience to the reigning Pontiff, though possibly reverence and respect on the part of English liegemen may have been wanting.

What can Mr. Dixon mean by stating that the English people hardly knew the name of their legendary King Arthur ; that Pen- dragon was to them an ogre, and his leek the symbol of a thief ; and that in London not a single legend had been printed till the year of Bosworth Field ? The latter fact perhaps is not so surprising, considering how recently printing had been introduced into this

country, and yet La Morte d'Arthure was one of the first books which Caxton, our first printer, had printed and published. But as for the

English people scarcely knowing who King Arthur was, their one delight at this period was in translations from the Norman-French romances, and the legends connected with the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights were the most favoured ; Geoffrey of Monmouth had used the tradition in the twelfth century as the groundwork of a Latin historical work, and an anonymous poem on Arthur's death had been written about 1400, whilst the poets of chivalry, allured by the beauty and pathos of the tale, made it for ages the centre of the most animated pictures of romance.

Forcible and perhaps truthful as Mr. Dixon's delineations are, there are the want of refinement and the unmistakably coarse colouring always to be met with in his writing, and which mar the good effect of his graphic descriptions ; the fairest side of the fairest nature cannot but suffer in his unscrupulous hands, and personal traits are distorted to gratify the whims of his pen. What will be thought of this sketch of the Princess Katharine ?—

" A girl of flesh and blood—the flesh not weak, the blood not water—

with a growing appetite for meat and wine, a brisk and saucy tongue, a riotous temper, an unbending will."

or of Mendoza, Cardinal of Spain ?— " A man with brimming eyes and shaven chin, you saw in him at

once a pleasant mien, unruffled temper, and prolific force A member of the Order of St. Francis, he was vowed to poverty, to chastity, and to obedience ; yet, in every stage of his career, ho was devoured by greed of gold, by love of women, by ungovernable pride. He kept a table and a harem."

As soon as Mr. Dixon lays aside portrait-painting for scenery and subject, there is a marked improvement ; we subjoin, in contrast to the above quotations (1), a description of the Alhambra in Granada, and (2) an account of the first meeting between Prince Arthur and Princess Katharine at Dogmersfield :-

1. "Yet in tho beauty of their home, and in the landscapes which surround that home, there lay a moans of education for the royal children better than the monks and friars could give. They lived with nature and they fed on art. Of all structures which adorned this earth, the home of Catharine stood the first in physical beauty. To her right and left the oye ran out on gracious lines. (!) Below the tower of the Comares, on the pole of which a cross had now replaced the crescent, spread a scone that an Arabian poet had extolled beyond the Valley of Damascus. Hero the snow-lino of the great sierras gave a hint of Lebanon. There the vega flowed through orchards, vineyards, gardens all but tropical in form and tint. The courts and alloys at her feet were perfect. As she strolled about the labyrinths of her palace, she could catch the jet and flash of fountains ; peep from the purple gloom of Abd-allah's hall into the fiery noon-tido of the Court of Lions ; breathe her evening hymn from the ventana of Zoraya ; look into the dark ravines, made musical in their leafy shadows by the Darro ; train her vine-shoots through the fretwork of innumerable balconies ; reach at orange and pomegranate, as the fruit hung burning from her garden wall ; and in the moments when a rarer spirit touched her fancy, she could daily with the secrets of the Moorish arch, and catch a meaning in those arabesques which clothed her walls with services of prayer and praise. [2.] Too young to ride as Henry rode, the Prince came after him, all slushed and soiled with the November rain ; and, after washing hands and changing clothes, he joined his father, who conducted him to the second chamber, where the Prince and Princess saw each other face to face. The steno was quaint and droll. They bowed and kissed. Each hold the other's palm, and spoke his love, the boy iu English and the girl in Spanish. Councillors and bishops stood about. When Arthur told his bride he loved her well, a bishop turned his phrases into Latin, which he whispered to a Spanish priest, who turned his love into Castillian. Henry put their hands into each other's, when ho bade them pledge their mutual troth. Camelot sighed and Aragon smiled, and love was chiefly made through two young pairs of eyes. When supper, which they ate apart (?), was done, the King and Prince walked back to Catharine's room—the inner room this time—and there, in spite of all Fonseca had to urge about his rule, they stayed till late at night. Elvira frowned, as a duenna should do. Cabra made his silent protest, for the hero was a knight who kept his word. But if hor ladies stared at these free English manners, Catharine liked her guests, and sending for musicians, she began to dance. If Arthur was too shy to lead her out, be danced a figure with her governess, Lady Guilford. Catharine's Southern dances would be new to King and Prince, and Catharino tripped and twirled until Henry rose."

Though Mr. Dixon has not lost his old faults, such as the in- cessant occurrence of full stops, the plurality of nicknames, the sometimes English, sometimes foreign spelling of proper names, and the sensual colouring of portraits, we are glad to notice some attempts at improvement. The dates of the period are given at the head of each page, and are more accurate than they in their scarcity were wont to be ; the plan of numbering the paragraphs with corresponding numbers to notes at the end of the book, showing the authorities for the statements in each paragraph, is well meant, but comparatively useless, because there is nothing to• identify the references with the respective statements in each paragraph, nor is it easy to distinguish between the statements of Mr. Dixon and those he authenticates. Thus in searching for the source whence he obtained his information as to the marriage in June, 1509, of Henry VIII. with Katharine, in the little chapel near Greenwich Palace [stated in our State Papers to have been celebrated in St. Paul's, and by common report in the Bishop of Salisbury's house in Fleet Street], we were not a little startled to find amongst the authorities Heron's Accounts, June 17, 1507 ! by which we gather that Heron was a prophet, as be wrote of what was to occur two years afterwards. It is unfortunate, moreover, that so many of Mr. Dixon's references should be inaccessible to those who read his book.

On the whole, the book is better than its predecessors, and though it does not appear to fulfil any particular end, it will do no harm, and will interest the Mudieites. Mr. Dixon's writing is evidently popular, and bookmaking with a notorious name on the title-page is profitable, so that like those which have gone before, this book will no doubt have a brief and successful run. We cannot conclude without congratulating Mr. Dixon on his resisting the to him most tempting opportunity of revelling in the scandal of Katharine's early widowhood, a matter- that has lately been discussed and sifted in its proper place by Mr. Bergenroth.