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 During all these years the air was full of Jesuit conspiracies. Mary Stuart was a prisoner in England, and, with her will or without it, was the focus of them all. Elizabeth's life was the one hope for the independence of England, and Elizabeth's life was the point at which they all were aimed; and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and Pope Gregory's Te Deum, showed the spirit of Popery and the lengths to which it was prepared to go.

With all these forcible 'dissuasives from Popery ' added to the associations connected with her mother's marriage, and her own subsequent life during her sister's reign, it might have been expected that Elizabeth would have thrown herself into the arms of the Protestants without reserve; and if she had f?one all lengths with the most extreme of them, there would have been no cause for surprise. Yet she was far from doing so and, as we have seen, it was her personal predilections alone which preserved to the Church of England its singular and unexampled form and character. There are some minds—and Elizabeth's was one of them whose actions are directed more by their taste than by either reason or conscience; and the canting phraseology and external precision of the Puritans seem to have been as revolting to Elizabeth's taste as their extravagant doctrines were to her reason. Having them on the one hand, and the Romanists on the other before her eyes, she, and many others with her, might well be led to ask whether it was not possible to avoid Scylla without falling at once into Charybdis. Anyone