Page:The Queens of England.djvu/384

 LADY JANE GREY. There is no character in English history which has excited a deeper or a purer interest than that of Lady Jane Grey. Though she perished by the axe of the executioner before she had reached her twentieth year, we forget that she was little more than a child as we contemplate the wisdom and the noble fortitude which she displayed in that brief career of existence. We listen to the words of a sagacity as profound as the piety which animated them ; behold her, under the pressure of un- fortunate circumstances, passing from a throne to a violent death with a calm propriety and a lofty philosophy which leave irresistibly behind them the impression of a mature and deeply-experienced woman. Lady Jane Grey was a mere girl who had been brought up in the highest walks of life, close to the throne, and with the varied objects of human ambition thickly scattered under her very feet, and yet had from actual childhood treated all such things with the indifference of a stoic, and embraced the better part of religion and of intel- lectual pleasures with a devotion that could not have been exceeded by the most portionless, unallied, and time-worn philosopher. It was only in her fourteenth year that Roger Ascham, finding her at Bradgate, reading her Plato, while her father and mother were with their friends out hunting, and expressing his astonishment that she was not partaking the pleasures of her family, received the startling answer, "Alas ! good folk, they never felt what true pleasure means ; I wisse all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleas- ure that I find in Plato!" Such a singular taste in one so very a child, and which con- tinued with her to the last, would have led us to suspect that she possessed more head than heart, had not history put it be- yond a doubt that she was as affectionate and tender in her disposition as she was extraordinary in her capacity, the eleva- tion of her taste, and the extent of her acquirements. In the 344