THE biography of the Devereux Earls of Essex, compiled by their descendant, Captain Walter Bouchier Devereux, embraces a period of one hundred and six years, and narrates the fortunes of three generations of this ancient house.

age

No epoch in English history has been more important, nor more pregnant of great events, than the latter half of the sixteenth, and the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was pre-eminently the Augustan age of England, fertile in men of genius. It was the of our greatest poets and statesmenthe age of Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, Jonson, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Burleigh, whom we enumerate from among a host of scarcely less illustrious names. Amid this array of great men we find, during the period in question, few more prominent personages than the high-born chiefs of the house of Devereux, each characterised by an adventurous career, an illustrious fortune, but a widely different fate.

With the first Earl we enter on that perplexed and intricate subject-Irish colonisation by English settlers - for to this nobleman was entrusted the conquest and plantation of Ulster; a task to which he fruitlessly sacrificed his energies, his fortune, and his life. This object was at last achieved, after incalculable loss of life and property, and cruel outrage inflicted on the mere Irish, by succeeding viceroys, or soldiers of fortune, deriving their commissions from Queen Elizabeth and her successor, James I.

The second Earl of Essex had a different, but far more tragical destiny. Young, handsome, brave, gifted, and adored by his sovereign, he rose to the pinnacle of earthly greatness, only to fall into a deeper abyss of ruin. He expiated on the scaffold, in the prime of life, the follies engendered by too great prosperity.

"O, how wretched

Is that poor man that hangs on princes' fa

yours;

There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,

That sweet aspect of princes and their ruin, More pangs and fears than wars or women have;

And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer-
Never to hope again."

Perhaps from a not unnatural reaction, we find the third Earl of Essex the avowed enemy of courts and kings; a rebel leader unfurling his banner against his sovereign, the champion of the Long Parliament, and lieutenant-general of the army which opposed itself to the unconstitutional encroachments of King Charles I. We must not, however, anticipate, but endeavour to trace as succinctly as possible the career of the three Devereux Earls of Essex whose biographies are now under our consideration.

Walter Devereux inherited from his grandfather the estates and titles of Viscount Hereford, Lord Ferrars of Chartley, Bouchier, and Lovaine, in 1558, and was created Earl of Essex in 1572. His ancestors traced their descent from a Norman companion-atarms of William the Conqueror; while the quarterings of their escutcheon indicated the brilliant alliances formed by the house of Devereux, no less than the high position which they held in England since the days of the Conquest.

The earliest military exploits of Essex are connected with the "Rising of the North," as the abortive conspiracy of the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland against Queen Elizabeth was designated. This rebellion, speedily suppressed by the vigorous measures of the government, was more properly a religious than a political movement, and was mainly intended for the restoration of Roman Catholicism, though connected also with the Duke of Norfolk's scheme for the liberation of the Queen of Scots, then a prisoner in the hands of Elizabeth. The intense Protestantism of Essex

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for he inherited from his predecessors, who had been amongst the earliest adherents to the tenets of the Reformation, a tendency towards the extreme doctrines afterwards professed by the Puritans naturally disposed him to exertions for the suppression of the outbreak. He raised, at his own expense, a troop of horse, which he placed at her Majesty's service. The malcontents unfurled their banner, on which was embroidered, "in vermeil colours and in gold," the cross and stigmata

"The wounds of hands, and feet, and side, And the sacred cross on which Jesus died-"

Whether it be that the information does notexist, or that Captain Devereux takes for granted that what is familiar to him is equally familiar to his readers-with that very general and pardonable mistake, by which some minds conceive that a subject they are themselves minutely acquainted with, must be patent to others, and so prove trite and uninteresting it is certain that, in the work before us, Captain Devereux has been mainly a collator and arranger of the correspondence of the earls whose history he has undertaken to narrate; and that nothing can be more scanty and meagre than his own contribution to the two volumes before us. We are not disposed to underrate the attractions of the letters themselves: many of them are highly interesting; some of them now made public for the first time; and all are important additions to the history of the period of which they treat. Yet the book, as a whole, wants interest, for it wants connexion. A less impartial narrative, even, would be preferable to the candid, unimpassioned, cold, bare style of the editor's remarks. Captain Devereux has too honestly, too carefully repressed the natural partiality of a biographer, even though himself more personally concerned in his labours than most his torians. We give him due credit for his upright intention, but this very merit has spoiled his book. We look, especially when treading the by-ways of history, for a vivid picturesqueness of style, which, without distorting or perverting facts, may invest the subject with a charm, and make that attractive and instructive which, in itself, is perhaps only of secondary importance. We have adverted to the striking characteristics of these three Earls of Essex; and the bold relief in which they might be expected to stand out from the canvas.

No less marked are the fortunes of their fair countesses; each in succession destined to play a peculiar part on the world's stage; but, if we except the third countess, notorious for her crimes, and the singularity of her story, we have very sparing allusions to the compagnons des jours of the Earls of Essex. We shall endeavour, at a later stage of our labours, to supply, in some degree, this omission; and to interest our readers in the ladies of the house of Devereux; having first, in the due sequence of events, intro