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FEMALE PORTRAIT GALLERY.

would it be to one made for the lute and distaff. "Let not," says the young Indian mother, in the 'Prairie,' "let not my child be a girl, for very sorrowful is the lot of woman." If this be true, and few will deny it, it is more than true in the lot of the royal orphan. The chronicles of the house of Stuart would almost justify the Grecian belief in fatality. Their doom was with them: the state—the scaffold—imprisonment and exile, crowd the annals of their race; on each high brow of their fated house is the shadow of the coming evil—the deep melancholy eyes are dark with the hours to come. It would seem as if inanity and worthlessness were their sole exemptions; the only kings whom destiny rejected as unworthy victims, were the weak James, and the profligate Charles; but in Mary, the rarest qualities and the worst fortunes of her house were united. A child, she became an exile from her native soil. In the very lowest class it is well to be bred up amid those scenes wherein our future is cast; nothing ever supplies the place of those early associations—nothing ever knits the heart to the place of its birth like the remembrances of childhood—nothing can give the entire knowledge of a people, but having been brought up among them. This is no place to enter into the long disputed question of Mary's guilt or innocence. If, as Wordsworth says,