but grappling each other with deadly energy all the time,
while they are taking breath for a renewal of the conflict. Queen Mary,
in one of these paroxysms, seized a portrait of her husband and tore it
into shreds. The reader, who has his or her experience in affairs of the
heart yet to come, will say, perhaps, her love for him then must have
been all gone. No; it was at its height. We do not tear the portraits of
those who are indifferent to us.

At the beginning of her reign, and, in fact, during all the previous
periods of her life, Mary had been an honest and conscientious Catholic.
She undoubtedly truly believed that the Christian Church ought to be
banded together in one great communion, with the Pope of Rome as its
spiritual head, and that her father had broken away from this
communion--which was, in fact, strictly true--merely to obtain a pretext
for getting released from her mother. How natural, under such
circumstances, that she should have desired to return. She commenced,
immediately on her accession, a course of measures to bring the nation
back to the Roman Catholic communion. She managed very prudently and
cautiously at first--especially while the affair of her marriage was
pending--seemingly very desirous of doing nothing to exasperate those
who were of the Protestant faith, or even to awaken their opposition.
After she was married, however, her desire to please her Catholic
husband, and his widely-extended and influential circle of Catholic
friends on the Continent, made her more eager to press forward the work
of putting down the Reformation in England; and as her marriage was now
effected, she was less concerned about the consequences of any
opposition which she might excite. Then, besides, her temper, never very
sweet, was sadly soured by her husband's treatment of her. She vented
her ill will upon those who would not yield to her wishes in respect to
their religious faith. She caused more and more severe laws to be
passed, and enforced them by more and more severe penalties. The more
she pressed these violent measures, the more the fortitude and
resolution of those who suffered from them were aroused. And, on the
other hand, the more they resisted, the more determined she became that
she would compel them to submit. She went on from one mode of coercion
to another, until she reached the last possible point, and inflicted the
most dreadful physical suffering which it is possible for man to inflict
up