ELIZABETH, SAINT, daughter of Andreas II., king of Hungary, was b. at Presburg in 1207. At the age of four, she was affianced to. the landgraf of Thuringia, Louis IV., called the pious, and brought to his court to be educated under the eyes of the parents of her future husband. She early displayed what may be called a passion for the severities of the Christian life, as it was conceived in those days. She despised pomp, avarice, ambition; cultivated humility, and exhibited the most self-denying benevolence. Her conduct, even as a girl, astonished the Thuringian court; but such was the 0-race and sweetness of her disposition, and the excellence of her beauty, that Louis—though her affections seemed to be given wholly to God—still wished to marry her. They were united when E. was only 14. Louis himself, far from the devout girl whom he had made his wife for her long prayers and ceaseless almsgiving, was himself par tially attracted to a similar mode of life. A boy and two girls were the fruit of their union; but the happiness of E., in so far as it depended on anything earthly, was shat tered by the death of her husband iu 1227, when absent on the crusade headed by Bar barossa. Her confessor, Conrad of Marburg, a narrow fanatical monk (to whose miser able teaching E. mainly owed her perverted idea of life and duty), had trained her to stifle the emotions of her nature as sinful, and the poor widow hardly dared to bewail her loss. Great misfortunes soon befell her. She was deprived of her regency by the brother of her deceased husband, and driven out of her dominions on the plea that she wasted the treasures of the state by her charities. The inhabitants of Marburg, whose miseries she had frequently relieved, refused her an asylum, for fear of the new regent. At last she found refuge in a church, where her first duty was to thank God that he had judged her worthy to suffer. Subsequently, after other severe privations, such as being
forced to take up her abode in the stable of a hostelry, she was received into the monastery of Kitzingen by the abbess, who was her aunt. When the warriors who had attended her husband in the crusade returned from the east, she gathered them round her, and recounted her sufferings. Steps were taken to restore to the unfortunate princess her sovereign rights. She declined the. regency, however, and would only accept the revenues which accrued to her as landgravine. The remainder of her days. were devoted to incessant devotions, alinsgivings, mortifications, etc. There is some thing mournfully sublime in her unnatural self-sacrifice. We shudder even in our sympathy when we read of this beautiful tender-hearted creature washing the head and the feet of the scrofulous and the leprous. :Murillo has a painting (now in the museum at Madrid) of this act of evangelical devotion. The solemn tragedy of her brief life assumed towards its close a ghastly intensity through the conduct of her con fessor, Conrad, who, under pretense of spiritual chastisement, used to strike and mal treat her with brutal severity. The alleged cause of this was Conrad's aversion to her "squandering" her money among the poor. Perhaps he thought it should have gone to him. At last her health gave way; and on the 19th Nov., 1231, at the age of 24, E. died, the victim partly of ill-usage and partly of a mistaken theory of religious life, but as gentle and saintly a soul as figures in the history of the middle ages. She was canonized four years after her death. See Montalembert's Histoire de Ante Elisabeth. de Hongrie (Paris, 1836). The Rev. Charles Kingsley's dramatic poem, entitled TU Saint's Tragedy (London, 1848), is founded on the story of E.'s life.