In fact, if Spanish bigotry had not forced her into a resolute antagonism of Rome, I think history would have been in doubt whether to count her most a Lutheran, or most a Roman.

Yet she made the Papists smoke for it as grimly as ever her sister Mary did the Protestants - if they stood one whit in the way of England's grasp

on power.

Personality of the Queen.

I think our friend Mr. Froude, whose history we all read, is a little unfair toward Queen Bess, as he was a little over-fair, and white-wash-i-ly disposed in the case of Henry VIII.: both tendencies being attributable to a mania this shrewd historian has for unripping and oversetting established forms of belief. I think that he not only bears with a greedy zeal upon her too commonly manifest selfishness and heartlessness, but that he enjoys putting little vicious dabs of bad color upon her

picture - as when he says, "she spat, and swore

like a trooper." Indeed it would seem that this clever biographer had carried a good deal of his fondness for "vicious dabs" in portraiture into

his more recent post-mortem exhibits; as if it were his duty and pleasure to hang out all sorts of soiled linen, in his office of Clean-Scrubber: Yet, I wish to speak with all respect of the distinguished historian whose vigor is conspicuous — whose industry is remarkable, whose crisp sentences are delightful, but whose accuracy is not of the surest; and whose conscience does, I think, sometimes go lame under strain of his high, rhetorical canter. The authority for all most damnatory statements with respect to the private life of the Queen, rests upon those Spanish Relations so minute as to be suspicious if they were not also so savagely bitter as to twist everything to the discredit of the Protestant Sovereign. Signor Soranzo-the Venetian ambassador (whom Froude does not cite - but who had equal opportunities of observation with the Spanish informer), says of Elizabeth (in a report not written for publication, but lying for years in the archives of Venice): "Such an air of dignified majesty pervades all her actions that no one can fail to judge her a queen. She is a good Greek and Latin scholar; and beside her native tongue she speaks Latin, French,

Spanish, and Italian benissimo are very modest and affable.”*

and her manners

I talk thus much — and may talk more—about the personality of Queen Elizabeth, because she must be counted-in a certain not very remote sense one of the forces that went to endow what is called the English Literature of her day — so instructed was she; so full of talent; so keen-sighted; so exact a most extraordinary woman. We must not think her greatness was factitious, and attributable to her only because she was a queen. There could be no greater mistake. She would have been great if she had been a shoemaker's daughter; I do not mean that she would have rode a white horse at Tilbury, and made the nations shake: but she would have bound more shoes, and bound them better, and looked sharper after the affairs of her household than any cobbler's wife in the land. Elizabeth would have made a wonderful post-mistress-a splendid head of a school with perhaps a little too large use of the ferule and she would have had her favorites, and shown it; but she

*Rawdon Brown's Calendar State Papers, 1554. From Venetian Archives.

would have lifted her pupils' thoughts into a high range of endeavor; she would have made an atmosphere of intellectual ambition about her; she would have struck fire from flinty souls; and so she did in her court: She inspired work-inspired imagination; may we not say that she inspired genius. That auburn hair of hers (I suppose we should have called it red, if her name had been Abigail) made an aureole, around which wit coruscated by a kind of electric affinity. It was counted worth toil to have the honor of laying a poem at her gracious feet, who was so royally a Queen-whose life, and power, and will and culture, made up a quadrature of poems.

Burleigh and Others.

And who was there of literary significance about Elizabeth in those early days of her reign? Roger Ascham was still doling out his sagacious talk, and his good precepts; but he was not a force-only what we might call a good creature. There was Sackville (afterward the elegant Earl of Dorset);

*Thomas Sackville, b. 1527; d. 1608, was author of portion of Mirror for Magistrates; also associated with Thomas Norton, in production of the Tragedy of Gorboduc.

he was in his prime then, and had very likely written his portion of the Mirror for Magistrates -a fairish poetic history of great unfortunate people completed afterward by other poets, but hardly read nowadays.

Old Tusser,* too - the farmer-poet-lived in these times; an Essex man, of about the same age as Ascham, but who probably never came nearer to the court than to sing in the choir of old St. Paul's. He had University experience, which, if it did not help his farming, on the banks of the Stour, did, doubtless, enable him to equip his somewhat prosy poems with such classic authentication and such directness and simplicities as gave to his Pointes of Husbandrie very great vogue. Many rhyming saws about farming, still current among old-fashioned country-folk, trace back to Master Tusser, who lived and farmed successively (tradition says not very successfully) at Ipswich, Dereham, and Norwich. His will, however, published in these later times, shows him to have been a man of considerable means.

Then there was Holinshed, † who, though the

* Thomas Tusser, b. about 1527; d. 1580.

Raphael Holinshed, d. about 1580. First edition of his Chronicle was published in 1577.