audacities, her maidenhood-all drew flatteries that heaped themselves in songs and sonnets. So live a woman and so live a Queen magnetized dulness into speech.

The Queen's Progresses.

I spoke but now of her love of pageants; every visiting prince from every great neighbor kingdom was honored with a pageant; every foreign suitor to her maidenly graces - whether looked on with favor or disfavor (as to which her eye and lip told no tales) - brought gala-days to London streets brought revels, and bear-baitings, and high passages of arms, and swaying of pennons and welcoming odes. Many and many a time the roystering poets I named to you- the Greenes, the Marlowes, the Jonsons, the Peeles, may have looked out from the Mermaid Tavern windows upon the royal processions that swept with goldcloth, and crimson housings through Cheapside, where every house blazed with welcoming banners, and every casement was crowded with the faces of the onlookers.

Thereby, too, she would very likely have passed in her famous "Progresses" to her good friends in the eastern counties; or to her loved Lord Bur

leigh, or to Cecil, at their fine place of Theobalds' Park, near Waltham Cross. True, old Burleigh

*

was wont to complain that her Majesty made him frequent visits, and that everyone cost him a matter of two or three thousand pounds. Indeed it was no small affair to take in the Queen with her attendants. Hospitable people of our day are sometimes taken aback by an easy-going friend who comes suddenly on a visit with a wife, and four or five children, and Saratoga trunks, and two or three nursery-maids, and a few poodles and a fox-terrier; but think of the Queen, with her tiring-women, and her ladies of the chamber, and her ushers, and her grand falconer, and her master of the hounds, and her flesher who knows the cuts she likes - and

her cook, and her secretary, and her fifty yeomen of the guard, and her sumpter mules, and her chaplain, and her laundry-women, and her fine

Nichols, in his Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, vol. i. (Preface), says: "She was twelve times at Theobalds, which was a very convenient distance from London,

starchers! No wonder Lord Burleigh groaned when he received a little notelet from his dear Queen saying she was coming down upon him for a week or ten days.

And Elizabeth loved these little surprises overmuch, and the progress along the high roads thither and back, which so fed her vanities: She was a woman of thrift withal, and loved her savings; and the kitchen fires at Nonsuch palace, or at Greenwich or at Richmond, might go out for a time while she was away upon these junketings.

I know that my young readers will be snuggling in their minds a memory of that greatest Progress of hers, and that grandest of all private entertainments at Kenilworth Castle; wondering, maybe, if that charming, yet over-sad story of Walter Scott's is true to the very life? And inasmuch as they will be devouring that book, I suspect, a great deal oftener than they will read Laneham's account of the great entertainment, or Gascoigne's,* I will

the Queen lying there at his Lordship's charge, sometimes three weeks, or a month, or six weeks together."

* George Gascoigne (b. 1530; d. 1577) published a tract, in those days, entitled The Princely Pleasures of Kenelworth

tell them how much, and where it varies from the true record.

There was a Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester a brilliant man, elegant in speech, in

person, in manner. at a court where his nephew Philip Sidney had shone-altogether such a courtier as Scott has painted him: And the Queen had regarded him tenderly so tenderly that it became the talk of her household and of the world. It is certain, too, that Leicester gave to the Queen a magnificent entertainment at his princely castle of Kenilworth, in the month of July, 1575. There were giants, there were Tritons, there were floating islands. Lawns were turned into lakes, and lakes were bridged with huge structures, roofed with crimson canopies, where fairies greeted the great guest with cornucopias of flowers and fruits. There was fairy music too; there were dances and plays and fireworks, that lighted all the region round about with a blaze of burning darts, and streams and hail of fire-sparks.

In all this there is no exaggeration in Scott's

Castle, which appears in Nichol's Progresses of Queen Elizabeth; as does also Laneham's Account of the Queen's Entertainment at Killingworth [sic] Castle.

picturing; none either in his portraiture of the coquetries and princely graces of the Queen. It is probable that no juster and truer picture of her aspect and bearing, and of the more salient points of her character ever will or can be drawn.

Thither, too, had come - from all the country round-yeomen, strolling players, adventurous youths, quick to look admiringly after that brilliant type of knighthood Sir Philip Sidney, then in his twenty-first year, and showing his gay trappings in the royal retinue: amongst such youths were, very likely, Michael Drayton and William Shakespeare, boys both in that day, just turned of eleven, and making light of the ten or twelve miles of open and beautiful country which lay between Kenilworth and their homes of Atherstone and of Stratford-upon-Avon.

It is true too, that Leicester, so admired of the Queen, and who was her host, had once married an Amy Robsart: true, too, that this Amy Robsart had died in a strangely sudden way at an old manorhouse of Cumnor; and true that a certain Foster and Varney, who were dependants of Leicester, did in some sense have her in their keeping. But