had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her service. The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham was just as unerring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success, indeed, in securing, from the beginning of her reign to its end, with the single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them to do, sprang, in great measure, from the noblest characteristic of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim the queen's temper fell below many of the tempers of her time in the breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy it stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser, and philosophy with Bruno; she could discuss Euphuism with Lilly, and enjoy the chivalry of Essex; she could turn from talk of the last fashions to pore with Cecil over dispatches and treasury-books; she could pass from tracking traitors with Walsingham, to settle points of doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances of a north-west passage to the Indies. The versatility and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand every phase of the intellectual movement about her, and to fix, by a sort of instinct, on its higher representatives.

It was only on its intellectual side, indeed, that Elizabeth touched the England of her day. All its moral aspects were simply dead to her. It was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness by the new moral energy which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole people, when honor and enthusiasm took colors of poetic beauty, and religion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the men about her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a picture would have touched her. She made her market with equal indifference out of the heroism of William of Orange or the bigotry of Philip. The noblest aims and lives were only counters on her board. She was the one soul in her realm whom the news of St. Bartholomew stirred to no thirst for vengeance; and while England was thrilling with the triumph over the

Armada, its queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making her profit out of the spoiled provisions she had ordered for the fleet that saved her. No womanly sympathy bound her even to those who stood closest to her life. She loved Leicester, indeed; she was grateful to Cecil. But for the most part she was deaf to the voices either of love or gratitude. She accepted such services as were never rendered to any other English sovereign without a thought of return. Walsingham spent his fortune in saving her life and her throne, and she left him to die a beggar. But, as if by a strange irony, it was to this very lack of womanly sympathy that she owed some of the grandest features of her character. If she was without love, she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good-humor was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last a mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the thought hardest to bring home to her. Even when Catholic plots broke out in her own household she would listen to no proposals for the removal of Catholics from her court.

Nothing is more revolting, but nothing is more characteristic of the queen than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty; and the ease with which she asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose was only equaled by the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. Her trickery, in fact, had its political value. Ignoble and wearisome as the queen's diplomacy seems to us now, tracking it as we do through a thousand dispatches, it succeeded in its main end, for it gained

time, and every year that was gained doubled Elizabeth's strength. She made as dexterous a use of the foibles of her temper. Her levity carried her gayly over moments of detection and embarrassment, where better women would have died of shame. She screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury and sports to good account. There were moments of grave danger in her reign when the country remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the queen give her days to hawking and hunting, and her nights to dancing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive candidates for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and conspiracies by love sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation.

As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. But, wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were, throughout, temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a rare tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse; but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper, indeed, tended to a rash self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. "I have the heart of a king," she cried, at a moment of utter peril, and it was with a kingly unconsciousness of the dangers about her that she fronted them for fifty years. She had, as strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. "Her majesty counts much on fortune," Walsingham wrote bitterly; "I wish she would trust more in Almighty God." The diplomatists who censured at one moment her irresolution, her delay, her

changes of front, censured at the next her "obstinacy," her iron will, her defiance of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. "This woman," Philip's envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance," this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand devils." To her own subjects, who knew little of her maneuvers and flirtations, of her "by-ways" and "crooked ways," she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish Main or glided between the icebergs of Baffin's Bay never doubted that the palm of bravery lay with their queen.

XXXIV.

EXECUTION OF MARY STUART.-FROUDE.

[Events soon forced Elizabeth to assume the leadership of the Protestant party in England, and, to some extent, in Europe. This brought her into antagonism with Spain, the great Catholic power of the age, and it also brought her face to face with her Catholic rival, Mary Stuart, who had a strong claim to the English throne. In the summer of 1568 Mary, fleeing from her rebellious subjects in Scotland, took refuge in England, and was detained there against her will. Many conspiracies were formed to liberate her, to assassinate Elizabeth, and to place Mary on the throne. At length, after nearly twenty years of anxiety and trouble, Elizabeth and her advisers thought it necessary to put her out of the way. She was executed on a charge of treason in 1587.]

THE end had come. She had long professed to expect it, but the clearest expectation is not certainty. The scene for which she had affected to prepare she was to encounter in its dread reality, and all her busy schemes, her dreams of vengeance, her visions of a revolution, with herself ascending out of the convulsion and seating herself on her rival's throne-all were gone. She had played deep, and the dice had gone against her. . . Her last night was a busy one. As she said herself, there was much to be done, and the time was short. A few lines to the king of France were dated two hours after midnight. They were to insist, for the last time, that she was innocent of the conspiracy, that she was dying for religion, and for having asserted her right to the crown; and to beg that, out of the sum which he owed her, her servants' wages might be paid, and masses provided for her soul. After this she slept for three or four hours, then rose, and with the most elaborate care prepared to encounter the end.

At eight in the morning the provost-marshal knocked at the outer door which communicated with her suite of apartments. It was locked, and no one answered. He went