more inflexible than the legate. Hard and intolerant as he was on these occasions, his conduct was but the logical result of a sincere belief in his creed. Outside the pale of the Catholic Church he thought there was no salvation; to bring all within the fold was, therefore, the object of every true son of the Church; those who created schisms and disseminated heresies were guilty of the most awful of all crimes the eternal destruction of immortal souls. To the man who destroyed the body the penalty of death was dealt out; was he who damned the soul to be more mercifully treated? In the eyes of Pole a heretic was the greatest enemy of God and man. "For be you assured," said he, when lecturing the citizens of London upon their sympathy with the Protestant martyrs, there is no kind of men so pernicious to the commonwealth as these heretics be; there are no thieves, no murderers, no adulterers, nor no kind of treason to be compared to theirs, who, as it were, undermining the chief foundation of all commonwealths, which is religion, maketh an entry to all kinds of vices in the most heinous manner." The conduct of Pole, during the short period he held office in England, reveals the true nature of the creed of Rome where its actions are unfettered by the civil power. As a consistent Catholic, possessing the opportunity of enforcing his principles, the legate could not, and ought not to, have acted otherwise.

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XXXIII.

CHARACTER AND POLICY OF ELIZABETH.-GREEN.

[The terrible persecution of Mary's reign, and her anti-national policy, led to a strong reaction against her. If she had lived longer, it is probable that she would have been hurled from the throne by a revolution. At her death the English people eagerly welcomed her successor. But the young queen was not inclined, at first, to play the role of a Protestant leader. She wished to become queen of the nation, and not of a party; and throughout her reign she followed public opinion rather than led it.]

QUEEN ELIZABETH.

amazing self-confidence.

To the world about her the temper of Elizabeth recalled, in its strange contrasts, the mixed blood within her veins. She was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne Boleyn. From her father she inherited her frank and hearty address, her love of popularity and of free intercourse with the people, her dauntless courage, and her Her harsh, manlike voice, her impetuous will, her furious outbursts of anger, came to her with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were school-boys; she met the insolence of Lord Essex with a box on the ear; she broke now and then into the gravest deliberations to swear at her ministers like a fish-wife. Strangely in contrast with these violent outlines of her father's temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature she drew from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure were with Elizabeth the very air she breathed Her delight was to move in perpetual progresses from castle to castle through a series of gorgeous pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a caliph's dream. She loved gayety, and laughter, and wit. A happy retort or a finished compliment never failed to win her favor. She

hoarded jewels. Her dresses were innumerable. Her vanity remained, even to old age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens. No adulation was too fulsome for her, no flattery of her beauty too gross. She would play with her rings that her courtiers might note the delicacy of her hands; or dance a coranto that an embassador, hidden dexterously behind a curtain, might report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests, gave color to a thousand scandals. Her character, in fact, like her portraits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy veiled the voluptuous temper which broke out in the romps of her girlhood, and showed itself almost ostentatiously through her later life. Personal beauty in a man was a sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome young squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and fondled her "sweet Robin," Lord Leicester, in the face of the court.

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It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held Elizabeth to be little more than a frivolous woman, or that Philip of Spain wondered how a wanton" could hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. Wilfulness and triviality played over the surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very type of reason untouched by imagination or passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, the young queen lived simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her vanity and caprice had no weight whatever with her in state affairs. The coquette of the presence-chamber became the coolest and hardest of politicians at the council-board Fresh from the flattery of her courtiers, she would tolerate no flattery in the closet; she was herself plain and downright of speech with her counselors, and she looked for a corresponding plainness of speech in return. The very hoice of her advisers, indeed, showed Elizabeth's ability. She

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