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to accuse the earl of opiniastreté, and that "he would not be ruled; but she would bridle and stay him "." On another occasion she said, "she observed such as followed her, and those which accompanied such as were in her displeasure; and that they should know as much before it was long"." No wonder the earl complained "that he was as much distasted with the glorious greatness of a favourite, as he was before with the supposed happiness of a courtier *." No wonder his mind was so tossed with contradictory passions, when her soul, on whom he depended, was a composition of tenderness and haughtiness!-nay, when even economy combated her affection! He professes, "that her fond parting with him, when he set out for Ireland, pierced his very soul3."-In a few weeks she quarrelled with him for demanding a poor supply of one thousand foot and three hundred horse 4.

decently, speaking of Henry the fourth to his embassador in most illiberal terms, and with the greatest contempt for the person of the embassador himself. Bacon Papers, vol. i. p. 328. Bacon Papers, vol. i. p. 5. .

9 Ib. p. 389.

• Ib. P. 116.

3 Ib. p. 425.

+ Camden and Bacon. She even mortified him so bitterly, as to oblige him to dispossess his dear friend, the earl of South

Having pretty clearly ascertained the existence of the sentiment, it seems that the earl's ruin was in great measure owing to the little homage he paid to a sovereign, jealous of his person and of her own, and not accustomed to pardon the want of a proper degree of awe and adoration! Before his voyage to Ireland, she had treated him as she did the fair Mrs. Bridges-in short, had given him a box on the ear for turning his back on her in contempt. What must she have felt on hearing he had said, "that she grew old and cankered, and that her mind was become as crooked as her carcase!" What provocation to a woman so disposed to believe all the flattery of her courts! How did she torture

ampton, of the generalship of horse, which the earl had conferred upon him. P. 423.

5 [In her 66th year she was thus complimented by an epigrammatist:

"When in thy flowring age thou did'st beginne

Thy happy reigne, ELIZA, blessed queene!
Then as a flowre thy country gan to spring,

All things, as after winter, waxed greene.
No riper time shakes off thy flowring yeeres,
Thy greennesse stayes, our budd continueth;

No age in thee or winter's face appeares;

And as thou, so thy country florisheth;

As if that greennesse and felicitie

Thy land did give, which it receives from thee."

Bastard's Chrestoleros, 1598, p. 88.

"There is almost none," says Harington, "that wayted in

6

Melville to make him prefer her beauty to his charming queen's! Elizabeth's foible about her person was so well known, that when she was sixty-seven, Veriken, the Dutch embassador, told her at his audience, "that he had longed to undertake that voyage to see her majesty, who for beauty and wisdom excelled all other princes of the world "." The next year lord Essex's sister lady Rich, interceding for him, tells her majesty, "Early did I hope this morning to have had mine eyes blessed with your majesty's beauty. That her brother's life, his love, his service to her beauties, did not deserve so hard a punishment. That he would be disabled from ever serving again his sacred goddess! whose excellent beauties and perfections ought to feel more compassion "." Whenever the weather

queen Elizabeth's court, and observed any thing, but can tell that it pleased her much to seeme and to be thought, and to be told, that she looked younge. The majestie and gravitie of a scepter, borne forty-four yeare, could not alter that nature of a woman in her." Nugæ Antiquæ, vol. ii. p. 215.

6 Vide his Memoirs.

7 Sidney Papers, vol. ii. p. 171.

Bacon Papers, p. 442, 443.[" The only objection," says Dr. Robertson, "to the account we have given of Elizabeth's attachment to Essex, arises from her great age. At the age of sixty-eight, the amorous passions are commonly abundantly cool, and the violence of all the passions, except one, is much abated. But the force of this objection is entirely removed,

would permit, she gave audience in the garden; her lines were strong, and in open daylight the shades had less force. Vertue, the engraver, had a pocket-book of Isaac Oliver, in which the latter had made a memorandum, that the queen would not let him give any shade to her features, telling him, "that shade was an accident, and not naturally existing in a face." Her portraits are generally without any shadow. I have in my possession another strongly presumptive proof of this weakness. It is a fragment of one of her last broad pieces, representing her horridly old and deformed. An entire coin with this image is not known. It is universally supposed that the die was broken by her command, and that some workman of the mint cut out this morsel, which contains barely the face2. As it has never been engraved, so singular a curiosity may have its merit, in a work which has no other kind of merit.

by an author who has illustrated many passages in the English history, and adorned more, in his Catalogue of royal and noble Authors." Hist. of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 243.]

This piece was purchased from the cabinet of the late earl of Oxford. [An original engraving of the queen, when she was princess Elizabeth, was prefixed to Nugæ Antiquæ, edit. 1769, and is here contrasted with her later resemblance in lord Orford's collection. Dr. Lort 1emarks, that Puttenham calls her "the most bewtifull or rather bewtie of quenes." Art of E. P. p. 207.]

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The above Fac Simile of 2.Elizabeth's Signature, the death-warrant of Robert Earl of Essex : now in the Marquis of Siffords Possession?

Pub. Feb'1. 1807, by 1. Scott 442, Strand.

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