sow-thistle, succory, senna, endive, carduus benedictus, dandelion, hop, maidenhair, fumitory, bugloss, borage, with their decoctions, distillations, and syrups.

The diuretics were aniseed, dill, fennel, germander, and ground pine. Against flatulency the medicines were innumerable; they were gentian, valerian, dittander, pennyroyal, rue, calamint, bay leaves, rosemary, hyssop, and various spices. Such were the remedies of men, who, in spite of the mall, lived quite as long as their more learned descendants.

CHAP. XV.

REVELS AND PROGRESSES.

"She shall be loved and feared, her own shall bless her,

Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,

And hang their heads with sorrow."

Execution of Mary Stuart. - Magnanimity. - Vanity. — Irresolution. Learning of the Age. -Historical Opinions. - Defence of

Her. Traits of her Character. - Her Temper and Habits. Anecdotes. Etiquette of the Court.

State Ceremonies. - Coin

of her Reign. - Royal Progresses. Their Policy. - List of them. Visit to Kenilworth. Laneham's Description. — Coventry Games. Hunting and Banquets. Visit to Cambridge.— Leicester and Cecil. Disputations.— Latin Speech. - Visit to Oxford. English Play. Elizabeth's Delight in the Students' Enthusiasm. - Visit to Norwich. Revels in Gray's Inn. - King of Misrule. Mask and Banquet.- Queen's Pleasure at the Mask. Twelfth Night. — Temple Revels. - Romance and Beauty of the Elizabethan Masks.- Tournament at Whitehall. Allegory and Mask. Sir Philip Sidney. - The Children of Desire. - Laws of the Tourney.—Surrender of the Championship.-Tournaments. Street Processions.

ELIZABETH was nursed by adversity, and in misfortune's bitter school proved an apt scholar. Her religion strengthened and rooted itself amid persecutions that had led her to

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found her faith on something deeper than mere habit or uninquiring belief. She gathered experience in three Courts, and suffered little from flattery, though few were more deserving it. No wonder that the Protestantism, for which she had so often risked her. life, became the great principle of her reign, and the motive of all her actions. Interest and principle both conduced to make her the Defender of the Protestant Faith throughout the world, for upon its existence depended her power, and even her life.

She began by degrees with all the caution and deliberation of her character: her first councils were half Protestant, half Popish: and the Roman bishops were undisturbed in their sees. Soon she weeded out the first, and removed the second: but only by degrees was she driven by necessity into severity against unremitting and fanatic enemies. From the first year to the last of her reign we find her equally the head of an armed Protestant league. She assisted the Scotch reformers, and those of France and Holland; while refugees from France and the Low Countries flocked continually to the free land.

As danger thickened around her, she soon found that there could be no toleration afforded to priests who headed rebellions and encouraged assassins.

Henry IV. fell by Ravaillac, the Prince of Orange by Balthazar, the cries of St. Bartholomew's Night reached

her ears; the Armada choked the channel, and only God saved her from destruction. Popish emissaries kept Ireland in a flame. The Duke of Norfolk rebelled under popish auspices, and even Mary, whom she protected, encouraged the conspirators against her person. Essex received applause from Rome; would-be murderers filled the prisons, and bulls were nailed to the church doors. She knew that in the eyes of half her subjects she was a cruel Jezebel, whose kingdom the pontiff had confiscated. If Elizabeth had perished by steel or poison, Europe might have again become Catholic, and the Protestants would have sunk into peevish sectarians. Yet the danger never roused her to cruelty, and her reign is stained but by one crime, and even the guilt of that one is disputed.

Need we say we refer to the execution of the Queen of Scots, a national rather than an individual sin, the result of just alarm and exasperation? We know that all the councillors of the Queen considered the plotting fugitive's death necessary for the safety of the nation, and the parliament unprompted urged the same line of action. The wretched guilty prisoner, whom only Romanists and poets now pity, was the centre of all intrigues, and the cynosure of a thousand conspiracies.

No lampoons or slanders could sting Elizabeth into cruelty; it is only an abridgment of these Jesuitical

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charges, and a specimen of their loud lies and obscene calumnies, that could convey any conception of the pain which a woman must have felt at knowing that she was deemed a monster of vice in every Catholic court of Christendom. Cardinal Allen's charges show us the language of the most respectable of her enemies. In the "Admonition to the Nobility of England," which the exile wrote the year of the Armada to incite his countrymen to rebel, he accuses his lawful mistress of being the illegitimate offspring of a vile woman put to death for her crimes. She had, he says, broken her coronation oath, and unlawfully removed the popish bishops from their sees, she had profaned sacraments, defiled churches, oppressed consciences, and destroyed the nobility. She harboured rebels and sold laws; leagued herself with the Turk, murdered priests, slaughtered her defenceless kinswoman, and proved herself a Jezebel and child of Lucifer. He accuses her of dishonest life, of intriguing with Leicester, and of refusing to marry because marriage would restrain her licentiousness.

Of Elizabeth's private virtue only Jacobites are now doubtful. State policy and womanly weakness is an excuse for her many coquettings, from which, however, she was the only sufferer; the sham lovers being men of selfish ambition, who really loved nothing but themselves. Phi