weight of her great mind and her great place were thrown
on the people's side. She was able to paralyse the dying efforts with
which, if a Stuart had been on the throne, the representatives of an
effete system might have made the struggle a deadly one; and the history
of England is not the history of France, because the resolution of one
person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart
of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was
no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any
other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social
organisation, was not any more a system under which their energies could
have scope to move. Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man
to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be
the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to
remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to
be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in
him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it
in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the
Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to plough the ocean with
its navies, and sow its colonies over the globe; and the first
appearance of these enormous forces and the light of the earliest
achievements of the new era shines through the forty years of the reign
of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its history is written,
will be seen to be among the most sublime phenomena which the earth as
yet has witnessed. The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and Elizabeth's place
was to recognise, to love, to foster, and to guide. The Government
originated nothing; at such a time it was neither necessary nor
desirable that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises were
on foot which promised ultimate good, and doubtful immediate profit, we
never fail to find among the lists of contributors the Queen's Majesty,
Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for
Elizabeth could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
distant voyages in the river, the queen would go down in her barge and
inspect. Frobisher,