through all the ages, even as the
great men who surrounded her throne have made her name illustrious.

The Elizabethan era is justly regarded as the brightest in English
history; not for the number of its great men, or the magnificence of its
great enterprises, or the triumphs of its great discoveries and
inventions, but because there were then born the great ideas which
constitute the strength and beauty of our proud civilization, and
because then the grandest questions which pertain to religion,
government, literature, and social life were first agitated, with the
freshness and earnestness of a revolutionary age. The men of that period
were a constellation of original thinkers. We still point with
admiration to the political wisdom of Cecil, to the sagacity of
Walsingham, to the varied accomplishments of Raleigh, to the chivalrous
graces of Sidney, to the bravery of Hawkins and Nottingham, to the bold
enterprises of Drake and Frobisher, to the mercantile integrity and
financial skill of Gresham, to the comprehensive intellect of Parker, to
the scholarship of Ascham, to the eloquence of Jewel, to the profundity
of Hooker, to the vast attainments and original genius of Bacon, to the
rich fancy of Spenser, to the almost inspired insight of Shakspeare,
towering above all the poets of ancient and of modern times, as fresh
to-day as he was three hundred years ago, the greatest miracle of
intellect that perhaps has ever adorned the world. By all these
illustrious men Queen Elizabeth was honored and beloved. All received no
small share of their renown from her glorious appreciation; all were
proud to revolve around her as a central sun, giving life and growth to
every great enterprise in her day, and shedding a light which shall
gladden unborn generations.

It is something that a woman has earned such a fame, and in a sphere
which has been supposed to belong to man alone. And if men shall here
and there be found to decry her greatness, let no woman be found who
shall seek to dethrone her from her lofty pedestal; for in so doing she
unwittingly becomes a detractor from that womanly greatness in which we
should all rejoice, and which thus far has so seldom been seen in
exalted stations. For my part, the more I study history the more I
reverence this great sovereign; and I am proud that such a woman has
lived and reigned and died in honor.

AUTHORITIES.

Fronde's History of England; Hume's History of England; Agnes
Strickl