e 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
honour and enthusiasm took colours 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 humour 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 very household she would listen to no proposals for the removal
of Catholics from her court.

If any trace of her sex lingered in the Queen'