lay thy sovereign. Call my
French guards--_a moi! a moi! mes Francais_!--I am beset
with traitors in mine own palace--they have murdered my
husband--Rescue! Rescue! for the Queen of Scotland!' She
started up from her chair--her features late so exquisitely
lovely in their paleness, now inflamed with the fury of
frenzy, and resembling those of a Bellona. 'We will take the
field ourself,' she said; 'warn the city--warn Lothian and
Fife--saddle our Spanish barb, and bid French Paris see our
petronel be charged. Better to die at the head of our brave
Scotsmen, like our grandfather at Flodden, than of a broken
heart like our ill-starred father.' 'Be patient--be
composed, dearest sovereign,' said Catherine; and then
addressing Lady Fleming angrily, she added, 'How could you
say aught that reminded her of her husband?' The word
reached the ear of the unhappy princess who caught it up,
speaking with great rapidity, 'Husband!--what husband? Not
his most Christian Majesty--he is ill at ease--he cannot
mount on horseback--not him of the Lennox--but it was the
Duke of Orkney thou wouldst say?' 'For God's love, madam, be
patient!' said the Lady Fleming. But the queen's excited
imagination could by no entreaty be diverted from its
course. 'Bid him come hither to our aid,' she said, 'and
bring with him his lambs, as he calls them--Bowton, Hay of
Talla, Black Ormiston and his kinsman Hob--Fie, how swart
they are, and how they smell of sulphur! What! closeted with
Morton? Nay, if the Douglas and the Hepburn hatch the
complot together, the bird when it breaks the shell will
scare Scotland, will it not, my Fleming?' 'She grows wilder
and wilder,' said Fleming. 'We have too many hearers for
these strange words.' 'Roland,' said Catherine, 'in the name
of God begone!--you cannot aid us here--leave us to deal
with her alone--away--away!"

And equally fine is the scene in _Kenilworth_ in which Elizabeth
undertakes the reconciliation of the haughty rivals, Sussex and
Leicester, unaware that in the course of the audience she herself will
have to bear a great strain on her self-command, both in her feelings
as a queen and her feelings as a lover. Her grand rebukes to both, her
ill-concealed preference for Leicester, her whispered ridicule of
Sussex, the impulses of tenderness which she