essened as they felt the
pressure and taxation of the war. Of old men had pressed to see the
Queen as if it were a glimpse of heaven. "In the year 1588," a bishop
tells us, who was then a country boy fresh come to town, "I did live at
the upper end of the Strand near St. Clement's church, when suddenly
there came a report to us (it was in December, much about five of the
clock at night, very dark) that the Queen was gone to Council, 'and if
you will see the Queen you must come quickly.' Then we all ran, when the
Court gates were set open, and no man did hinder us from coming in.
There we came, where there was a far greater company than was usually at
Lenten sermons; and when we had staid there an hour and that the yard
was full, there being a number of torches, the Queen came out in great
state. Then we cried, 'God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!'
Then the Queen turned to us and said, 'God bless you all, my good
people!' Then we cried again, 'God bless your Majesty! God bless your
Majesty!' Then the Queen said again to us, 'You may well have a greater
prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince.' And so looking
one upon another a while the Queen departed. This wrought such an
impression on us, for shows and pageantry are ever best seen by
torchlight, that all the way long we did nothing but talk what an
admirable Queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her
service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her progresses, the
people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The temper
of the age in fact was changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her
own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral,
prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child
of earth and the Renascence.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's death.]

But if ministers and courtiers were counting on her death, Elizabeth had
no mind to die. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it,
and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She
hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted
and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. "The
Queen," wrote a courtier a few months before her death, "was never so
gallant these many years nor so set upon jollity." She persisted, in
spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from country-house to
country-house. She clung to business as of old, and rated i