th loyalty to the
crown. The poets idealized Elizabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and
to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of
Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict
against popery and Spain. Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman. In spite
of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character,
and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her
government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will,
and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a _man_," and she
had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts,
passionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic
flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities,
the nobles, and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with
plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the
day. "When the queen paraded through a country town," says Warton, the
historian of English poetry, "almost every pageant was a pantheon. When
she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the
hall she was saluted by the _penates_. In the afternoon, when she
condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons
and nereids; the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs,
who peeped from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in
the figure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by
Diana, who, pronouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of
unspotted chastity, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of
Acteon." The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any
notice were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of
Leicester, when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of
these was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, _The
Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth_, and Walter Scott has
made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of _Kenilworth_.
Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy
of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to
see the spectacle; may have seen Neptune riding on the back of a huge
dolphin in the castle lake, speaking the copy of verses in which he
offered his trident to the empress of the sea; and may have

heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such d