ake.
At three o'clock next morning, she very quietly died, in the forty-fifth
year of her reign.

That reign had been a glorious one, and is made for ever memorable by the
distinguished men who flourished in it. Apart from the great voyagers,
statesmen, and scholars, whom it produced, the names of BACON, SPENSER,
and SHAKESPEARE, will always be remembered with pride and veneration by
the civilised world, and will always impart (though with no great reason,
perhaps) some portion of their lustre to the name of Elizabeth herself.
It was a great reign for discovery, for commerce, and for English
enterprise and spirit in general. It was a great reign for the
Protestant religion and for the Reformation which made England free. The
Queen was very popular, and in her progresses, or journeys about her
dominions, was everywhere received with the liveliest joy. I think the
truth is, that she was not half so good as she has been made out, and not
half so bad as she has been made out. She had her fine qualities, but
she was coarse, capricious, and treacherous, and had all the faults of an
excessively vain young woman long after she was an old one. On the
whole, she had a great deal too much of her father in her, to please me.

Many improvements and luxuries were introduced in the course of these
five-and-forty years in the general manner of living; but cock-fighting,
bull-baiting, and bear-baiting, were still the national amusements; and a
coach was so rarely seen, and was such an ugly and cumbersome affair when
it was seen, that even the Queen herself, on many high occasions, rode on
horseback on a pillion behind the Lord Chancellor.

CHAPTER XXXII--ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE FIRST

'Our cousin of Scotland' was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in mind
and person. His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his legs were
much too weak for his body, and his dull goggle-eyes stared and rolled
like an idiot's. He was cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken,
greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited man on
earth. His figure--what is commonly called rickety from his
birth--presented a most ridiculous appearance, dressed in thick padded
clothes, as a safeguard against being stabbed (of which he lived in
continual fear), of a grass-green colour from head to foot, with a
hunting-horn dangling at his side instead of a sword, and his hat and
feather sticking over one eye, or hanging on the back of