moved through good or ill report, and proved to the utmost in the dungeon
and on the scaffold--the love of a pure, high-minded, trusting woman,
confident, and fearless, and faithful to the end.

It does not appear that Raleigh suspected the true cause of Elizabeth's
alienation from so good and great a servant: perhaps no one man of the many
whom for the like cause she neglected, disgraced, persecuted, knew that the
cause existed in the fact of their having taken to themselves partners of
life and happiness--a solace which she sacrificed to the sterile honors of
an undivided crown--of their enjoying the bliss and perfect contentment of
a happy wedded life, while she, who would fain have enjoyed the like, could
she have done so without the loan of some portion of her independent and
undivided authority, was compelled, by her own jealousy of power and
obstinacy of will, to pine in lonely and unloved virginity.

Yet such was doubtless the cause of his decline in the royal favor, which
he never, in after days, regained; for, after Essex was dead by her award
and deed, Elizabeth, in her furious and lion-like remorse, visited his
death upon the heads of all those who had been his enemies in life, or
counseled her against him, even when he was in arms against her crown; nor
forgave them any more than she forgave herself, who died literally
broken-hearted, the most lamentable and disastrous of women, if the
proudest and most fortunate queens, in the heyday of her fortunes, when she
had raised her England to that proud and pre-eminent station above rather
than among the states of Europe, from which she never declined, save for a
brief space under her successors, those weakest and wickedest of English
kings, the ominous and ill-starred Stuarts, and which she still maintains
in her hale and superb old age, savoring, after nearly nine centuries of
increasing might and scarcely interrupted rule, in no respect of
decrepitude or decay.

Her greatest crime was the death of Mary Stuart; her greatest misfortune,
the death of Essex; her greatest shame, the disgrace of Walter Raleigh. But
with all her crimes, all her misfortunes, all her shame, she was a great
woman, and a glorious queen, and in both qualities peculiarly and
distinctively English. The stay and bulwark of her country's freedom and
religion, she lived and died possessed of that rarest and most divine gift
to princes, her people's unmixed love and veneration.

She died in an