er--"So please your Majesty,
my young Lord of Oxford, who is here in presence, knows Master Anthony
Foster's hand and his character."

The Earl of Oxford, a young unthrift, whom Foster had more than once
accommodated with loans on usurious interest, acknowledged, on this
appeal, that he knew him as a wealthy and independent franklin, supposed
to be worth much money, and verified the certificate produced to be his
handwriting.

"And who speaks to the Doctor's certificate?" said the Queen. "Alasco,
methinks, is his name."

Masters, her Majesty's physician (not the less willingly that he
remembered his repulse from Sayes Court, and thought that his present
testimony might gratify Leicester, and mortify the Earl of Sussex and
his faction), acknowledged he had more than once consulted with Doctor
Alasco, and spoke of him as a man of extraordinary learning and hidden
acquirements, though not altogether in the regular course of practice.
The Earl of Huntingdon, Lord Leicester's brother-in-law, and the old
Countess of Rutland, next sang his praises, and both remembered the
thin, beautiful Italian hand in which he was wont to write his receipts,
and which corresponded to the certificate produced as his.

"And now, I trust, Master Tressilian, this matter is ended," said the
Queen. "We will do something ere the night is older to reconcile old Sir
Hugh Robsart to the match. You have done your duty something more than
boldly; but we were no woman had we not compassion for the wounds which
true love deals, so we forgive your audacity, and your uncleansed
boots withal, which have well-nigh overpowered my Lord of Leicester's
perfumes."

So spoke Elizabeth, whose nicety of scent was one of the characteristics
of her organization, as appeared long afterwards when she expelled Essex
from her presence, on a charge against his boots similar to that which
she now expressed against those of Tressilian.

But Tressilian had by this time collected himself, astonished as he had
at first been by the audacity of the falsehood so feasibly supported,
and placed in array against the evidence of his own eyes. He rushed
forward, kneeled down, and caught the Queen by the skirt of her robe.
"As you are Christian woman," he said, "madam, as you are crowned Queen,
to do equal justice among your subjects--as you hope yourself to have
fair hearing (which God grant you) at that last bar at which we must all
plead, grant me one small request! Decide not