"

long attributed to Spenser, are now known to be Churchyard's. Yet that
the author of the _Faery Queen_ had similar injuries to endure, is
manifest from those lines of unrivalled energy in which the poet, from
the bitterness of his soul, describes the miseries of a profitless
court-attendance. Few readers will have forgotten a passage so
celebrated; but it will here be read with peculiar interest, as
illustrative of the character of Elizabeth and the sufferings of her
unfortunate courtiers.

"Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide;
To lose good days that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed today, to be put back tomorrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers;
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run;
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

_Mother Hubbard's Tale._

One of the most laudable objects of the parsimony exercised by Elizabeth
at this period was that of enabling herself to afford effectual aid to
Henry IV. of France, now struggling, with adverse fortune but invincible
resolution, to conquer from the united armies of Spain and the League
the throne which was his birthright. In the depth of his distress, just
when his Swiss and German auxiliaries were on the point of disbanding
themselves for want of pay, the friendship of Elizabeth came in aid of
his necessities with a supply of twenty-two thousand pounds; a sum,
trifling as it may seem in modern estimation, which sufficed to rescue
Henry from his immediate embarrassment, and which he frankly avowed to
be the largest he had ever seen. The generosity of his ally did not stop
here; for she speedily equipped a body of four thousand men and sent
them to join him at Dieppe under command of the gallant lord Willoughby.
By this reinforcement Henry was enabled to march to Paris and possess
himself of its suburbs, and subsequently to engage in several other
enterprises, in which he gratefully acknowledged the eminent service
rendered him by the valor and fidelity of this band of English.

The next year Elizabeth, alarmed at seeing several of the ports of
Bretagne opposite to her own shores garrisoned by Spanish troops, whom
the Lea