Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 17.djvu/236

 In person Elizabeth was a little over middle height, and when she came to the throne she must have been a beautiful young woman, with a profusion of auburn hair, a broad commanding brow, and regular features that were capable of rapid changes of expression as her hazel eyes flashed with anger or sparkled with merriment. Her portraits appear to have been all more or less 'idealised,' their number is so great that it is to be wondered that no monograph has yet been attempted dealing with them at all adequately. By far the most impressive picture of her which has been engraved is Mark Gerard's portrait at Burleigh House; it forms the frontispiece to the first volume of Wright's 'Elizabeth and her Times.' The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn could hardly have missed inheriting some of the personal beauty of her parents, but she was emphatically her fathers child. From him she got her immense physical vigour, her magnificent constitution, her powerful intellect, a frame which seemed incapable of fatigue, and a nervous system that rendered her almost insensible to fear or pain. Her life was the life of a man, not of a woman; she could hunt all day, dance or watch masques and pageants all night, till the knees of strong men trembled under them as they wearily waited in attendance upon her person; yet she never seemed to suffer from the immense tension at which she lived. With her amazing energy, her want of all sympathy for weakness, her fierce wilfulness and self-assertion, and a certain coarseness of fibre, it was inevitable that she should be unfeminine. She swore, she spat upon a courtier's coat when it did not please her taste, she beat her gentlewomen soundly, she kissed whom she pleased, she gave Essex a good stinging blow on the face, she called the members of her privy council by all sorts of nicknames; but woe to him who should presume to take liberties with her, forget that she was his queen, or dare by word or deed to cross her when she was bent upon any course. The infamous maiming of John Stubbes for writing a pamphlet against the Anjou marriage is a hideous instance of her occasional ferocity the lifelong imprisonment of the Earl of Arundel illustrates her vindictiveness. Her early education, hard, prosaic, and masculine as it was, must have been conducted with great care. It was a severe training, but there was nothing in it to soften her, to stimulate her imagination, or to refine her tastes. With the Roman poets she appears to have never had any acquaintance. Latin and French she learnt colloquially, and acquired a perfect command of them; her French letters are better compositions than her English ones. Italian she did not speak with ease, and Greek she probably never was much at home in. The few attempts at English verse which she indulged in are worthless. She was a facile performer upon more than one musical instrument, and in 1599 she sent over Thomas Dallam [q. v.] with an organ which she presented to the sultan Mahomet III, and which took the builder more than a year to set up (Addit. MSS. 17480). She had little or no taste for pictorial art, and her passion for dress was barbaric. Her memory was extraordinary. When the ambassador of Sigismund, king of Poland, presented his letters of credence in July 1597, and took occasion to deliver an harangue which provoked her by its impertinence, Elizabeth electrified him and the court by hurling a long speech at him in Latin, rating him roundly for his presumption. It was certainly spoken on the spur of the moment, and when she ended she turned laughingly to her council, half surprised at her own fluency. For literature, as we now understand the term, it is curious that she never appears to have had any taste. Some of Shakespeare's plays were performed in her presence, but she looked upon such matters as pastime — one show was as good as another. Camden notes that once, shortly after the execution of Mary Stuart, she took to reading books, as if it were quite unusual, When she did turn to study it was only a recurring to the authors she had gone through in her girlhood; she translated Boethius and Sallust. She did not even care for learning or learned men. Camden was almost the only one of them in whom she showed any kindly interest; it is doubtful whether Richard Hooker owod to her even the trumpery country living of Bishopsbourne, Kent, where he died unnoticed in 1600. Spenser she seems never to have cared for; she lived quite outside that splendid intellectual activity which began at the close of her reign. Her parsimony was phenomenal. Her hatred of marriage and her irritation and wrath against any one who dared to take a wife at all secretly was almost a craze. Leicester, Essex, Raleigh, Sir Robert Carey, John Downe, and many another, are instances of those whom she could not forgive for simply marrying on the sly (see, Const. Hist. vol. i. ch. iv. p. 174). Yet, when all is said that can be said to prove that she had her weaknesses and her faults, it amounts to no more than this, that she was human; and when all deductions have been made that the most captious criticism can collect, her name will go down to posterity as one of the