Page:The Queens of England.djvu/454

 410 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. they did her great wrong ; that he liked her extremely ; and added many far stronger and less delicate expressions of ad- miration ; and all the while he spoke, he gazed from time to time rapturously on her, and then again turned to the English- man. Elizabeth, whose eyes were more fixed on these pri- vate persons than on the ambassadors, as soon as the audience was finished, sent for her English subject, and commanded him, under pain of her displeasure, to tell her precisely what the Hollander had said to him ; for she was quite assured, by the manner and gestures of both, that she had been the subject of their conversation. The gentleman for a long time hesitated to comply, alleging that only trifles were- spoken, equally unworthy and unfit to be communicated to her ma- jesty; but Elizabeth peremptorily persisting, he was at length compelled to tell her the love which the Dutchman expressed for her person, and the very phrases in which his admiration was conveyed. The result of this affair was that each ambas- sador was presented with a gold chain worth two hundred pounds, and each of their retinue with one worth twenty-five pounds ; but the Hollander who had lauded the queen's beauty in language which cannot be repeated, received a gold chain worth four hundred pounds, which chain he wore about his neck as long as he lived." In Sir Walter Scott's "History of Scotland" is a passage which records her vanity with such whimsical gravity that it must be transferred to these pages in his own words : "Throughout her whole reign, Queen Elizabeth, pre-emi- nent as a sovereign, had never been able to forbear the asser- tion of her claims as a wit and as a beauty. When verging to the extremity of life her mirror presented her with hair too gray and features too withered to reflect, even in her own opinion, the features of that fairy queen of immortal youth and beauty, in which she had been painted by one of the most charming poets of that poetic age. She avenged her- self by discontinuing the consultation of her looking-glass, which no Lnger flattered her, and exchanged that monitor of the toilet for the false, favorable, and pleasing reports of the ladies who attended her. This indulgence of vanity brought as usual, its own punishment. The young females who waited upon her turned her pretensions into ridicule ; and, if the report of the times is true, ventured even to personal insult, by misplacing the cosmetics which she used for the repair of