Page:The Queens of England.djvu/492

 444 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. information of the Roman court: "She delights beyond meas- ure in admiration and praises of her beauty, in which she has the vanity to think that she has no equal. Hence she makes public exhibitions of herself in a thousand ways, and with a thousand different inventions ; and sometimes to so great an excess that it has been doubted which went furthest, the king in the ostentation of his learning, or the queen in the display of her beauty." This is confirmed by a curious anecdote re- lated by Osborne ; who says he himself saw James one evening parting from the queen, and taking his leave at her coach side, "by kissing her sufficiently to the middle of the shoulders ; for so low she went bare," he adds, "all the days I had the fortune to know her ; having a skin far more amiable than the features it covered, though not the disposition, in which re- port rendered her very debonair." Other equally good wit- nesses confirm Bcntivoglio's account. "Her great passion is for balls and public entertainments, which she herself arranges, and which serve as a public theater on which to display her grace and beauty." For this she acted goddesses, negresses, and nereids, and displayed herself as the Indian princess or the Turkish sultana. Thus she had arranged that pageant in Jonson's fine Masque of Queens, wherein twelve ladies were exhibited sitting on a throne in the form of a pyramid, eleven of whom represented the highest and most heroical of queens that had ever existed, and the twelfth was Anne, in propria persona, to whom the poor needy poet gives the name of Belanna, and who is unan- imously chosen by the other queens to form the apex of their pyramid, as possessing in her single person all the virtues wherewith it had been the glory of each to be separately adorned ! At the suggestion of her peculiar taste, too, Jonson introduced into his Masque of Blackness twelve Ethiopian nymphs, daughters of the Niger, who had come all the way to Britain (as the country now begins to be called) in search of a wash to whiten their complexions, and who had nothing to do but show their blackened negress-faces, and dance. Sir Dudley Carleton received an invitation to the latter masque, and one or two facts from his account of it may show us what the thing generally was. This exhibition took place in the Banqueting-house at Whitehall ; and the first thing you saw on entering the room was a great engine at the lower end which had motion, and in which were the images of sea-horses,