Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/411

 ease," says Froude, "galloping a half-broken stallion over the heather as when languishing in her boudoir over a love-sonnet." She said "she wished she was a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the field, or to walk on the causey with a Glasgow buckler and a broadsword."

She reminds us of Bathsheba in the novel which has been already quoted. Talking with her maid Liddy, she said, "I hope I am not a bold sort of maid,—mannish?" she continued, with some anxiety. To which Liddy replied, "Oh, no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that 'tis getting on that way sometimes."

At the age of nineteen, the delicately nurtured woman set sail from France for Scotland, to begin that long, indomitable struggle to succeed Elizabeth, and to break the Reformation in England. The wiliest and most inflexible of Queen Elizabeth's counsellors shivered their weapons against the guard of her swift tact, until imprisonment, which was twice escaped from, and death,—

"That fell arrest, Without all bail,"—

became England's last resource against this dangerous, lovable, bewildering, fateful woman. Her bronze effigy in St. Mary's Church at Warwick lifts features whose clearly cut delicacy implies her resolution, and the magnetic power of all her loves and plots.

Her attachments were sometimes inspired by politics, sometimes by sentiment. All her mental and emotional ability was pledged to honor drafts which came in the interest of the Pope, of France, of hatred of Protestant