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", "
", "center", "70", "0", "0", "[Cover]") ?>
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", "
", "center", "70", "0", "0", "[Title Page]") ?>
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", "
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", "
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", "center", "70", "0", "0", "[Frontispiece]", SmallCapsText("Elizabeth, Queen of England.")) ?>
all the sovereigns that have worn the crown of
England, Queen Elizabeth is the most puzzling, the most
fascinating, the most blindly praised, and the most
unjustly blamed. To make lists of her faults and
virtues is easy. One may say with little fear of
contradiction that her intellect was magnificent and
her vanity almost incredibly childish; that she was at
one time the most outspoken of women, at another the
most untruthful; that on one occasion she would
manifest a dignity that was truly sovereign, while on
another the rudeness of her manners was unworthy of
even the age in which she lived. Sometimes she was the
strongest of the strong, sometimes the weakest of the
weak.
At a distance of three hundred years it is not easy to
balance these claims to censure and to admiration, but
at least no one should forget that the little white
hand of which she was so vain
guided the ship of state
with most consummate skill in its perilous passage
through the troubled waters of the latter half of the
sixteenth century.
Worcester, March, 1902
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", "
", "center", "70", "0", "0", "[Contents]") ?>
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", "
", "center", "70", "0", "0", "[Illustrations]") ?>