To be content than to be great.
We are introduced to Queen Elizabeth at the palace gate as she takes her royal barge for a morning’s trip upon the Thames: and it is here that Scott introduces with grace the well-known incident of Sir Walter Raleigh placing his mantle upon the ground before the queen to save Her Majesty’s slippers. We see her attempting to reconcile the difference between Leicester and Essex, who bow for the time before her haughty will; and we wonder that her proud spirit, which brooked no opposition, could stop in the midst of state affairs to receive as flattery an allusion to tresses of gold braided in a metaphor of sunbeams; while Leicester, tottering upon the precipice of infamy, by false eloquence brings a blush to her cheek, and conjures her to strip him of all his power, but to leave him the name of her servant. “Take from the poor Dudley,” he exclaimed, “all that your bounty has made him, and bid him be the poor gentleman he was when your grace first shone on him; leave him no more than his cloak and his sword, but led him still boast he has—what in word and deed he never forfeited—the regard of his adored Queen and mistress!”
But it is in the Halls of Kenilworth, where we trace in Scott’s picture at once the greatness and weakness of the woman and the queen. We are introduced to the stately castle which Scott describes with the love of an antiquarian—a lordly structure composed of a huge pile of magnificent castellated buildings, apparently of different ages, revealing in its armorial bearings “the emblems of mighty chiefs who had long passed away and, whose history, could Ambition have lent ear to it, might have read a lesson to the haughty favorite, who had now acquired and was augmenting the fair domain.”
Amid these princely halls, where the clocks for seven days point to the hour of noon as if to indicate one continual banquet, we trace the misery of those who hang on princes’ favors. The picture is a revelation of the frailty of all human aspirations; and we close the volume recalling the words of Burns:
“It’s no, in titles or in rank,
It’s no, in wealth like London bank
To purchase peace or rest.
If happiness has not her seat
And center in the breast,
We may be wise or rich or great,