the end.
[IN THE TOWER OF MANY STORIES.]
THE EARL OF ESSEX AND HIS RING.
BY MRS. LEW. WALLACE.
he name of Queen Elizabeth is dear to loyal English hearts, and her reign is named to-day as second only to that of the gentle and gracious Victoria. She was strong and wise, ready to sacrifice small things for a great end, and all things for the good of her subjects. The many portraits of her I have seen are much like the pictures of George Eliot: red hair, a pale high forehead, keen dark eyes, a nose hooked like the beak of an eagle, sharp chin. Such is not the face to win admiration, much less to waken love; yet, when nearly seventy—an age which no art can conceal—she listened to the soft flatteries of her courtiers as tributes to her beauty which they could not repress. When one shaded his eyes at her approach, as though the lustre of her face dazzled his sight like the sun, and said "he could not behold it with a fixed eye," she was delighted with the foolish speech, as a young girl with the roses of her first ball. One can hardly keep from laughing at the idea of high-born youths of twenty-five or thirty hanging breathless on her withered smiles and pretending worship of her charms. Such was her daily portion from the shining train of courtiers surrounding her, and she never tired of it. One said of her red hair: "A poet, madam, might call it a golden web wrought by Minerva; but to my thinking it was paler than even the purest gold—more like the last parting sunbeam of the softest day of spring."
The great ruler never learned to rule her own spirit. She swore at her maids of honor, and boxed the ears of the Lord-Lieutenant for appearing before her in muddy boots, and sent him in disgrace to the Tower. She vowed that England was her husband, whom she loved with a perfect love, and she would have none other; she had wedded herself to the kingdom at the coronation by the ring then placed upon her finger: in remembrance thereof she wished engraved on her tombstone these words: "Here lies Elizabeth, who lived and died a Maiden Queen."
There was another ring, of which I shall presently tell, more precious than that which went with the crown, because life and death were in its keeping.
It was her custom to select from her courtiers one on whom she lavished a fickle love and transient favor. When the court was beginning to tire of Raleigh, Leicester, a former favorite, introduced his step-son, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, in hope of weakening the influence of Raleigh. Essex was a spirited boy of seventeen, fresh from Oxford, with handsome face and graceful mien. Clad in the pictorial dress of the period, wearing crest and plume, badges and ribbons of honor, he was a figure to claim the glance of a king as he greeted his sovereign, and it is not strange that the susceptible virgin felt the fascination of such a presence, although she was then fifty years old.