ned in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors
paid their compliments to sex or rank--ours are addressed to the person.
There is no flattery where there is no falsehood--no falsehood where
there is no deception. Loyalty of old was a passion, and passion has a
truth of its own--and as language does not always furnish expressions
exactly adapted, or native to the feeling, what can the loyal poet do,
but take the most precious portion of the currency, and impress it with
the mint-mark of his own devoted fancy? Perhaps there never was a more
panegyrical rhymer than Spenser, and yet, so fine and ethereal is his
incense, that the breath of morning is not more cool and salutary:--

"It falls me here to write of Chastity
That fayrest virtue, far above the rest.
For which what needs me fetch from Faery,
Forreine ensamples it to have exprest,
Sith it is shrined in my soveraine's brest,
And form'd so lively on each perfect part,
That to all ladies, who have it protest,
Needs but behold the pourtraict of her part,
If pourtray'd it might be by any living art;
But living art may not least part expresse,
Nor life-resembling pencil it can paint,
All it were Zeuxis or Praxiteles--
His daedale hand would faile and greatly faynt,
And her perfections with his error taynt;
Ne poet's wit that passeth painter farre--
In picturing the parts of beauty daynt," &c.

But neither Zeuxis nor Praxiteles was called from the dead to mar her
perfections, nor record her negative charms. Poetry was the only art
that flourished in the Virgin reign. The pure Gothic, after attaining
its full efflorescence under Henry VII., departed, never to return. The
Grecian orders were not only absurdly jumbled together, but yet more
outrageously conglomerated with the Gothic and Arabesque. "To gild
refined gold--to paint the lily," was all the humour of it. A similar
inconsistency infected literature. The classic and the romantic (to use
those terms, which, though popular, are not logically exact) were
interwoven. The Arcadia and the Fairy Queen are glorious offences, which
"make defect perfection." Perhaps, Shakspeare's "small Latin and less
Greek," preserved him from worse anachronisms than any that he has
committed. Queen Bess's patronage was of the national breed: she loved
no pictures so well as portraits of herself. As, however, her painters
have not flattered her, it may not uncharitably be concluded that they
were no great