poor women's hands! How many times staid she
her chariot when she saw any simple body offer to speak to her grace! A
branch of rosemary given her grace with a supplication by a poor woman
about Fleet-bridge was seen in her chariot till her grace came to
Westminster[39]."

[Note 39: Holinshed's Chronicles.]

The reader may here be reminded, that five-and-twenty years before, when
the mother of this queen passed through London to her coronation, the
pageants exhibited derived their personages and allusions chiefly from
pagan mythology or classical fiction. But all was now changed; the
earnestness of religious controversy in Edward's time, and the fury of
persecution since, had put to flight Apollo, the Muses, and the Graces:
Learning indeed had kept her station and her honors, but she had lent
her lamp to other studies, and whether in the tongue of ancient Rome or
modern England, Elizabeth was hailed in Christian strains, and as the
sovereign of a Christian country. A people filled with earnest zeal in
the best of causes implored her to free them once again from popery; to
overthrow the tyranny of error and of superstition; to establish gospel
truth; and to accept at their hands, as the standard of her faith and
the rule of her conduct, that holy book of which they regarded the free
and undisturbed possession as their brightest privilege.

How tame, how puerile, in the midst of sentiments serious and profound
as these, would have appeared the intrusion of classical imagery,
however graceful in itself or ingenious in its application! Frigid must
have been the spectator who could even have remarked its absence, while
shouts of patriotic ardor and of religious joy were bursting from the
lips of the whole assembled population.

The august ceremonies of the coronation, which took place on the
following day, merit no particular description; regulated in every thing
by ancient custom, they afforded little scope for that display of
popular sentiment which had given so intense an interest to the
procession of the day before. Great perplexity was occasioned by the
refusal of the whole bench of bishops to perform the coronation service;
but at length, to the displeasure of his brethren, Ogelthorp bishop of
Carlisle suffered himself to be gained over, and the rite was duly
celebrated. This refractoriness of the episcopal order was wisely
overlooked for the present by the new government; but it proceeded no
doubt from the princip