Queen Elizabeth is the first among the great female sovereigns of the
world with whose reign we associate a decided progress in national
wealth, power, and prosperity; so that she ranks with the great men who
have administered kingdoms. If I can prove this fact, the sex should be
proud of so illustrious a woman, and should be charitable to those
foibles which sullied the beauty of her character, since they were in
part faults of the age, and developed by the circumstances which
surrounded her.

She was born in the year 1533, the rough age of Luther, when Charles V.
was dreaming of establishing a united continental military empire, and
when the princes of the House of Valois were battling with the ideas of
the Reformation,--an earnest, revolutionary, and progressive age. She
was educated as the second daughter of Henry VIII. naturally would be,
having the celebrated Ascham as her tutor in Greek, Latin, French, and
Italian. She was precocious as well as studious, and astonished her
teachers by her attainments. She was probably the best-educated woman in
England next to Lady Jane Grey, and she excelled in those departments of
knowledge for which novels have given such distaste in these more
enlightened times.

Elizabeth was a mere girl when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed for
infidelities and levities to which her husband could not be blind, had
he been less suspicious,--a cruel execution, which nothing short of
high-treason could have justified even in that rough age. Though her
birth was declared to be illegitimate by her cruel and unscrupulous
father, yet she was treated as a princess. She was seventeen when her
hateful old father died; and during the six years when the government
was in the hands of Somerset, Edward VI. being a minor, Elizabeth was