even for that 'then'; for it is much nowadays to find any one who
believes that Queen Elizabeth was ever young, or who does not talk of
her as if she was born about seventy years of age covered with rouge
and wrinkles. I will undertake to say that as to the beauty of this
woman there is a greater mass of testimony, and from the very best
judges too, than there is of the beauty of any personage in history;
and yet it has become the fashion now to deny even that. The plain
facts seem that she was very graceful, active, accomplished in all
outward manners, of a perfect figure, and of that style of
intellectual beauty, depending on expression, which attracted (and we
trust always will attract) Britons far more than that merely sensuous
loveliness in which no doubt Mary Stuart far surpassed her. And
there seems little doubt that, like many Englishwomen, she retained
her beauty to a very late period in life, not to mention that she
was, in 1592, just at that age of rejuvenescence which makes many a
woman more lovely at sixty than she has been since she was thirty-
five. No doubt, too, she used every artificial means to preserve her
famous complexion; and quite right she was. This beauty of hers had
been a talent, as all beauty is, committed to her by God; it had been
an important element in her great success; men had accepted it as
what beauty of form and expression generally is, an outward and
visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace; and while the inward
was unchanged, what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward? If
she was the same, why should she not try to look the same? And what
blame to those who worshipped her, if, knowing that she was the same,
they too should fancy that she looked the same, the Elizabeth of
their youth, and should talk as if the fair flesh, as well as the
fair spirit, was immortal? Does not every loving husband do so when
he forgets the gray hair and the sunken cheek, and all the wastes of
time, and sees the partner of many joys and sorrows not as she has