the virgin-queen appropriated the Catholic honours of the Virgin Mary.
She was as great as Diana of the Ephesians. The moon shone but to
furnish a type of her bright and stainless maidenhood. To magnify her
greatness, the humility of courtly adulation merged in the ecstasies of
Platonic love. She was charming by indefeasible right;--a _jure
divino_ beauty. Her fascinations multiplied with her wrinkles, and
her admirers might have anticipated the conceit of Cowley,

"The antipevistoisis of age
More inflamed their amorous rage."

It is easy for a Whig, or a Puritan, or any other unimaginative
blockhead, to cry out against all this as nauseous flattery, and assert
that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise--a
coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was
mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of
its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the
woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme
of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the
cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon,
degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's
sacred majesty, enshrined 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