The masculine side of Elizabeth's character was fully balanced by her
feminine foibles. Her vanity was inordinate. Her love of adulation and
passion for display, her caprice, duplicity, and her reckless love-
affairs, form a strange background for the calm, determined, masterly
statesmanship under which her Kingdom expanded.

The subject of her marriage was a momentous one. There were plenty of
aspirants for the honor. Her brother-in-law Philip, since the
abdication of Charles V., his father, was a mighty King, ruler over
Spain and the Netherlands, and was at the head of Catholic Europe. He
saw in this vain, silly young Queen of England an easy prey. By
marrying her he could bring England back to the fold, as he had done
with her sister Mary, and the Catholic cause would be invincible.

Elizabeth was a coquette, without the personal charm supposed to belong
to that dangerous part of humanity. She toyed with an offer of marriage
as does a cat with a mouse. She had never intended to marry Philip, but
she kept him waiting so long for her decision, and so exasperated him
with her caprice, that he exclaimed at last, "That girl has ten
thousand devils in her." He little thought, that beneath that surface
of folly there was a nature hard as steel, and a calm, clear, cool
intelligence, for which his own would be no match, and which would one
day hold in check the diplomacy of the "Escurial" and outwit that of
Europe. She adored the culture brought by the "new learning;" delighted
in the society of Sir Philip Sidney, who reflected all that was best in
England of that day; talked of poetry with Spenser; discussed
philosophy with Bruno; read Greek tragedies and Latin orations in the
original; could converse in French and Italian, and was besides
proficient in another language,--the language of the fishwife,--which
she used with startling effect with her lords and ministers when her