QUEEN ELIZABETH died in the seventieth year of her age and the forty-fourth of her reign, March 24, on the eve of the festival of the Annunciation, called Lady Day. Among the complimentary epitaphs which were composed for her, and hung up in many churches, was one ending with the following couplet:-- "She is, she was--what can there be more said? On earth the first, in heaven the second maid." It is stated by Lady Southwell that directions were left by Elizabeth that she should not be embalmed; but Cecil gave orders to her surgeon to open her. "Now, the Queen's body being cered up," continues Lady Southwell, "was brought by water to Whitehall, where, being watched every night by six several ladies, myself that night watching as one of them, and being all in our places about the corpse, which was fast nailed up in a board coffin, with leaves of lead covered with velvet, her body burst with such a crack that it splitted the wood, lead, and cere-cloth; whereupon, the next day she was fain to be new trimmed up." Elizabeth was most royally interred in Westminster Abbey on the 28th of April, 1603. We subjoin a rare contemporary engraving of the funeral procession, by which it will be seen with what pomp and ceremony the remains of the great Queen were escorted to their last resting-place. "The city of Westminster," says Stow, "was surcharged with multitudes of all sorts of people, in the streets, houses, windows, leads, and gutters, who came to see the obsequy. And when they beheld her statue, or effigy, lying on the coffin, set forth in royal robes, having a crown upon the head thereof, and a ball and a sceptre in either hand, there was such a general sighing, groaning, and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man; neither doth any history mention any people, time, or state to make such lamentation for the death of a sovereign." The funereal effigy which, by its close resemblance to their deceased sovereign, moved the sensibility of the loyal and excitable portion of the spectators at her obsequies in this powerful manner, was no other than the faded waxwork effigy of Queen Elizabeth preserved in Westminster Abbey.