While this ambassador was at court Queen Elizabeth appeared in a different costume each day, and was pleased when he said that he preferred the Italian style for her because it displayed her yellow curls to advantage. She asked him which was the more beautiful, she or Mary Stuart. "You are the handsomest queen in England," he replied, "and ours the handsomest queen in Scotland." "Which of us is the taller?" asked Elizabeth. "Our queen," said Melville. "Then she is over-tall," returned Elizabeth; "for I am neither too tall nor too short." She next asked how Queen Mary passed her time. "When I left Scotland, she had just come from a Highland hunt," answered the ambassador; "but when she has leisure, she reads, and sometimes plays on the lute and the virginals." "Does she play well?" asked Elizabeth. "Reasonably well for a queen," was the reply. {085}Elizabeth had a love for flattery that could never be satisfied; the most fulsome compliments were always acceptable, and those who desired favors at her hands knew the importance of tickling her vanity. It made her unhappy to suspect that any one could think Mary Stuart, of all women, in any particular superior to herself. So on the evening after the interview with Lord Melville she managed to perform on the virginals, when she knew that he was within hearing. It had the desired effect; for the ambassador raised the drawing-room curtains to see who the player was, and delighted the heart of Elizabeth by assuring her that she was a much better musician than his queen. Fond as Elizabeth was of popularity she never permitted any one to interfere with her. Once when Leicester attempted to express an opinion contrary to her's regarding some state matter, she flew into a passion, and said: "I will have here but one mistress and no master." This so humiliated the favorite, who had been treated like a spoiled child for several years, that he absented himself from court as much as possible, and finally requested that he might be sent on a diplomatic mission to France. But Elizabeth would not comply. She told him that it would be no great honor to the King of France, were she to send him her groom; then turning to the French ambassador, who was present, she laughingly added, "I cannot live without seeing him every day; he is like my lap-dog: so soon as he is seen any where they say I am near at hand, and wherever I am seen he is expected." Elizabeth was generally kind and grateful to those who had treated her well in her youth; but her cruelty towards Doctor Heath, Archbishop of York, is an exception. The doctor had been of real service to her; but so determined was she to brook no opposition, that when he refused to {086}acknowledge her supremacy over the church, she had him shut up in the Tower, and even put to torture, although he was eighty years of age at the time.