The Queen made no pretensions to literary taste as did King James, her successor. But she knew what she liked. And her untutored but extremely shrewd faculty seldom led her astray. There were those, and Heming and Burbage had been among them, who had been inclined to deplore the fact that the author had not prepared stronger food for Gloriana’s palate. A play of delicacy and fantasy, all lightness and grace, would surely miss the mark. She who had held her sides at the broad humors of _Juliet’s_ nurse and of _Hostess Quickly_ would hardly appreciate the melancholy _Jacques_, _Touchstone_ and above all, the subtle charm of _Rosalind_. But this was not the case. Those finely accomplished actors, William Kemp and Richard Burbage, had very wisely been intrusted with the two chief male characters. To be sure, it was hardly Nature’s design that they should interpret them, but players of their genius dignify and embellish every rôle for which they are cast. The noble voice, the manly bearing, the persuasive ease of style, that choicest fruit of many a victory hardly won, tells just as surely in a whimsical impersonation a little away from the main lines of human development, as in the delineation of some incomparably drawn world figure such as _Hamlet_, _Falstaff_, _Lear_. Unaided, these great men would have carried through a weaker play. And yet they did but serve as a kind of heavy relief, a somber frame for the central figure. _Rosalind_ has stood for three centuries as the symbol of womanhood in its youthful glory. That embodiment of the divinity of girlhood still remains without a peer. And none could have given it more powerful, more appealing expression than Anne Feversham. From the moment the slight figure came out of the depths of the forest and spoke her first magic lines in a voice as clear as a bell, a hush seemed to fall upon all. The occupants of the pavilion, no less than the humbler spectators who were privileged to sit upon the grass were spellbound. The tall figure, trim and slender, yet exquisite in outline, looked a little gaunt, a little fine-drawn in its close-fitting boy’s dress. The eyes shone out of the pale face with a luster that fascinated those the least sensitive to beauty. And the voice thrilling with a nameless music ravished ears which knew it not for a cadence borne upon the long night of the soul.