When Queen Elizabeth made her progresses, she was frequently entertained with elaborate shows, which, presumably, must have pleased her, since they occurred so often, but which afford tedious reading to the modern inquirer. They were usually cast in an allegorical form, and had more or less dramatic action. They took place in the daytime and in the open air: it can hardly be said that they were performed, for the thread of the plot was so thin, and the stage of operations so large, that the whole effect must have appeared rather fortuitous, and wanting in cohesion. At night time and in one of the great halls, either of a city, a college, or a great house, there were other performances, in which the interest was more concentrated, and the characters more varied; these were called plays, of which a great number were performed, written by all sorts of people, and all affording (apparently) equal pleasure to the onlookers. The majority of these pieces have faded into oblivion, but a certain number have survived, and go to form much of what we know as the Elizabethan drama. But it is with the entertainments provided in the daytime that we are more particularly concerned: they were of an ephemeral nature, and have not, like many of the plays, passed into the literature of the country: and our concern with them lies in the form in which they were cast and the spirit which animated them. When Elizabeth made her passage through the city of London to Westminster the day before her coronation--that is, on January 13th, 1558--the whole journey was interspersed with "pageants," as they were called.[16] These consisted of triumphal arches of various designs, upon which living allegorical figures were placed: one represented the Queen's immediate ancestors: another four virtues treading down four contrary vices; another the eight beatitudes; on another were Time and Truth his daughter; and so forth. Each of these personages, says the account, according to their proper names and properties, had not only their names in plain and perfect writing set upon their breasts easily to be read of all, but also each of them was aptly and properly apparelled, so that his apparel and name did agree to express the same person that in title he represented. As each pageant was reached, there stepped forth a "child" on to some prominent part of it, who recited a number of verses explanatory of the device, and a copy of these verses was affixed in a tablet upon the pageant, balanced by another bearing a Latin version of the same lines. Besides these, it says, every void place in the pageant was furnished with sentences touching the matter and ground of the said pageant. We have here, therefore, on a large scale, the same kind of treatment which was applied on a small scale to chimney-pieces--allegorical figures and various inscriptions more or less pithy. It is a matter for speculation whether either the Queen or the populace at large