Two black palls fling their shadows on the court of Elizabeth in 1587: Sidney died in October of 1586; and in the following February Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded. The next year the Spanish Armada is swept from the seas, and all England is given up to rejoicings. And as we look back upon this period and catch its alternating light and shade on the pages of the historians and in the lives of English poets and statesmen, the great Queen, in her ruff and laces, and with her coronet of jewels, seems somehow, throughout all, the central figure. We see Raleigh the Captain of her Guard--the valiant knight, the scholar, the ready poet--but readiest of all to bring his fine figure and his stately gallantries to her court: We see Sir Francis Drake, with his full beard and bullet-head--all browned with his long voyages, from which he has come laden with ingots of Spanish gold--swinging with his sailor-gait into her august presence: We catch sight of Lord Burleigh, feeble now with the weight of years, leading up that young nephew of his--Francis Bacon, that he may kiss the Queen’s hand and do service for favors which shall make him in time Lord Chancellor of England. Perhaps the rash, headstrong Oxford may be in presence, whose poor wife was once the affianced of Sidney: And the elegant Lord Buckhurst, decorous with the white hair of age, who, in his younger days, when plain Thomas Sackville, had contributed the best parts to the _Mirror for Magistrates_: Richard Hooker, too, may be there--come up from the “peace and privacy” of his country parsonage--in his sombre clerical dress, bent with study, but in the prime of his age and power, with the calm face and the severe philosophy with which he has confronted a termagant of a wife and the beginnings of Dissent. And, if not in this presence, yet somewhere in London might have been found, in that day, a young man, not much past twenty--just up from Stratford-upon-Avon--to take his part in playing at the Globe Theatre; yet not wholly like other players. Even now, while all these worthies are gathering about the august Queen in her brilliant halls at Greenwich or at Hampton Court, this young Stratford man may be seated upon the steps of Old St. Paul’s--with his chin upon his hand--looking out on the multitudinous human tide, which even then swept down Ludgate Hill, and meditating the speeches of those shadowy courtiers of his--only creatures of his day-dreams; yet they are to carry his messages of wisdom into all lands and languages. But I must shut the books where I see these figures come and go. CHAPTER VII.