Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign, she would have prided herself not on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nor was her trickery without political value. Ignoble, inexpressibly wearisome as the queen’s diplomacy seems to us now, tracing it as we do through a thousand dispatches, it succeeded in its main end. It gained time, and every year that was gained doubled Elizabeth’s strength. Nothing is more revolting in the queen, but nothing is more characteristic than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty; and the ease with which she asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose, was only equaled by the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. The same purely intellectual view of things showed itself in the dexterous use she made of her very faults. Her levity carried her gayly over moments of detection and embarrassment where better women would have died of shame. She screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury and sports to good account. There were moments of grave danger in her reign, when the country remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the queen give her days to hawking and hunting and her nights to dancing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive candidates for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and conspiracies by love-sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation.