As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. But, wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were throughout temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a singular tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse; but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. She had, as strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. “Her Majesty counts much on Fortune,” Walsingham wrote bitterly; “I wish she would trust more in Almighty God.” The diplomatists who censured at one moment her irresolution, her delay, her changes of front, censure at the next her “obstinacy,” her iron will, her defiance of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. “This woman,” Philip’s envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance, “this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand devils.” To her own subjects, indeed, who knew nothing of her manœuvres and retreats, of her “by-ways” and “crooked ways,” she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish main or glided between the icebergs of Baffin Bay never doubted that the palm of bravery lay with their queen. Her steadiness and courage in the pursuit of her aims was equaled by the wisdom with which she chose the men to accomplish them. She had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her service. The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham was just as unerring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success, indeed, in securing from the beginning of her reign to its end, with the single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them to do, sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below many of the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy, it stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with Bruno; she could discuss euphuism with Lyly, and enjoy the chivalry of Essex; she could turn from talk of the last fashions to pore with Cecil over dispatches and treasury books; she could pass from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points of doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances of a northwest passage to the Indies. The versatility and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand every phase of the intellectual movement of her day, and to fix by a sort of instinct on its higher representatives. But the greatness of the queen rests above all on her power over her people.