Court life--The Queen's position--Her character--She takes notice of Ralegh--Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester--Sir Philip Sidney--Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer, and Walsingham-- Robert Cecil--The dress of the courtier--The language of the courtier--The other side, and the other Queen--Mary, Queen of Scots--The great intrigue--Its discovery--Death of Queen Mary. The Court was the brilliant feature of the time. The Court was not confined to ceremonial functions and presentations--it was not a bath in which a man or a woman must be dipped before he or she could lay any real claim to distinguished respectability. The Court had a vivid existence of its own. "It was the centre, not of government alone, but of the fine arts: the exemplar of culture and civilization." The Court held a lien on the gaiety and life of the time. Courtiers and merchants (the two chief classes) were as distinct as a little later were town and gown at the Universities. To be a proper courtier became a cult. Three great books, extraordinarily typical of the Renaissance, were written in almost identical years, books which pointed to new scope for the State, for the Prince, and for the private man. In 1513 Machiavel completed _The Prince_, in 1516 Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_ was published, and in the same year Count Baldassare Castiglione finished his _Book of the Courtier_. The dream of the Utopia may never be realized; but in some seventy-five years a close example of the Prince and of the Courtier were found in Queen Elizabeth, and in many of the men who surrounded her. _The Book of the Courtier_ was translated into all the languages of Europe, and became the text-book of the cult. Its English translator was Thomas Hoby, and his work, as has been seen, was commended by the judicious Ascham. Castiglione was chaffed for moulding his own conduct precisely on the model of the perfect courtier he portrays in his book; and he could not but confess that the man of his imagination was the man he would choose to be. And, indeed, it would be what every courtier would aspire to be, as Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, "This is the happy Warrior, this is he That every man in arms should wish to be." The Courtier must be gallant in the use of arms, proficient in all exercises of the body, skilled in all exercises of the mind; he must be ready and witty of tongue; he must be well-born and distinguished. But his realm is beyond the mere enterprise of accomplishments and birth. For the book ends with Bembo's great praise of Beauty--that Beauty "which is the origin of all other beawtye, whiche never encreaseth nor diminisheth always bewtifull and of itself ... most simple. This is the beawtye unseperable from the high bountye, whiche with her voyce calleth and draweth to her all thynges...," and an understanding of this Heavenly Beauty must be the final trait of the Perfect Courtier.