“The king’s majesty Commends his good opinion of you, and Does purpose honour to you no less flowing Than Marchioness of Pembroke.” With perfect tact Anne meets the flowing honours, and says,— “Vouchsafe to speak my thanks and my obedience, As from a blushing handmaid to his highness, Whose health and royalty I pray for.” In an _aside_ the Chamberlain owns,— “I have perused her well; Beauty and honour in her are so mingled That they have caught the king: and who knows yet But from this lady may proceed a gem To lighten all this isle?” So on Romeo’s first sight of Juliet _(Romeo and Juliet_, act i. sc. 5, l. 41, vol. vii. p. 30), her beauty and inner worth called forth the confession,— “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.” And the Sonnet (CV. vol. ix. p. 603, l. 4) that represents love,— “Still constant in a wondrous excellence;” also tells us of the abiding beauty of the soul,— “‘Fair, kind, and true,’ is all my argument, ‘Fair, kind, and true,’ varying to other words; And in this change is my invention spent, Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords. ‘Fair, kind, and true,’ have often lived alone, Which three till now never kept seat in one.” The power of Conscience, as the soul’s bulwark against adversities, has been sung from the time when Horace wrote (_Epist._ i. 1. 60),— “Hic murus aëneus esto, Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa,”— “This be thy wall of brass, to be conscious to thyself of no shame, to become pale at no crime.” Or, in the still more popular ode (_Carm._ i. 22), which being of old recited in the palaces of Mæcenas and Augustus at Rome, has, after the flow of nearly nineteen centuries, been revived in the drawing rooms of Paris and London, and of the whole civilized world;— “Integer vitæ, scelerisque purus, Non eget Mauris jaculis, neque arcu, Non venenatis gravida sagittis, Fusce, pharetra,”— “He, sound in his life, from all transgression free, Doth need no Moorish javelins, nor bended bow, Nor of arrows winged with poisons a quiver-tree, Fuscus, to strike his foe.”[173] Both these sentiments of the lyric poet have been imitated or adapted by the dramatic; as in _2 Henry VI._ (act iii. sc. 2, l. 232, vol. v. p. 171), where the good king exclaims,—