_"Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee. I am dead, Horatio. Wretched Queen, adieu! You that look pale and tremble at this chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time,--as this fell sergeant--Death, Is strict in his arrest--O, I could tell you-- But let it be. Horatio, I am dead! Thou livest; report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied. O, I die, Horatio; The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit, I cannot live to hear the news from England; But I do prophesy the election lights On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice; So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, Which have solicited. The rest is silence!"_ (Dies.) And then to close the scene of slaughter, the noble and faithful Horatio, bending over the body of his princely friend, exclaims: _"Now cracks a noble heart; Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"_ Such tumultuous applause I never heard in a theatre, and shouts for "The Ghost" and "Hamlet" prevailed until William and Burbage came from behind the curtain and made a triple bow to the audience as the clock in the tower of Saint Paul struck the midnight hour. _The lesson in great Hamlet taught, Is that a throne is dearly bought By lawless love and bloody deeds, Which fester like corrupted weeds, And smell to heaven with poison breath Involving all in certain death. For fraud and murder can't be hid Since Eve and Cain did what they did And left us naked through the world, Like meteors in midnight hurled, To darkle in this trackless sphere, Not knowing what we're doing here!_ CHAPTER XVII. DEATH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. CORONATION OF KING JAMES. _"All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity."_ _"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."_ _"What have kings that privates have not too, Save ceremony?"_ The New Year of sixteen hundred and three brought no consolation or happiness to Queen Elizabeth. Her reign of forty-four years had been bloody, but patriotic; and while she had long since passed the noonday of her glory, her sunset of life hastened to its setting with a fevered brain and tortured heart, to think that she had not one real friend living, but surrounded by cunning courtiers, who were already manipulating for the favor and patronage of King James. _Like a blasted pine on a mountain peak, She moaned and sighed every day and week; Awaiting the deadly, stormy gust That laid her low in the crumbling dust._ To amuse her lingering hours of grief Lord Cecil desired the Shakspere Company to give its new version of "Love's Labor's Lost" before the Queen in the grand reception hall at Richmond.