“Could exemplary Worth, or Virtue Save One happier Woman had escap’d the Grave. From every Vice, and female Error free, She was in fact, what Woman ought to be. Envy’d no Queens, but pitied all their Cares, Expecting Crowns less troublesome than theirs.” This paragon of virtue, worth, and contentment with her station in life died in 1740, aged 31. A real startler awaits the stranger who enters unsuspectingly into Cumnor church. This is none other than a singularly vivid likeness of Queen Elizabeth, done in stone and standing on a pedestal in the north aisle. The pale effigy, standing there in the subdued light of the church, is calculated to stir the nerves of the most stolid. The statue, a singularly fine one, represents the Queen in the costume of the period, made familiar in many statues and paintings. She is standing, and holds the orb and sceptre, symbols of sovereignty. This work of art has a history of some curious interest. It was originally set up in the grounds of Cumnor Place by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in honour of his great patroness. Perhaps it is due to this origin that the statue represents the Queen so pleasingly. Zucchero, in his painting of her, and the many other sculptors who plied their chisels on this inspiring theme, never produced anything to vie with this in combined charm and dignity. Elsewhere you perceive “great Eliza”—in spite of courtly efforts to idealise her—rendered not a little uncouthly. Majesty, with more than a dash of vinegar, and plain evidences of the termagant, are characteristics of the most of Queen Elizabeth’s portraits in marble, stone, and paint; but here she is rendered in terms of grace. [Illustration: STATUE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH, CUMNOR CHURCH.] Upon the decay of Cumnor Place the statue was removed to Dean Court, and thence to a height above the village of Ferry Hinksey, in 1779. From that solitude it was taken to Wytham Abbey, and eventually forgotten; being found, broken to pieces, in an out-house. It was finally removed, restored, and placed here, in Cumnor Church, in 1888, on a pedestal detailing these circumstances. An unusual, and welcome, feature of this church is the series of engravings, reproductions of seventeenth-century correspondence, and notes upon the history of the village, for the information of the cultured visitor. Here you may read something of the grim associations of the vanished Cumnor Place, and learn, in a chronological table drawn up by the vicar, to what tune the centuries have jogged along in this rural parish. That chronology ends with this remarkable thought, this astonishing intellectual effort: “1893. The Future is not yet!” It never is.