respectable side of the statutes; but, with the growing wickedness of the world, we should like to know what sort of metal will the laws be made of. The great social link must inevitably be a fetter. How often have we stood, with the unseen tears in our eyes, watching the nobility of the land, in nobility’s best bib and tucker, winding in golden line to the drawing-room of Queen Victoria! Alas! degenerate dukes—faded duchesses. Marquises fallen upon evil times—marchionesses very dim indeed! What are you to the nobility of Elizabeth? What to the grandees of those merry days, the golden shadow of which is brightness itself to the cold, grey glimmering of the present? We have yet one thought to comfort us; and that is, a half belief that the court of Elizabeth was held as nothing to all courts preceding; and so back, until Englishmen mourned over the abomination of cloaks and vests, sorrowing for those golden days, those good old times of the painted Britons! Great was the virtue abounding in _woad_; grievous the wilful iniquity woven in broad-cloth. Queen Elizabeth died—fair, regal bud!—in the sweetness of virginity; and though the sun (by some despairing effort) managed to rise the next morning, it has never been wholly itself since. She died, and was brought to Whitehall, to the great calamity of the fish then swimming in the river; for a poet of the day, quoted by Camden, has eternised the evil that in the hour fell upon Thames flounders:— “The Queene was brought by water to Whitehall; At every stroke the oares teares let fall; More clung about the barge; fish under water _Wept out their eyes of pearle, and swame blinde after_, I think the bargemen might with easier thighes Have rowed her thither in her people’s eyes. Yet, howsoere, thus much my thoughts have scann’d, She’d come by water, had she come by land.” So closed the golden days of Queen Elizabeth; leaving us, in all the virtues and comforts of the world, the bankrupt children of Queen Victoria! Unworthy is he of the balmy sweetness of this blessed May who can think so! A churlish, foolish, moody traitor to the spirit of goodness and beauty that, as with the bounty of the sun and air, calls up forms of loveliness in his path, and surrounds him with ten thousand household blessings! With active presences, which the poet of Elizabeth, in even _his_ large love for man could scarce have dreamed of; or, dreaming, seen them as a part of fairy fantasy—a cloud-woven pageant!