It is easy for a Whig, or a Puritan, or any other unimaginative blockhead, to cry out against all this as nauseous flattery, and assert that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise--a coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors paid their compliments to sex or rank--ours are addressed to the person. There is no flattery where there is no falsehood--no falsehood where there is no deception. Loyalty of old was a passion, and passion has a truth of its own--and as language does not always furnish expressions exactly adapted, or native to the feeling, what can the loyal poet do, but take the most precious portion of the currency, and impress it with the mint-mark of his own devoted fancy? Perhaps there never was a more panegyrical rhymer than Spenser, and yet, so fine and ethereal is his incense, that the breath of morning is not more cool and salutary:-- "It falls me here to write of Chastity That fayrest virtue, far above the rest. For which what needs me fetch from Faery, Forreine ensamples it to have exprest, Sith it is shrined in my soveraine's brest, And form'd so lively on each perfect part, That to all ladies, who have it protest, Needs but behold the pourtraict of her part, If pourtray'd it might be by any living art; But living art may not least part expresse, Nor life-resembling pencil it can paint, All it were Zeuxis or Praxiteles-- His dædale hand would faile and greatly faynt, And her perfections with his error taynt; Ne poet's wit that passeth painter farre-- In picturing the parts of beauty daynt," &c.