This celebrated queen has been described as passionately admiring handsome persons, and he was already far advanced in her favor who approached her with beauty and grace. It is said she had so unconquerable an aversion to ugly and ill-made men, that she could not endure their presence. Her aversion to boots was very marked, and highly characteristic of the woman. I think it is Sir Walter Scott who, in one of his romances, represents her as having had so much aversion to the boots of the Duke of Suffolk, who was brought forward by his party for the honor of knighthood, as to fly into a passion about it, and for some time to refuse to knight him in such a dress.[5] She is well known to have been a great coquette, giving all her suitors some hopes of finally obtaining her hand. She had likewise a most ardent desire to be thought beautiful. Raleigh was well aware of this excessive vanity, and made it a means of securing her favor and continuing in her good graces. Mr. Hume tells us that Sir Walter, in a love-letter written to the queen when she was sixty years old, after exhausting his poetic talent in exalting her charms and his devotion, concludes by _comparing_ her to _Venus and Diana_. D'Israeli says that Du Maurier, in his Memoirs, writes: "I heard from my father, that having been sent to her, at every audience he had with her Majesty, she pulled off her gloves more than a hundred times, to _display her hands_, which were indeed beautiful and very white." And he says, "She never forgave Buzenval for ridiculing her bad pronunciation of the French language; and when Henry IV sent him over on an embassy, she would not receive him. So nice was the irritable vanity of this great queen, that she made her private injuries matters of state." Well then has it been said, that "the toilet of Elizabeth was indeed an altar of devotion, of which she was the idol, and all her ministers were her votaries: it was the reign of coquetry, and the golden age of millinery." [Footnote 5: In the Memoirs of the Duchess d'Abrantes, it is stated that Madame Permon, mother of the Duchess, had a very great aversion to the boots of the Republican generals, particularly when wet and passing through the process of drying.]