Like her father, she "loved a _man_," and she
had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts,
passionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic
flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities,
the nobles, and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with
plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the
day. "When the queen paraded through a country town," says Warton, the
historian of English poetry, "almost every pageant was a pantheon. When
she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the
hall she was saluted by the _penates_. In the afternoon, when she
condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons
and nereids; the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs,
who peeped from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in
the figure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by
Diana, who, pronouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of
unspotted chastity, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of
Acteon." The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any
notice were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of
Leicester, when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575.
Pages:
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86