which more fitly might be called the dress of an Arcadian shepherdess. It is all in the style of the literary rusticity of the day. The Queen, with her fantastic dress worked with birds and flowers, her open bosom, and her high head-dress, worked like the gown, stands in a woodland scene with her hand on a stag decked with flowers. Perhaps she is "Dian chaste and fair," or a "passionate shepherdess." Certainly she is very sentimental, and the picture is loaded with mottoes more or less intelligible. Verses, perhaps her own, which seem to contain an allusion to one of her love affairs, complete the mystery of the picture:—
"The restles swallow fits my restles minde,
In still revivinge, still renewinge wronges;
Her just complaintes of cruelty unkinde
Are all the musique that my life prolonges.
With pensive thoughtes my weepinge stagg I crowne,
Whose melancholy tears my cares expresse;
Hes teares in sylence, and my sighes unknowne,
Are all the physicke that my harmes redresse.
My onely hope was in this goodly tree,
Which I did plant in love, bringe up in care,
But all in vaine, for now to late I see
The shales be mine, the kernels others are.
My musique may be plaintes, my physique teares,
If this be all the fruite my love-tree beares."
It is a picture which should be looked at again and again. There is no other which so happily conveys the idea of Elizabeth's coquetry and quaintness with her shrewd, direct common sense.
