DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

mony. When her cousin, and favourite, Sir Robert Carey, presumed to take to himself a wife, she banished him from England; and when Sir Walter Raleigh committed the same offence with one of her own maids of honour, she sent him to prison and expelled his bride from her court. Though easily swayed by personal predilections, which were not always justified, Elizabeth showed an unfailing sagacity in the selection of her ministers. Such men as her Prime Minister Burleigh, the ancestor of the present Lord Salisbury, who for forty years bore the burden of office, and whom she tended on his death-bed ; Sir Philip Sydney and Spencer, the creators of English poetry and literature ; Shakespeare, who wrote his best plays for the amusement of the Queen; such men, and a host of others of hardly less distinction, owe the appre- ciation of their merits and their rise greatly to the encouragement they received from Elizabeth. On the other hand, her Vice-Chamberlain, Chris- topher Hatton, whose only apparent recommendation was his proficiency in dancing, and who had probably never opened a law book, she made Lord Chancellor. Strange to say, however, he acquitted himself most creditably of his difficult duties, as he had the good sense to rely upon the experience of trained lawyers when called upon to give a decision. But her in- fatuation for Lord Robert Dudley, a younger son of