That very time I saw—­but thou could’st not—­
  Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
  Cupid all armed.  A certain aim he took
  At a fair vestal throned by the west,
  And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
  As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. 
  But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
  Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
  And the imperial votaress passed on
  In maiden meditation, fancy free—­

an allusion to Leicester’s unsuccessful suit for Elizabeth’s hand.

The praises of the queen, which sound through all the poetry of her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader.  But they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment.  England had never before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary.  When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter’s feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown.  The poets idealized Elizabeth.  She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain.  Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman.  In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage.  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.  An account of these was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth,