“You tantalize us, my lord,” said the Queen—­“Master Philip Sidney is, we know, a minion of the Muses, and we are pleased it should be so.  Valour never shines to more advantage than when united with the true taste and love of letters.  But surely there are some others among our young courtiers who can recollect what your lordship has forgotten amid weightier affairs.—­Master Tressilian, you are described to me as a worshipper of Minerva—­remember you aught of these lines?”

Tressilian’s heart was too heavy, his prospects in life too fatally blighted, to profit by the opportunity which the Queen thus offered to him of attracting her attention; but he determined to transfer the advantage to his more ambitious young friend, and excusing himself on the score of want of recollection, he added that he believed the beautiful verses of which my Lord of Leicester had spoken were in the remembrance of Master Walter Raleigh.

At the command of the Queen, that cavalier repeated, with accent and manner which even added to their exquisite delicacy of tact and beauty of description, the celebrated vision of Oberon:—­

     “That very time I saw (but thou couldst not),
     Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
     Cupid, allarm’d:  a certain aim he took
     At a fair vestal, throned by the west;
     And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
     As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts: 
     But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
     Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon;
     And the imperial vot’ress passed on,
     In maiden meditation, fancy free.”

The voice of Raleigh, as he repeated the last lines, became a little tremulous, as if diffident how the Sovereign to whom the homage was addressed might receive it, exquisite as it was.  If this diffidence was affected, it was good policy; but if real, there was little occasion for it.  The verses were not probably new to the Queen, for when was ever such elegant flattery long in reaching the royal ear to which it was addressed?  But they were not the less welcome when repeated by such a speaker as Raleigh.  Alike delighted with the matter, the manner, and the graceful form and animated countenance of the gallant young reciter, Elizabeth kept time to every cadence with look and with finger.  When the speaker had ceased, she murmured over the last lines as if scarce conscious that she was overheard, and as she uttered the words,

“In maiden meditation, fancy free,” she dropped into the Thames the supplication of Orson Pinnit, keeper of the royal bears, to find more favourable acceptance at Sheerness, or wherever the tide might waft it.