But the queen's excited imagination could by no entreaty be diverted from its course.

'Bid him come hither to our aid,' she said, 'and bring with him his lambs, as he calls them--Bowton, Hay of Talla, Black Ormiston and his kinsman Hob--Fie, how swart they are, and how they smell of sulphur! What! closeted with Morton?
Nay, if the Douglas and the Hepburn hatch the complot together, the bird when it breaks the shell will scare Scotland, will it not, my Fleming ?' 'She grows wilder and wilder,' said Fleming.

'We have too many hearers for these strange words.' 'Roland,' said Catherine, 'in the name of God begone!--you cannot aid us here--leave us to deal with her alone--away--away!" And equally fine is the scene in _Kenilworth_ in which Elizabeth undertakes the reconciliation of the haughty rivals, Sussex and Leicester, unaware that in the course of the audience she herself will have to bear a great strain on her self-command, both in her feelings as a queen and her feelings as a lover.

Her grand rebukes to both, her ill-concealed preference for Leicester, her whispered ridicule of Sussex, the impulses of tenderness which she stifles, the flashes of resentment to which she gives way, the triumph of policy over private feeling, her imperious impatience when she is baffled, her jealousy as she grows suspicious of a personal rival, her gratified pride and vanity when the suspicion is exchanged for the clear evidence, as she supposes, of Leicester's love, and her peremptory conclusion of the audience, bring before the mind a series of pictures far more vivid and impressive than the greatest of historical painters could fix on canvas, even at the cost of the labour of years.

Even more brilliant, though not so sustained and difficult an effort of genius, is the later scene in the same story, in which Elizabeth drags the unhappy Countess of Leicester from her concealment in one of the grottoes of Kenilworth Castle, and strides off with her, in a fit of vindictive humiliation and Amazonian fury, to confront her with her husband.