The goodly heritage that England gave her offspring overseas included Shakespeare and the English Bible.  The Authorized Version entered into the very substance of early American life.  There was a marked difference between Episcopalian Virginia and Puritan New England.  But both took their stand on this version of the English Bible, in which the springs of Holy Writ rejoiced to run through channels of Elizabethan prose.  It is true that Elizabeth slept with her fathers before this book of books was printed, and that the first of the Stuarts reigned in her stead.  Nevertheless the Authorized Version is pure Elizabethan.  All its translators were Elizabethans, as their dedication to King James, still printed with every copy, gratefully acknowledges in its reference to ’the setting of that bright Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth of most happy memory.’

These words of the reverend scholars contain no empty compliment.  Elizabeth was a great sovereign and in some essential particulars, a very great national leader.  This daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn the debonair, was born a heretic in 1533.  Her father was then defying both Spain and the Pope.  Within three years after her birth her mother was beheaded; and by Act of Parliament Elizabeth herself was declared illegitimate.  She was fourteen when her father died, leaving the kingdom to his three children in succession, Elizabeth being the third.  Then followed the Protestant reign of the boy-king Edward VI, during which Elizabeth enjoyed security; then the Catholic reign of her Spanish half-sister, ‘Bloody Mary,’ during which her life hung by the merest thread.

At first, however, Mary concealed her hostility to Elizabeth because she thought the two daughters of Henry VIII ought to appear together in her triumphal entry into London.  From one point of view—­and a feminine one at that—­this was a fatal mistake on Mary’s part:  for never did Elizabeth show to more advantage.  She was just under twenty, while Mary was nearly twice her age.  Mary had, indeed, provided herself with one good foil in the person of Anne of Cleves, the ‘Flemish mare’ whose flat coarse face and lumbering body had disgusted King Henry thirteen years before, when Cromwell had foisted her upon him as his fourth wife.  But with poor, fat, straw-colored Anne on one side, and black-and-sallow, foreign-looking, man-voiced Mary on the other, the thoroughly English Princess Elizabeth took London by storm on the spot.  Tall and majestic, she was a magnificent example of the finest Anglo-Norman type.  Always ‘the glass of fashion’ and then the very ‘mould of form’ her splendid figure looked equally well on horseback or on foot.  A little full in the eye, and with a slightly aquiline nose, she appeared, as she really was, keenly observant and commanding.  Though these two features just prevented her from being a beauty, the bright blue eyes and the finely chiselled nose were themselves quite beautiful enough.  Nor was she less taking