: 



58 EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 



may not be considered here. " The great soul of the 

 world is just " and it has kept Mary within the territory 

 of its favour. Both had, perhaps, the worst fault of the 

 two temperamental extremes : Elizabeth had no affec- 

 tions ; Mary's affections were turbulent and escaped 

 control. Mary was indeed a beautiful if somewhat terrible 

 lioness. What might she have been if mated to a less 

 feeble and foolish lion ? Elizabeth was little more 

 than a magnified though splendid wasp. And now it 

 is interesting to observe that the two queens were 

 not less strongly contrasted in bodily characteristics 

 than in mental. Elizabeth was of large frame, of pink 

 \ skin, scantily endowed with hair, the eyebrows being 

 ( almost absent, of well curved dorsal spine and for- 

 wardly and downwardly poised head. Mary was 

 slighter, her spine less curved and her head erect ; her 

 eyebrows were marked and her head-hair long and 

 abundant. No woman of Mary's bodily characteristics 

 has ever been a scold, no woman of Elizabeth's has 

 ever tumbled headlong into the turbid pools of 

 passion. 



Two memorable figures of the Tudor epoch were 

 More and Erasmus. The two friends were very 

 marked and very noble examples of the active and less 

 impassioned temperament, and both had the character- 

 istic anatomical framework which gives lodgment to the 

 spontaneously up-and-be-doing nerve as distinguished 

 from nerve which sometimes needs the spur. There 

 was nothing pensive or dreamy or sluggish in either 

 of them. Both were self-confident, especially Erasmus, 

 and not without some sense of their own import- 

 ance. In neither of them, however, was there the 

 least trace of self-seeking. But to More's high qualities 

 were added undoubted traces of a disapproving and 



