The disposition of Elizabeth was originally deficient in benevolence and sympathy, and prone to suspicion, pride and anger; and we observe with pain in the progress of her history, how much the influences to which her high station and the peculiar circumstances of her reign inevitably exposed her, tended in various modes to exasperate these radical evils of her nature.

The extravagant flattery administered to her daily and hourly, was of most pernicious effect; it not only fostered in her an absurd excess of personal vanity, but, what was worse, by filling her with exaggerated notions both of her own wisdom and of her sovereign power and prerogative, it contributed to render her rule more stern and despotic, and her mind on many points incapable of sober counsel. This effect was remarked by one of her clergy, who, in a sermon preached in her presence, had the boldness to tell her, that she who had been meek as lamb was become an untameable heifer; for which reproof he was in his turn reprenended by her majesty on his quitting the pulpit, as “an over confident man who dishonored his sovereign.”

The decay of her beauty was an unwelcome truth which all the artifices of adulation were unable to hide from her secret consciousness; since she could never behold her image in a mirror, during the latter years of her life, without transports of impotent anger; and this circumstance contributed not a little to sour her temper, while it rendered the young and lovely the chosen objects of her malignity.