Our famous old friend, the great sovereign who saw fit to box the ears of offending gentlemen, and make war upon their wives, possesses the North Gallery. Pale, beaked, sinister; amiably shrewd, like Becky Sharp; now as a priggish infant with a huge watery head, anon as a parrot-like old woman; here with dogs frisking about her, and there with a grimace which would scatter a pack of dogs to the four winds; always swathed in inexpressible finery, Elizabetha Dei Gratia Regina arises on the awed spectator's eye. Her vanities were fairly inherited from her straddling sire. Any authentic portrait of her is a mass of fluff and sparkle, an elaborate cobweb several feet square, in which, after much search and many barricades of haberdashery surmounted, you shall light upon the spectral spider who inhabits them. There is nothing much more entertaining in this world than a study of the royal and virginal wardrobe. Those were epic clothes! They defy analysis, from the geyser of lace circling the neck and ears in a dozen cross-currents, to the acute angles of the diamonded, rubied stomacher, and the stiff acre of petticoat. They brought employment and money to artists, who painted in the significant occupant as they could, and they serve to illustrate for ever the science of dress-making, whose heraldic shield should bear Eve couchant on one side, and Elizabeth rampant on the other. In the balcony above is No. 484, an appalling picture of Her Majesty, in a ruff like isinglass. When we recall that, grown old, she had all her mirrors broken, and all paintings of herself which were not liars destroyed, what must have been the terrors of that countenance for which such a copy as this proved sufficiently flattering! Despite Zucchero, Hilliard, and Pourbus, he is the wisest man alive who knows how that illustrious lady really looked. And as you glance about, be it on the first visit or the twentieth, full of optical and consequent historical bewilderment; as you see how to right and left of Queen Bess the hosts of that wonderful reign have gathered again, you become keenly aware that one who died in the parish of S. Andrew Undershaft, in 1543, "should have died hereafter." Hunger for that bygone genius is in your thought there: O for an hour of _Hans Ho. pinxit_!