One more Elizabethan reference ...

... and then I'll move along. But the pickings have been slim here this week for a couple of reasons. In the first place, I've been working on scripts for next Sunday's 18th annual Chariton Cemetery Heritage Tour (4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 18; admission by free-will donation; sponsored by the Chariton Historic Preservation Commission). That's a more time consuming process than you might think.

And then the new glasses (finally) arrived during the week. There was nothing the matter with the old glasses, other than the fact they were so old I'd run out of ways to tape the frames together. But the new lenses do not interact with a computer screen in the same way the old ones did --- there's a learning curve (and a stiff neck) involved.

So I grabbed this image this morning from the Twitter feed of Philip Mould, British art historian and dealer.

Goodness knows there have been enough images online and in other media this week of the late queen, tailing out lately into sentimental drawings of royal Corgis reunited with their late mistress.

This is an official 2007 portrait by photographer Annie Leibovitz, taken in the Buckingham Palace gardens. As Mould puts it, "the most successful portrait of Queen Elizabeth in later life. Shades of Caravaggio, it combines solitary sovereignty with the brooding challenges of realm."

Or the brooding challenges of these 21st century days in general --- another reason why the symbolic stability that her presence provided will be sorely missed.