and Algiers, where Britons were found in chains, till the sovereign of England demanded their restitution, and of the Holy Land, where the peaceful crusaders now only knelt in pilgrimage. All this convinced them that the world was every where inhabited; and that all was veracious, as Sebastian Cabot, the true rival of Columbus, and perhaps our countrymen, had marked in his laborious maps, which he had engraved, and which were often wondered at, as they hung in the Privy Gallery at Westminster. Alas! for the readers of modern travels, who can no longer participate in the wild and awful sensations of the all-believing faith of "the home-bred wit" of the Elizabethan era-the first readers of HAKLUYT'S immense collection. The advancement of general society out of its first exclusive circles became apparent when "the public" themselves were gradually forming a component part of the empire. "The new learning," as the free discussions of opinions and the popular literature of the day were distinguished, widely spread. Society was no longer scattered in distant insulations. Their observation was more extended, their thought was more grave; tastes multiplied, and finer sympathies awakened. "The theatre" and "the ordinary" first rose in this early stage of our civilization; and the ceaseless publications of the day, in the current form of pamphlets, were snatched up, even in the intervening pauses of theatrical representation, or were commented on by some caustic oracle at the ordinary, or in Powles' walk. We were now at the crisis of that great moral revolution in the intellectual history of a people, when the people become readers, and the people become writers. In the closer intercourse with their neighbors, their insulated homeliness was giving way to more exotic manners; they seemed to imitate every nation while they were incurring the raillery or the causticity of our satirists, who are not usually the profoundest philosophers. The satirists are the earliest recorders of manners, but, fugitive historians of fugitive objects, they only sport on the surface of things. The progressive expansion of social life, through its homeliest transitions, are more clearly discerned in the perspective view; for those who are occupied by opening their narrow ways, and by lengthening their streets, do not contemplate on the architectural city which is reserved for posterity. It was popular to ridicule the finical "Monsieur Traveller," who was somewhat insolent by having "swum in a gondola ;" or to raise a laugh at him who had "bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, and his bonnet in Germany." It did not occur to our immortal satirist that the taste which had borrowed the doublet and the bonnet, had also introduced to his happier notice the tales of Bandello and the Giuletta of Luigi Porto. The dandy of Bishop Hall almost resembles the fantastic picture of Horace, in illustrating a combination of absurdities. Hall paints with vigor: "A French head joined to neck Italian; His thighs from Germany, his breast from Spain; But if this egregious man of fashion borrowed the wordiness of Italian compliment, or the formality of the Spanish courtesy, he had been also taught the sonnet and the stanza, and those musical studies which now entered into the system of education, and probably gave delicacy to our emotions, and euphony to our language. The first attempts in the refinements of manners are unavoidably vitiated by too close a copy; and it is long before that becomes graceful which began in affectation. When the people experienced a ceaseless irritability, a marvelling curiosity, to learn foreign adventures and to inspect strange objects, and "laid out ten doits to sec a dead Indian," these were the nascent propensities which made Europe for them a common country, and indicated that insular genius which at a distant day was to add new dominions to the British empire. This public opinion which this sovereign was creating she watched with solicitude, not only at home, but even abroad. No book was put forth against her government, but we find her ministers selecting immediately the most learned heads or the most able writers to furnish the replies.* Burghley, we are told, had his emissaries to inform him of the ballads sung in the streets; and a curious anecdote, at the close of the reign of Elizabeth, informs us how anxiously she pondered on the manifestations of her people's feelings. The party of Lord Essex, on the afternoon before their insurrection, ordered the play of the tragical abdication of Richard the Second. It is one of the charges in their trial; and we learn, from a more secret quarter than the public trial, that the queen deeply felt the acting of this play at that moment as the watchword of the rebels, expressive of their design. The queen's fears transformed her into Richard the Second; and a single step seemed to divide her throne from her grave. The recollection of this circumstance long haunted her spirits; for, a year and a half afterward, in a literary conversation with the antiquary Lambarde, the subject of a portrait of Richard the Second occurring, the queen exclaimed, "I am Richard the Second, know ye not that ?" The antiquary, * When Osorio published in Latin a bitter attack on Elizabeth and the English church, Cecil employed Walter Haddon to answer it in Latin; and, January 1563, sent Haddon's book in a despatch to France, to our ambassador there, that it might be published where Osorio's had first come out. Lord Burghley sent the book of the Jesuit Sanders, whom Fuller calls Slanders, "De Visibili Monarchia," to the Archbishop of Canterbury to get answered. The archbishop, having found the right man, writes to Lord Burghley, that "he has honested him with a room in the Arches" until he had completed the work. A libellous tract, entitled "A Discovery of Treason," in 1573, reflecting severely on Elizabeth's ministers, was immediately answered by a royal proclamation; and so was the libel on Leicester by the Jesuit Parsons, and many others. at once wary and ingenuous, replied, well knowing that the virgin queen would shrink were her well-beloved Essex to be cast among ordinary rebels, “Such a wicked imagination was attempted by a most unkind gentleman, the most adorned creature that ever your majesty made.” The queen replied, "He that will forget God will also forget his bennefactors." So long afterward was the royal Elizabeth still brooding over the gloomy recollection. In the art of government a new principle seemed to have arisen, that of adopting and guiding public opinion, which, in the mutations of civil and political society, had emerged as from a chaos. A vacillating and impetuous monarch could not dare it; it was the work of a thoughtful sovereign whose sex inspired a reign of love. Elizabeth not only lived in the hearts of her people, but survived in their memories; when she was no more, her birth-day was long observed as a festival day; and so prompt was the remembrance of her deeds and her words, that when Charles the First once published his royal speech, an insidious patriot sent forth "The Speech of Queen Elizabeth," which being innocently printed by the king's printer, brought him into trouble. Our philosophic politician, Harrington, has a remarkable observation on the administration of Elizabeth, which, laying aside his peculiar views on monarchy, and his theoretical balances in the state, we may partly adopt. He says, "If the governinent of Elizabeth be rightly weighed, it seems rather the exercise of principality in a commonwealth than of sovereign power in a monarchy. Certain it is that she ruled wholly with an art she had to high perfection, by humoring and blessing her people." Did Harrington imagine that political resembles physical science? In the revelations of the Verulamian philosophy, it was a favorite axiom with its founder, that we subdue Nature by yielding to her. 21 ORTHOGRAPHY AND ORTHOEPY. SOME of the first scholars of our country stepped out of the circle of their classical studies with the patriotic design of inculcating the possibility of creating a literary language. This was a generous effort in those who had already secured their supremacy by their skill and dexterity in the two languages consecrated by scholars. Many of the learned engaged in the ambitious reform of our orthography, then regulated by no certain laws; but while each indulged in some scheme different from his predecessors, the language seemed only to be the more disguised amid such difficult improvements and fantastic inventions. A curious instance of the monstrous anomalies of our orthography in the infancy of our literature, when a spelling-book was yet a precious thing which had no existence, appears in this letter of the Dutchess of Norfolk to Cromwell Earl of Essex: "My ffary gode lord-her I sand you in tokyn hoff the neweyer a glasse hoff Setyl set in Sellfer gyld I pra you tak hit (in) wort An hy wer habel het shoulde be bater I woll hit war wort a m crone." These lines were written by one of the most accomplished ladies of the sixteenth century, "the friend of scholars and the patron of literature." Dr. Nott, who has supplied this literary curiosity, has modernised the passage word by word; and though the idiom of the times is preserved, it no longer wears any appearance of vulgarity or of illiteracy. "My very good lord,-Here I send you, in token of the New Year, a glass of setyll set in silver gilt; I pray you take it (in) worth. An I were able it should be better. I would it were worth a thousand crown.” |