well) during the reign of Mary. On the accession of Elizabeth he received the additional appointment of reader in the learned languages to the Queen. Elizabeth used to take lessons from him at a stated hour each day. In 1563 he wrote his Schoolmaster, a treatise on education.1 This work was never finished, and was printed by his widow in 1571. The sense and acuteness of many of his pedagogic suggestions have been much dwelt upon by Johnson. An excellent biography of Ascham may be found in Hartley Coleridge's Northern Worthies. 39. John Bourchier, Lord Berners, who seems to have been the little nephew of Juliana Berners (see Haselwood's ed. of the 'Book of St. Albans'), made a good translation of Froissart at the command of Henry VIII.; this was printed in 1523. He also translated from the French the Golden boke of Marcus Aurelius, i.e., the 'Meditations' of that emperor, and the romance of Huon de Bordeaux; this last has been lately reprinted. Sir Thomas Elyot, a courtier in the time of Henry VIII., is the author of the political treatise called The Governour. The book is dedicated to the king, and was first published in 1531. Experience and reading of the ancients, he tells us, have qualified him, and inclination incited him, to write of the form of a juste publike weale.' Such an opening makes us think of Plato's Republic, or More's Utopia, or, at the least, Fortescue's Absolute and Limited Monarchy. But the promise was not kept, nor could it well have been kept; for who that had any regard for his life, and was not hopelessly servile in nature, could have written freely and fully on political questions under the horrible despotism of Henry VIII.? After the first few pages, the author slides into the subject of education for the remainder of the first book; the second and third books, again, with the exception of a few pages, form an ethical treatise on virtues and vices, with but slight reference to the bearing of these on the work of government. In the brief portion which is political, Elyot argues on behalf of ranks and degrees among men from the examples of subordination afforded in the kingdoms of nature. Superior knowledge he deems to be, in itself, the best and most legitimate title to superior honour. Monarchy, as a form of government, he sets above aristocracy and democracy. He draws an argument from a beehive : In a little beaste, whiche of all other is most to be mervailed at, I meane the Bee, is lefte to man by nature a perpetual figure of a just governaunce or rule; who have among them one principall bee for their governour, which excelleth all other in greatnesse, yet hath he no pricke or stinge, but in him is more knowledge than in the residewe.' 1 Extract Book, art. 44. CHAPTER III. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 1558-1625. 1. THIS is the golden or Augustan age of English literature. After its brilliant opening under Chaucer, a period of poverty and feebleness had continued for more than a hundred and fifty years. Servile in thought and stiff in expression, it remained unvivified by genius even during the first half of the reign of Elizabeth; and Italy with her Ariosto and Tasso, France with her Marot and Rabelais, Portugal with her Camoens, and even Spain with her Ercilla, appeared to have outstripped England in the race of fame. Hence Sir Philip Sydney in his Dejence of Poesie, written shortly before his death in 1586, after awarding a certain meed of praise to Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser (whose first work had but lately appeared), does not remember to have seen many more [English poets] that have poetical sinews in them.' Gradually a change became apparent. The Paradise of Dainty Devices, a collection of poems published in 1578, contains pieces by Richard Edwards, Jasper Heywood, and others, which evince a skill of poetical handling not before met with. England's Helicon, a poetical miscellany (comprising fugitive pieces composed between 1580 and 1600), to which Sidney, Raleigh, Lodge, and Marlowe contributed, is full of genuine and native beauties. Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, a miscellany of the same class, appeared in 1602. Spenser published the first three books of the Faerie Queene in 1590 ; Shakspere began to write for the stage about the year 1586; the Essays of Francis Bacon were first published in 1597; and the first portion of Hooker's great work on Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in 1594. 2. The peaceable and firmly settled state of the country after 1558 was largely instrumental in the rise of this literary greatness. Queen Elizabeth, whose sagacity detected the one paramount political want of the country, concluded in the second year of her reign a rather inglorious peace with France, and devoted all her energies to the work of strengthening the power of her government, passing good laws, and improving the internal administration of the kingdom. The consequences of the durable internal peace thus established were astonishing. Men began to trade, farm, and build with renewed vigour ; a great breadth of forest land was reclaimed; travellers went forth to discover islands far away,' and to open new outlets for commerce; wealth, through this multiplied activity, poured into the kingdom; and that general prosperity was the result which led her subjects to invest the sovereign, under whom all this was done, with a hundred virtues and shining qualities not her own. Of this feeling Shakspere became the mouthpiece and mirror : She shall be loved and feared; her own shall bless her; And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her; Under his own vine, what he plants, and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.1 There is indeed a reverse to the picture. Ireland was devastated in this reign with fire and sword; and the minority in England who adhered to the ancient faith became the victims of an organised system of persecution and plunder. Open a book by Cardinal Allen, and a scene of martyred priests, of harried and plundered laymen, of tortured consciences and bleeding hearts, will blot out from your view the smiling images of peace and plenty above portrayed. The mass of the people, however, went quietly with the government, believing -and the circumstances of the time were such as to lend some colour to the belief-that to adhere to the Pope meant, not merely preference for the old religion, but also sympathy with Spain, disloyalty to England, and aid and comfort to her enemies all over the world. Wealth and ease brought leisure in their train; and leisure demanded entertainment, not for the body only, but also for the mind. The people, for amusement's sake, took up the old popular drama, which had come down from the very beginning of the Middle Ages; and, after a process of gradual transformation and elaboration by inferior hands, developed it, in the mouths of its Shakspere, Jonson, and Fletcher, into the worldfamed romantic drama of England. As the reading class increased, so did the number of those who strove to minister 1 Henry VIII. act v. sc. 5. to its desires; and although the religious convulsions which society had undergone had checked the movement towards a complete and profound appreciation of antiquity, which had been commenced by Colet, More, and Erasmus, in the universities, so that England could not then, nor for centuries afterwards, produce scholars in any way comparable to those of the Continent, yet the number of translations which were made of ancient authors proves that there was a general taste for at least a superficial learning, and a very wide diffusion of it. Translation soon led to imitation, and to the projection of new literary works on the purer principles of art disclosed in the classical authors. The epics of Ariosto and Tasso were also translated, the former by Harrington, the latter by Carew and Fairfax; and the fact shows both how eagerly the Italian literature was studied by people of education, and how general must have been the diffusion of an intellectual taste. Spenser doubtless framed his allegory in emulation of the Orlando of Ariosto, and the form and idea of Bacon's Essays were probably suggested to him by the Essays of Montaigne. Let us now briefly trace the progress, and describe the principal achievements, in poetry and in prose writing, during the period under consideration. Poets: Spenser, Shakspere, Southwell, Warner, Daniel, Drayton Donne, Davies, Lodge, Chapman, Marston, Gascoigne, Sidney, Tusser, Marlowe, Raleigh; Translators. 3. Among the poets of the period, Spenser holds the first rank. The appearance of his Shepheard's Calender, in 1579, was considered by his contemporaries to form an epoch in the history of English poetry. This poem is dedicated to Sidney, and in an introductory epistle, feigned to come from a third hand, addressed to his friend Gabriel Harvey,1 the poet enters 1 Harvey was a native of Saffron Walden, and an early and firm friend of Spenser, who celebrates him as 'Hobbinol' in the Shepheard's Calender. In his youth he wrote Gratulationes Valdinenses,-Congratulations from Saffron Walden,- -a Latin elegiac poem in honour of Elizabeth. In another carly production,-Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets,-he desires that he may be 'epitaphed the inventour of the English hexameter,' an absurd form of that metre which Stanihurst and others adopted (see below, § 24), but which did not long hold its ground. Harvey introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney, perhaps also to Leicester. With Spenser he published in 1580 Three proper and wittie familiar Letters, on an earthquake that had recently occurred, and on 6 our English reformed versifying,' by which was chiefly meant the hexameter. (Warton's English Poetry, iv. 205; Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays, Lond. 1815.) into some curious particulars respecting the diction of his work. He commences the epistle by quoting from the 'old famous poet' Chaucer, and also from Lydgate, whom he calls 'a worthy scholar of so excellent a master.' The Calender itself, partly by the large use of alliteration, partly by an express allusion in the epilogue, supplies us with evidence that he was a diligent reader and admirer of the Vision of Piers Plowman by Langland. These three were his English models: he was young and full of enthusiasm, and there is little wonder if their poetical diction, which, if obsolete, was eminently striking and picturesque, commended itself to his youthful taste more than the composite English current in his own day. His words are as follows: 'And first of the wordes to speake, I graunt they bee something hard, and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent authours and most famous poets. In whom, whereas this our poet hath bin much travailed and thoroughly read, how could it be (as that worthy oratour sayde), but that walking in the sunne, although for other cause he walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt; and having the sound of those auncient poets still ringing in his eares, he mought needes in singing hit out some of their tunes ? But whether he useth them by such casualtie and custome, or of set purpose and choise, as thinking them fittest for such rusticall rudenesse of shepheards, either for that their rough sound would make his rimes more ragged and rusticall, or else because such old obsolete wordes are most used of country folke, sure I thinke, and thinke I thinke not amisse, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say, authoritie to the verse. But if any will rashly blame his purpose in choise of old and unwonted wordes, him may I more justly blame and condemne, or of witlesse headinesse in judging, or of heedles hardinesse in condemning; for, not marking the compasse of his bent, he will judge of the length of his cast: for, in my opinion, it is one especial praise of inany which are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their rightfull heritage, such good and naturall English wordes as have beene long time out of use, and almost clean disherited, which is the only cause that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough for prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted most bare and barren of both. Which default, when as some endeavoured to salve and recure, they patched up the holes with pieces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the Italian, everywhere of the Latin; not weighing how ill those tongues accorded with |