and changeless atmosphere of heaven, for these men had abandoned earth, and may therefore inherit perpetual blessedness. Dante-filled with keen political passion as he was-finds his subjects of highest imaginative interest not in the life of Florence, and Pisa, and Verona, but in circles of Hell, and the mount of Purgatory, and the rose of beatified spirits. Human love ceases to be adequate for the needs of his adult heart; the woman who was dearest to him ceases to be woman, and is sublimed into the supernatural wisdom of theology.

While the world was thus given over to Satan, those who were lacking in the spiritual passion, and who could not abandon this world, closed a bargain with the evil One. Together with the world and the flesh they accepted the devil, as in the legend Faustus does, and as Boccaccio did in fact. Our imagination can hardly find a place for Shakspere in any part of the Middle Ages. Either they would transform him, or he would. confound and disorganise them. With his ever present sense of truth, his realization of fact, and especially of that great fact, a moral order of the universe, we cannot think of Shakspere among the men of pleasure, scepticism, and irony; he could not stay his energy or his humour with the shallow lubricities of Boccaccio. Neither can we picture to ourselves an ascetic Shakspere, suppressing his desire of knowledge, transforming his hearty sense of natural enjoyment into curiosities of mystic joy, exhaling his strength in sighs after an "Urbs beata Ierusalem," or in tender lamentation over the vanity of human love and human grief.

But in the Renascence and Reformation period, in

stead of substituting supernatural powers, and persons, and events for the natural facts of the world, men recurred to those facts, and found in them inspiration and sustenance for heart, and intellect, and conscience. Of paradise men knew somewhat less than Angelico had known, or Dante; but they saw that this earth is good. Physical nature was not damnable; the outlying regions of the earth were not all tenanted by vampyres and devils. Sir John Mandeville brought back stories of obscure valleys communicating with hell, and haunted by homicidal demons; Raleigh brought back the tobacco plant and the potato. In the college of his New Atlantis Bacon erects a statue to the inventor of sugar. Dreams of unexplored regions excited the imagination of Spaniard and Englishman in the later Renascence ; but it was of El Dorado they dreamed, with its goldroofed city, and auriferous sands. Hardy men went forth to establish plantations and possess the earth. And as these were eager to acquire power over the physical world by extending in the Indies and America the dominion of civilised man, others were no less eagerly engaged in endeavouring to extend, by means of scientific discovery, the dominion of man over all forces and provinces of nature. The student of science was not now a magician, a dealer in the black art, in miracles of the diabolic kind; he pleaded in the courts, he held a seat in parliament, he became Lord Chancellor of England. It was ascertained that heaven was not constructed of a series of spheres moving over and around the earth, but that the earth was truly in heaven. This is typical of the moral discovery of the time. Men found that the earth

is in heaven, that God is not above nature, touching it only through rare preternatural points of contact,rather that He is not far from every one of us, that human life is sacred, and time a fragment of eternity.*

Catholicism had endeavoured to sanctify things secular by virtue proceeding towards them from special ecclesiastical persons, and places and acts. The modern spirit, of which Protestantism is a part, revealed in the total life of men a deeper and truer sanctity than can be conferred by touches of any wand of ecclesiastical magic. The burden of the curse was lightened. was lightened. Knowledge was good, and men set about increasing the store of knowledge by interrogation of nature, and by research into the life of mankind as preserved in ancient literatures. Visible pomp was a thing which the eye might frankly enjoy; men tried to make life splendid. Raleigh rode by the queen in silver armour; the Jesuit Drexelius estimated the value of the shoes worn by this minion of the English Cleopatra at six thousand six hundred gold pieces. The essays "Of Building" and "Of Gardens," by Bacon, show how this superb mundane ritualism had a charm for his imagination. Beauty was now confessed to be good; not the beauty of paradise which Angelico painted, but that of Lionardo's Monna Lisa, and Raffaele's Fornarina, and of the daughters of Palma Vecchio.

* See the excellent opening chapters of "Shakespeare als Protestant, Politiker, Psycholog, und Dichter," by Dr Eduard Vehse. "Shakespeare, der ungelehrte, unstudirte Dichter ist der erste, in welchem sich der moderne Geist, der von der Welt weiss, der die gesammte Wirklichkeit zu begreifen sucht, energisch zusammenfasst. Dieser moderne Geist ist der gerade Gegensatz des mittelalterlichen Geistes; er erfasst die Welt und namentlich die innere Welt als ein Stück des Himmels, und das Leben als einen Theil der Ewigkeit." Vol. i., p. 62.

The earth and those excellent creatures, man and woman, walking upon it formed a spectacle worth a painter's soul. One's country was for the present not the heavenly Jerusalem, but a certain defined portion of this habitable globe; and patriotism became a virtue, and queenworship a piece of religion. Conscience was a faithful witness; an actual sense of sin, and an actual need of righteousness were individual concerns, belonging to the inmost self of each human being, and not to be dealt with by ecclesiastical mechanism, by sale of indulgence, or dispensation of a Pope. Woman was neither a satanic bait to catch the soul of man, nor was she the supernatural object of mediæval chivalric devotion; she was no miracle, yet not less nor other than that endlessly interesting thing-woman. Love, friendship, marriage, the ties of parent and child, jealousy, ambition, hatred, revenge, loyalty, devotion, mercy, these were not insignificant affairs because belonging to a world which passes away; human life being of importance, these, the blessings and curses of human life, were important also. Heaven may be very real; we have a good hope that it is so; meanwhile here is our earth, a substantial, indubitable fact.

The self-conscious ethics of the Elizabethan period find an imaginative utterance in Spenser's "Faerie Queene." Spenser's view of human life is grave and earnest; it is that of a knightly encounter with principalities and powers of evil. Yet Spenser is neither mediæval nor essentially Puritan; the design of the "Faerie Queene" is in harmony with the general Elizabethan movement. The problem which the poet

sets himself to consider is not that of our great English allegory," The Pilgrim's Progress "-how the soul of man may escape from earth to heaven. Nor is the quest of a mystical Grail a central point in this epic of Arthur. The general end of Spenser's poem is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." A grand self-culture is that about which Spenser is concerned; not as with Bunyan the escape of the soul to heaven; not the attainment of supernatural grace through a point of mystical contact, like the vision which was granted to the virgin knight of the mediæval allegory. Self-culture, the formation of a complete character for the uses of earth, and afterwards, if need be, for the uses of heaven-this was subject sufficient for the twenty-four books designed to form the epic of the age of Elizabeth. And the means of that self-culture is of the active kind, namely warfare, warfare not for its own sake, but for the generous accomplishment of unselfish ends. Godliness, selfmastery, chastity, fraternity, justice, courtesy, constancy -each of these is an element in the ideal of human character conceived by the poet; not an ascetic, not a mediæval ideal. If we are to give a name to that ideal we must call it Magnificence, Great-doing. Penitential discipline and heavenly contemplation are recognised by Spenser as needful to the perfecting of the Godward side of man's nature, and as preparing him for strenuous encounter with evil; yet it is characteristic that even heavenly Contemplation in Spenser's allegory cannot forget the importance of those wonderful things of earth, -London and the Queen.