of Queen Elizabeth, hardly one was born so much as five before she ascended the throne.

years

In whatever direction we look during the first half of her reign, we discover an equal inaptitude, among men of letters, to build on the foundations that had been laid in the generation before. A respectable muster-roll of literary names could not be collected from those twenty or twenty-five years, unless it were to include a few of those writers who, properly belonging to the preceding time, continued to labour in this.

In poetry, the Mirror of Magistrates continued merely to heap up bad verses. The miscellaneous collection, called "The Paradise of Dainty Devices," contains hardly any pieces that are above mediocrity; and old Tusser's "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry," though Southey has thought it worthy of republication, teaches agriculture in verse, but does not aim at making it poetical. It is only towards the end of this interregnum of genius, that we reach something of poetical promise; and then we have only "The Steel Glass" of Gascoigne, a tolerable satirical poem in indifferent blank verse, with some smaller poems of his which are more lively.

The drama lingered in the state in which Udall and Sackville left it, till about the very time of Shakspeare's youth. Even its best writers deserve but slight commendation. Edwards, however, who hardly improved the art at all, was the best of the contributors to the "Paradise;" and Gascoigne the satirist, though merely a dramatic translator, not only used blank verse in tragic dialogue, but wrote our earliest prose comedy. John Still, who in maturer age became a bishop, composed the best of the original comedies, "Gammer Gurton's Needle;" which, however, is in every way inferior to "Roister Doister."

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In English prose, again, the time was equally barren. Its reputation is redeemed by one great event only; the appearance of the Bishops' Bible, which will soon be commemorated more particularly. Of original writers, it possessed none that are generally remembered, except the venerable Bishop Jewell. But the Apology for the Church of England," the most celebrated work of this learned, able and pious man, was written in Latin. We must not, however, forget Stow's unpretending Chronicles of England and Survey of London; and the readers of Shakspeare may be reminded, that to these obscure years belong the plain but useful historical works of Hall and Holinshed, of which he made so free use.

Learning in the ancient tongues, which had received a check during the ecclesiastical troubles, was now allowed to resume its

course. The Oriental languages were studied sufficiently to give great aid to the Scriptural critics and translators. But classical knowledge, which is said to have declined almost everywhere in the latter half of the century, produced in England no very valuable fruits. Its first effect was the setting afloat a shoal of metrical translations from the Latin poets, with some from the Greek. These were very far from being useless. They not only diffused a taste for the antique, but served as convenient manuals for some of the less instructed among the later poets; Shakspeare himself being, in all likelihood, not slow to appropriate their treasures. But, as specimens either of style or of poetry, they are, one and all, exceedingly bad.

2. The writers being thus finally disposed of, who appeared in the first half of Elizabeth's long reign, our inquiries must dwell very particularly on those by whom they were succeeded. The immense and invaluable series of literary works, which embellished the period now in question, might be regarded as beginning with Spenser's earliest poem, which was published in the year 1579.

"There never was, anywhere, anything like the sixty or seventy years that elapsed from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the Restoration. In point of real force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo the Tenth, or of Louis the Fourteenth, can come at all into comparison. For, in that short period, we shall find the names of almost all the very great men that this nation has ever produced; the names of Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Sidney, of Raleigh, and Hooker, and Taylor, of Napier, and Milton, and Cudworth, and Hobbes, and many others; men, all of them, not merely of great talents and accomplishments, but of vast compass and reach of understanding, and of minds truly creative and original; not men who perfected art by the delicacy of their taste, or digested knowledge by the justness of their reasonings; but men who made vast and substantial additions to the materials upon which taste and reason must hereafter be employed, and who enlarged, to an incredible and unparalleled extent, both the stores and the resources of the human faculties."

No age in our literature deserves to be studied so deeply, as that which, in respect of its innate power of thought and invention, is thus justly ranked above the most brilliant eras of ancient Greece and Rome, of modern Italy and France. Nor, when we survey that energetic period from its beginning to its close, do we

* Lord Jeffrey: Contributions to the Edinburgh Review; Vol. II.

discover any point at which its activity can be said, with truth, to have either ceased or flagged.. Impediments thrown up in one channel of thought, served only to drive the current forward with redoubled impetuosity in another. Some of the highest minds, indeed, lingered on earth till the bounds of their time were past, casting the shadow of their strength on the feebler age that followed. Allied, likewise, so closely, by the originality and vigour which was common to all, the leaders of our golden age of letters were linked together not less firmly by the common spirit and tone of their works. Let us look in what direction we will; to theology or philosophy, to the drama, or the narrative poem, or the ever-shifting shapes of the lyric: everywhere there meets us, in the midst of boundless dissimilitude imprinted by individual genius and temperament, a similarity of general characteristics as striking as if it had been transmitted with the blood. The great men of that great age, separated from their predecessors by a gap in time, and distinguished from them yet more clearly by their intellectual character, stand aloof, quite as decidedly, from those degenerate successors, amidst whom a few of them moved in the latest stages of their course. Taylor, and Hall, and Baxter, are pupils who learned new lessons in the school which had nurtured Hooker; Hobbes might be called, without injustice to either party, the philosophical step-son and heir of Bacon; and Milton is the last survivor of the princely race, whose intellectual founders were Spenser and Shakspeare.

While the period thus spoken of, reaching from about 1580 to 1660, must be treated as one, it will not be supposed to have been void of changes. Eighty years could not have passed along, in one of the most actively thinking ages of the world, without evolving much that was novel; still less could this have happened in a time when revolutions, political and religious, were bursting out like volcanoes, and when all the relations of society were, more than once, utterly metamorphosed.

Accordingly, we cannot thoroughly understand the intellectual phenomena that arose, unless we begin our scrutiny by regarding them in their order of succession; and the spirit which prevailed in public affairs communicated itself sufficiently to literature, to make the changes of dynasty represent, in a loose way, the successive changes which took place in the realm of letters. We will hastily examine, one after another, the latter half of Elizabeth's reign, the reign of James, that of Charles, and the few years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.

THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH FROM 1580.

3. It is not easy to detect all the impulses, which made the last generation of the sixteenth century so strong in itself, and capable of bequeathing so much strength to those who took up its inheritance.

The chivalrous temper of the middle ages was not yet extinct. But it had begun to seek for more useful fields of exercise when it animated the half-piratical adventurers, who roamed the seas of the west in search of new worlds, and fame, and gold; and it burned with a purer flame in Queen Elizabeth's foreign wars, blazing up with a mingled burst of patriotic and religious zeal when the shores of England were threatened by the terrible fleet of the Spaniards. There was an expanding elasticity, a growing freedom, both of thought and of action; a freedom which was very imperfect according to modern views, but which still was much wider than any that had yet, unless for short intervals, been enjoyed by the nation. There was an increasing national prosperity, with a corresponding advance of comfort and refinement throughout all ranks of society. Ancient literature became directly familiar to a few, and at second hand to very many; a knowledge of such science as Europe then possessed began to be zealously desired by educated men'; and there was diffused, widely, an acquaintance with the history and relations of other countries.

Mightier than all these forces in outward show, and strong in its slow and silent working on the hearts of the nation, was the influence exerted by the Reformation, which, now completed, had moulded the polity of the English Church into the form it was destined to retain. More gentle than the gales that blew from the new-found islands of the ocean, was the spirit which pure religion breathed, or should have breathed, over the face of society; and tenfold more welcome was, or should have been, the voice that announced freedom of spiritual thought, than the loudest blast with which a herald's trumpet ever ushered in a proclamation of civil liberty. It cannot be doubted that the ecclesiastical revolution, which was so peacefully effected by Elizabeth, was felt, by the nation at large, like the removal of an oppressive weight. But we must not allow ourselves to imagine, either that perfect religious freedom was now gained; or that the old faith vanished from the land as a snow-wreath melts before the warmth of spring; or that the purification of doctrine and discipline transformed the hearts and minds of a whole people with the suddenness of a sorcerer's charm.

In the deliverance out of the ancient prison-house, the captives carried with them some of the ancient fetters. This took place partly because the strong-willed sovereign so decreed it, partly because it could not well have been otherwise. If Elizabeth sternly suppressed the dissent of her Catholic subjects, she prevented, with a hand equally heavy, all departure of Protestants from the ecclesiastical polity which she had established; and, in church as in state, her prudent mixture of forbearance with severity checked the growth, as well as curbed the manifestation, of discontents which were to be aggravated into destructive violence by the bigotry and folly of her successors. In regard to the matters in which we are immediately interested, the great queen's policy, and the state of doctrine during the greater part of her time, concurred in having this effect; that puritanism has not in any shape a place in literary history till we reach the reign of James. Literature was affected in a different way by the somewhat doubtful state of opinion and feeling which is traceable among the people. The cautious and moderate character of the ecclesiastical changes, while it facilitated the gradual absorption of the whole community into the bosom of the reformed church, saved all men from that abrupt breaking up of settled associations, and that severe antagonism of feeling between the old and the new, which another course of events had caused in Scotland. It is certain that the effects which this state of things produced in literature, and most of all in poetry, were, in the meantime at least, highly beneficial. The poets, speaking to the nation, and themselves inhaling its spirit, had thus at their command a rich fund of ideas and sentiments, passing in an uninterrupted series from the past into the present. The picturesqueness of the middle ages, and their chivalry, and their superstitions, still awakened in every breast an echo more or less loud and clear; and the newly revealed spiritual world, which was gradually diffusing its atmosphere all around, communicated, even to those who were unconscious whence the prompting came, enlarged vigour and independence of thought, and novel and elevating objects of aspiration. Nor was the morality of the time, whatever may be our ethical judgment on it, less favourable to the progress of literary culture. It was neither lofty nor ascetic, but neither was it generally impure; it was, like the manners, seldom refined; but, like these, it was coarse in tone rather than bad in essence. It was better than that which had prevailed in the early part of the century; and unfortunately, that of the time which succeeded was much

worse.