It is a question which tempts to wide conjectures, what the results might have been if the social and ecclesiastical relations of England had been guided into another channel; what might have happened, in the progress of literature or in that of the nation, if, for example, the people had been trained in such a school as that, of which the short reign of Edward the Sixth held out the promise; if they had been taught by a press subjected to no restrictions, and guided by a clergy from whom puritanism inherited its doctrines and its spirit. Probably Charles the First would not have been dethroned; but probably, likewise, neither Shakspeare nor Spenser would have written.

4. The adventurers who flocked into the tourney-field of letters, during the last half of Elizabeth's reign, are a host whom it would take hours to muster. Their writings range over the whole circle of knowledge and invention, and give anticipations, both in prose and in verse, of almost every variety which literature has since displayed; and, although a few only of the vast number of works have gained wide and enduring celebrity, there are among them a good many, which, if seldom read, are known sufficiently to keep alive the names of the authors.

The minor writers of that age deserve much greater honour than they are wont to receive. The labours of several of them are really not less important than those of their most celebrated contemporaries, as facts in the intellectual history of our nation. In some departments, indeed, the small men worked more signal improvements than the great ones; and, everywhere, the credit which is usually monopolized by the one class, should in justice be shared with the other. Were it not for the drama and the chivalrous epic, it might be said that the less distinguished authors of that generation were the earliest builders of the structure of English literature. Others coming after them reared the edifice higher, and decked it with richer ornament: but the rustic basement is as essential a part of the pile, as are the porticos and columns that support its roof. Had it not been for the experiments which were tried by such men, and the promptings and warnings which their example furnished, their successors could not have effected what they did.

Further, the social and intellectual character of the last generation in the sixteenth century descended, in great part, to the race that followed it. Those to whom the men of letters addressed themselves in the reign of James, could not have been qualified to respond to their appeals, if they had not been the sons of those who had so strongly acted and thought and felt in the time of Elizabeth.

Therefore, even although the most distinguished names of that earlier time had been wanting, it would not be either unjust or incorrect to speak, as we often do, of the whole mass of our literature down to the Commonwealth, as belonging to the Elizabethan Age. Yet to her time belong strictly no more than three of the great men of our period. Its intellectual chiefs were Spenser, Shakspeare, and Hooker: and, it must now be said on the other side, if these had stood literally alone, they would suffice to vindicate for the reign of the masculine queen its right to be described as the most illustrious era in our intellectual annals.

When we have read the names of those three celebrated men, and have noted the time in which they lived, we know when it was that English poetry rose to its culminating point, in style as well as in matter; and we know also when it was that English eloquence, though still imperfect in language, spoke, from one mouth at least, with a majesty which it has never since surpassed.

That the poetical art should be developed more quickly than other departments of literature, is a circumstance which, after our study of earlier periods, we should be quite prepared to expect. The nation grows like the man: it nourishes imagination and passion before reflective thought is matured; and it creates and appreciates poetry, while history seems uninteresting, and philosophy is unknown. All languages, also, are fully competent for expressing the complex manifestations of fancy and emotion, long before they become fit for precisely denoting general truths, or recording correctly the results of analysis; and, yet further, all of them can move freely when supported by the leading-strings of verse, although their gait might still be uncertain and awkward if, prose being adopted, the guiding hand were taken away. Here, indeed, it should be remembered, that, in these, the latest stages in the development of the English tongue, a high degree of excellence in prose style followed, more quickly than is usual, on the perfecting of the language for metrical uses.

5. Our two immortal poets must be studied more closely hereafter a few points only may here conveniently be premised.

The Faerie Queene of Spenser, and the Dramas of Shakspeare, are possessions for all time: yet they wear, strikingly and characteristically, features imprinted on them by the age in which they were conceived. Their inventors stood on a frontier-ground, which, while it lay within the bounds of the new moral kingdom, and commanded a prospect over its nearest scenes of regular and cultivated beauty, yet also enabled them to look backward on the past, and to catch vivid glimpses of its wild magnificence. Both

of them were possessed by thoughts, and feelings, and images, which could not have arisen if they had lived either a century later or as much earlier. Yet the attention of the two was chiefly fixed on different objects: and very dissimilar were their views of man and history, of nature and art. Spenser's eye dwelt, with fond and untiring admiration, on the gorgeous scenery which covered the elfin-land of knighthood and romance: present realities passed before him unseen, or were remembered only to be woven insensibly into the gossamer-tissue of fantasy; and, lost in his life-long dream of antique grandeur and ideal loveliness, he was blind to all the phenomena of that renovated world, which was rising around him out of the ancient chaos. He was the Last Minstrel of Chivalry: he was greater, beyond comparison, than the greatest of his forerunners; but still he was no more than the modern poet of the remote past. Shakspeare was emphatically the poet of the present and the future. He knew antiquity well, and meditated on it deeply, as he did on all things: the historical glories of England received an added majesty from his hands; and the heroes of Greece and Rome rose to imaginative life at his bidding. But to him the middle ages, not less than the classical times, were unveiled in their true light: he saw in them fallen fragments on which men were to build anew, august scenes of desolation whose ruin taught men to work more wisely: he painted them as the accessory features and distant landscape of colossal pictures, in whose foreground stood figures soaring beyond the limits of their place; figures instinct with the spirit of the time in which the poet lived, yet lifted out of and above their time by the impulse of potent genius, prescient of momentous truths that still lay slumbering in the bosom of futurity.

By the side of the Poetry, in which those celebrated men took the lead, the contemporary Prose shows poorly, with the one great exception. For, in respect of style, Hooker really stands almost alone in his own time, and might be said to do so though he were compared with his successors. His majestic sweep of thought has its parallels: his command of illustration was often surpassed: both as a thinker and as an expounder of thought, this distinguished man is but one among several. But he used the words of his native tongue with a skill and judgment, and wove them into sentences with a harmonious fulness and a frequent approach to complete symmetry of structure, which are alike above the character of English style as it was next to be developed, and marvellous when we remember that he may fairly be held to have been the first in our illustrious train of great prose writers.

Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" was printed in the year 1594.

Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia" had been written before 1587; and in 1596 appeared Bacon's "Essays" and the "View of Ireland" by the poet Spenser. But none of these are comparable in style to the roll of Hooker's sentences. Sidney is loose and clumsy in construction; Bacon is stiff in his forms, and somewhat affectedly antique in diction; and Spenser's prose is in all respects vigorous rather than polished. But, the value of the matter of the books being at present out of question, none of these entitle us to do more than assert, that, before the close of the sixteenth century, there were a few men who wrote English prose very much more regularly and easily than it had been written before, and that their style is less cumbrous and pedantic than that of the most famous writers who followed.

In a word, the application of the English language to Metrical composition may be held to have been perfected by Shakspeare. It would be hard to discover any improvements which, in this use, it has received since his time. The moulding of it into Prose forms had proceeded so far, that, though its development had here stopped, it would have been fully adequate for expressing all varieties of thought with perfect perspicuity and great vigour. But there was still much to be done, before English Prose could satisfy the requirements of an exactly critical taste. We must remember the real imperfections of style, both in our study of these writers, and when we pass to those of the next generation; because we are in constant danger of being blinded to them by the fascination of the eloquence displayed in the books in which they are contained.

THE REIGN OF JAMES THE FIRST.

6. The reign of Elizabeth, as we have learned, gave the keynote to all the literature of the next sixty years. Yet, amidst the general harmony with which the strains succeed each other, there break in, not infrequently, clanging discords.

The literary works which belong to this succeeding part of the period, not only were much more numerous, but really stand, if they are regarded in the mass, higher than those which closed the sixteenth century. Spenser was unimitated, and Shakspeare inimitable but the drama itself, which, in this generation as in the last, monopolized nearly all the best endowed minds, received new and interesting developments; and other kinds of poetry were enriched beyond precedent. Prose writing, on the other hand, blossomed into a harvest of eloquence, unexampled alike in its irregular vigour and in its rich amount.

Under the rule of James, learning was exact enough to do

good service both in classics and theology: and it became sc fashionable, as to infect English writing with a prevalent eruption of pedantic affectations. The chivalrous temper was rapidly on the wane: few men were actuated by it; and those who were so, found themselves out of place. The last survivor of Elizabeth's devoted knights died on the scaffold: and the chancellor of the kingdom, the greatest thinker of his day, was found guilty of corruption. In the palace and its precincts, the old coarseness had begun to pass into positive licentiousness: and a moral degeneracy, propagated yet more widely, began to shed its poison on the lighter kinds of literature. The church possessed many good and able men; but events of various kinds were bringing dissent to the surface. The civil polity stood apparently firm; but it was really undermined already, and about to totter and fall.

A few names, distinctively belonging to James's reign, may serve to illustrate its intellectual characteristics. Bacon, the great pilot of modern science, then gave to the world the rudiments of his philosophy: the venerable Camden was perhaps too learned to be accepted as a fair representative of the erudition of his day. Bishop Hall, then beginning to be eminent, exemplifies, favourably, not only the eloquence and talent of the clergy, but the beginnings of resistance to the proceedings and tendencies by which the Church was soon to be overthrown. The drama was headed by Ben Jonson, a semi-classic in taste, and honourably severe in morals; and by Beaumont and Fletcher, luxuriating in irregularity of dramatic forms, and heralding the licentiousness which soon corrupted the art generally. From the crowd of poets who filled other fields, we may single out Donne, both as very distinguished for native genius, and as having been the instrument in the introduction of fantastic eccentricities into poetical composition.

THE REIGN OF CHARLES THE FIRST THE COMMONWEALTH

AND PROTECTORATE.

7. The public events which took place in the last two sections of our period run gradually into each other, so as to make the successive stages not distinctly separable. Charles the First ceased to reign, long before he laid down his head on the block; and, while he still occupied the throne, the measures of his chief advisers, urged with impotent imprudence, and aggravated by royal perfidy, had already separated the nation into two great parties, opposed to each other both politically and ecclesiastically. Strafford alarmed patriotic statesmen into rebellion: Laud goaded conscientious religionists into secession from the Church.