“If ever a man," says Dean Church, “had a great object in life and pursued it through good and evil report, through ardent hope and keen disappointment to the end, with unwearied patience and unshaken faith, it was Bacon, when he sought for the improvement of human knowledge, for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate."

SUMMARY OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE

We have seen England, lifted by the common wave of thought and emotion, find an outlet for her richer and deeper experience in the creation of innumerable works in every department of literature. To the careful student of history, the vast possibilities, the latent powers of the English nature are apparent from the first; the genius of Chaucer strengthens his confidence in the correctness of his estimate, and he sees in the supreme literary greatness of England, under the kindly influence of the Renaissance, the splendid confirmation of this view.

We have approached this many-sided and inexhaustible period, chiefly through the study of three of its greatest men, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon. The first is supreme as a poet of dream-land, the second supreme among all poets, the last is the great thinker who stands at the gateway of our modern science. These men are indeed pre-eminent, but other writers crowd about them, each great enough to stand first in a less abundant time. The extent and richness of Elizabethan literature has made our study

* Church's Life of Bacon,

most limited, for so "spacious" is the time that on every hand are beautiful regions which we cannot even pretend to explore. For instance there is all the literature of criticism, the books in which Sir Philip Sidney, William Webbe, and George Puttenham discuss the art of poetry; there is the literature of travel, books such as Hakluyt's Voyages (1589), in which the narratives of great navigators like Sir Humphrey Gilbert or Sir Walter Raleigh were collected; there are all the books of short poems, Tottel's Miscellany, England's Helicon, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, and the like, which tell us how prodigal the country was in song in that full time when England was "a nest of singing birds." Then, too, there are series of sonnets, such as those of Spenser, Sidney, William Drummond (1585–1649); the last perhaps the most Italian in tone and among the most beautiful of them all. We have spoken briefly of the drama, but only extended study can make us realize its power and richness, the great host of busy playwrights and their extraordinary vigor and productiveness. We have alluded to the prose writers, but we must pass by the work of historian, theologian, romance-writer, and antiquarian, almost without mention. We are forced to leave these regions behind us unexplored, but it will help us to a firmer hold on this revival of learning period, if, before leaving it, we fix in our minds certain points of chronology that rise like milestones along the way. In doing this we must remember that such arbitrary divisions of literature are convenient, but not always exactly true, for literary periods are not

in reality thus sharply defined, but one flows almost imperceptibly into the other.

First (cir. 1491-cir. 1513). We may associate the last ten years of the fifteenth and the first ten or thirteen years of the sixteenth centuries with that band of teachers and educational reformers who may be called the missionaries of the new learning. This period reaches from about 1491, the year when Grocyn lectured on Greek at Oxford, to about 1510 or 1513, when Colet founded or completed the grammar school of St. Paul. Conspicuous in this time are Grocyn, Erasmus, Linacre, Colet, and, in his young manhood, Sir Thomas More.

Second (1513-1557). During this time the influence of Italy begins to be apparent in English poetry. Henry VIII. is a patron of learning; More publishes his Utopia, Heywood his Interludes, Roger Ascham his Toxophilus (1544), Coverdale and Cranmer their Translations of the Bible (1535 and 1537). Phaer's Virgil, Heywood's Seneca, and other translations of the classics appear. We note in Ralph Roister Doister the beginning of regular comedy. On the whole the new learning is making itself apparent in literature, and the time is full of the signs. of promise.

Third (1557-1579). This period may be remembered as beginning with the publication of Tottel's Miscellany and ending with that of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. During this interval the coming of a mighty outburst draws nearer, the work of preparation goes on in the publication of numerous classical translations; Sackville writes his Induc

tion to the Mirror for Magistrates (1563); short poems and ballads appear in extraordinary numbers; the first regular tragedy is written, and innumerable Italian stories become popular. It is a time of growth, of preparation, and of expectancy.

Fourth (1579-1637). Between these years is the high noon of the English Renaissance. The period begins with the Shepherd's Calendar, the decisive entrance into literature of the greatest poet England had produced since Chaucer. The ten years succeeding are marked by the rapid advance of the drama under Lyly, Peele, Greene, Lodge, and Marlowe, the immediate precursors of Shakespeare. In 1590, with the first installment of The Faërie Queene and the advent of Shakespeare, we are at the opening of twenty of the most glorious years in the whole twelve centuries of the literature. From about 1613, when Shakespeare ceased to write, we note the slow decline of this creative energy, and in 1637 two events occur which emphasize for us the ending of the old and the beginning of the new. In that year Ben Jonson died, the greatest surviving representative of the glory of the Elizabethans, and in that year also there was published the Comus of the young Puritan, John Milton. Thus the old order was changing, yielding place to the new.

CHAPTER II

THE PURITAN IN LITERATURE

THE ENGLAND OF MILTON

ALTHOUGH Shakespeare and Milton are familiarly linked together in our ordinary speech as the two Shakespeare greatest poets of England, in the whole and Milton spirit and nature of their work they spirit of dif- have hardly anything in common.

express the

It is

ferent times. not merely that they are, for the most part, distinguished in separate provinces of poetry; that Shakespeare is above all the dramatic, and Milton the epic poet of the literature; the difference lies much deeper, and declares itself unmistakably at almost every point. Now, this is not entirely due to an inborn, personal difference in the genius of these two representative poets; it is due also to the difference in the spirit of the times they represent. For in a sense even Shakespeare was "of an age," as well as "for all time." * So far as we can guess from his work, he seems to have shared the orthodox politics of the Tudor times, distrusting the actions of the populace, and stanch in his support of the power of the king. In the true spirit of the Renaissance, Shakespeare's work is taken up chiefly with humanity

"He was not of an age, but for all time." From Ben Jonson's poem "To the Memory of Shakespeare,"