on a while on shooters or bowlers, as he rid abroad." In another place we are told that his reading was for the most part in Latin, French, or Italian, and that he very seldom read any English books. This may serve in part to account for the treatment Spenser is said to have had to complain of, when the queen's bounty to the poet was attempted to be checked by her grave-browed minister; he probably despised the Fairy Queen, and concluded that it could not be worth the reading, as being written in the vulgar tongue.

But we must draw to a close. Burghley, as well as her other ministers, sometimes experienced a little of the effects of Elizabeth's caprice and occasional violence of temper, but he was never to any serious extent, or for any considerable space of time, out of favour. If, also, he thought he had on some occasions reason to complain of not being sufficiently supported, or of his advice being disregarded, because some temporary favourite had possession of the royal ear, such was scarcely ever the case on any great emergency; the giving the command of the forces in Holland to Leicester was almost the only very important step which Elizabeth is known to have taken in opposition to Burghley's advice. Nor, with whatever sharpness she may have sometimes turned upon him in her fits of ill humour, did she ever suffer any one to backbite or try to undermine him in her favour; her conviction of his integrity and his value was too firm and deep-seated to be for a moment shaken in that way. And, besides, being human, it was impossible that she should not have had a genuine regard for one who had served her so long and so faithfully; they had passed together from youth to old age-out of one generation of men into a second and a third; had it been only an oak of the forest under which she had been all that while accustomed to find familiar shade and shelter, it must have become dear to her. Throughout forty years of a happy and glorious reign, he had been the main stay of her throne; she used herself to call him her spirit, and their union indeed was more like that of the soul

and the body than anything else. At the least one thinks of Burghley and Elizabeth almost as of husband and wife. Such a husband was the only sort of one suitable for the Man-Queen.

Burghley's spreading branches flourished green for a long while; but decay must needs overtake at last whatever is earthly. The first stroke, long deferred, that fell upon him was the death of his venerable mother in March, 1587; next, in April, 1589, he lost his wife. He continued, however, to discharge all his public duties for some years after this; taking a leading part in the debates of the House of Lords when parliament was sitting, as well as overlooking and directing the general course of public affairs both at home and abroad as diligently as ever with his politic head and unwearied pen. A report is preserved of an elaborate speech made by him in the parliament which met in February, 1593 (the last which sat during his time); several of the state papers drawn up by him that have been published are of still later date; and of those addressed to him some are dated several years after this. In one of his letters, however, written in May, 1593, we find him speaking in strong terms of his sufferings from broken health. The letter is to his son Robert, and, having finished the business part of it, he adds in a postscript, "If I may not have some leisure to cure my head, I shall shortly ease it in my grave.' His thread of life, however, was spun out for a considerable space longer; his death did not take place till the 4th of August, 1598; wherein," says his domestic biographer, in concluding a detailed account of his last hours, which, like all his life, were radiant with piety, 66 one thing was observed as most strange, namely, that, though many watched to see when he should die, he lay looking so sweetly, and went away so mildly, as in a sleep, that it could scarce be perceived when the breath went out of his body."

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Besides his two sons, Thomas by his first wife, who was in 1605 created Earl of Exeter, and was the ancestor of the present Marquess of Exeter, and Robert,

by his second wife, created Baron Cecil, in 1603, and Earl of Salisbury, in 1605, the ancestor of the present Marquess of Salisbury, Lord Burghley had by his second wife two daughters, Anne, married (unhappily) to Edward Earl of Oxford, and Elizabeth, married to William Wentworth, Esq., son and heir of the Lord Wentworth, whom, however, he predeceased. He had also two other sons and a daughter, who all died in infancy.

IT took about two centuries to weld into a common tongue the two perfectly distinct languages spoken in England from the time of the Norman Conquest; about two more to shape that common tongue into the general form of what is now called English; a third space of the same length to bring the compound thus produced to the state in all essential respects in which it has remained ever since, and will no doubt remain while it continues to subsist. In other words, for the first two hundred years the Saxon and Norman were still two separate languages, whose streams were distinguishable even while flowing in the same channel; in the second period the two mingled elements were in a state of effervescence, or of something like contention; in the third, they were perfectly interfused and united, but still in a state of transition, and only advancing to maturity. By the middle of the twelfth century, Saxon and Norman had run together into one body; by the middle of the four

teenth that body had acquired a perfect unity of spirit, character, and tendency; by the middle of the sixteenth it had achieved its full growth and ultimate form and

condition.

The completion of the first of these three periods produced nothing which has lived in or can be said to belong to our literature. What was then accomplished, indeed, was rather the destruction of the two old tongues than the creation of a new one. But the termination of the second period produced the poetry of Chaucer; the termination of the third, the poetry of Spenser. While Chaucer, however, is one of the greatest writers of our own or any other country, his poetry is hidden or obscured to the popular eye under the disguise of a language that has become to a great extent dead or obsolete

that is not, either in its vocables or its grammatical forms, the English that we now speak, but requires to be in great part translated, like a foreign tongue, in order to be made generally intelligible. Spenser has the advantage of having written after the language had become substantially what it still remains, and of being, with the exception of a word here and there, as universally and readily intelligible as any poet of our own day. While Chaucer, therefore, has been properly called the morning star of our poetry, Spenser is its morning sun. The daylight of our literature begins with him.

As for the intervening time between Chaucer and Spenser, it was the era only of imitatorship and abortive effort. The greater part of the poetry of that grey of the morning is a mere reflection of Chaucer; what of it aims at being anything more is still only either a feeble or a lurid light even when it is most original. Lydgate may serve for an exemplification of its more common character; Surrey, Wyatt, and Gascoigne, of that of it which, aiming at a note of its own, was still as it were too timid to raise its voice properly; Skelton and Buckhurst, of what of it evinced most of force and daring, though as yet rather in contest than in conquest. The first voice of song heard in this new era that was really full and free was that of Spenser.