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breast of William Shakspeare. An intense nationality, and a happy loyalty to the government, as represented in the sovereign-fervid as were these emotions in the days of Queen Elizabeth-could not but affect vividly the national literature, especially the dramatic literature, placed as it was in close contact with the people. This influence is manifest in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Ben Jonson, and all the great authors of the time; and doubtless it was one of the causes that helped them to their greatness.

The English language, too, was now better fitted for all the uses of literature, more adequate to the needs of philosophic thought, and of deep and varied feeling—at once stronger, more flexible, and more copious. It was now flowing one mighty flood, no longer showing the separate colours of the two streams which filled its channel-colours caught from the different soils, the Saxon and the Norman, in which they had their springs. The hidden harmonies of the language were disclosed, and its power of more varied music shown. The people's speech had grown to its full stature.* The language became affluent in expressions incorporated with it from the literature of antiquity, for classical learning in its

* Dr. Johnson, in the preface to his Dictionary, a work demanding his gigantic powers and congenial to them, has admirably remarked, that "From the authors which arose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sydney; and the diction of common life from Shakspeare,-few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words in which they might be expressed." H. R.

best forms was made, as it were, part of the mind of modern Europe; and in England, under Elizabeth, the great universities, which during the immediately previous reigns had suffered from violence that had pierced even those tranquil abodes, were gathering anew their scattered force. The attainments of the Queen herself, gained by the superior education which Henry VIII. had the sagacity to give his daughters, (it is one of the few good things to be said of him,) created another sympathy between the sovereign and her subjects. Beside the influence of ancient literature, necessarily limited to the learned, there was the larger and more open influence of the nation's own older literature-Chaucer's poetry dear to the people, and honoured by his grateful successors—for it was to Chaucer, let it be remembered, that Spenser applies the well-known phrase, the "well of English undefiled." There was the early romance, and that strange expression of the mediaval mind, the "Mysteries" and "Moralities," "Miracle Plays"-that allegorical drama, in which abstractions were personified, and the actors were such things as "Pride," "Gluttony," "Swift-to-Sin,” "Charity," and, what might perhaps be the more appropriate personifications for later times, "Learning-withoutmoney," and "Money-without-learning," and "All-formoney." In the great controversy of the Reformation, these devices for edification were freely employed by both divisions of the church to promote their respective opinions. An act of parliament in the reign of Henry VIII., for the promotion of true religion, forbade all interludes contradictory to established doctrines. In the preparatory processes of the Elizabethan literature, there was also the early minstrelsy in all its forms, tales told

by the fireside in the long English winter evenings, and songs sung, as Shakspeare speaks of, by women as they sat spinning and knitting in the sun. How deep was the influence of the popular minstrelsy, is apparent from that well-known sentence of Sir Philip Sydney: "I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blinde crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?''* Sydney's feeling becomes still more intelligible when we recall how the same strain clung to the heart of Walter Scott, (it was his favourite of the old ballads :) when visiting the ruined castle of Douglas, feeling the sure approaches of death, he repeated to Lockhart the old poem, the pathos of the last stanza having an application not to be mistaken, and leaving him in tears:

"My wound is deep-I fain would sleep

Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And hide me beneath the bracken bush
That grows on yonder lilylee.

This deed was done at the Otterbourne,
About the dawning of the day;

Earl Douglas was buried at the bracken bush,
And the Percy led captive away."+

Thus, as I have sought to show, there were propitious influences, from the past and of the present, which gave to our language the most illustrious period of its literature that which is usually called the "Elizabethan,"

*Defence of Poesy, p. 34. Oxford ed. 1829.
Lockhart's Scott, vol. x. p. 85.

passing over into the seventeenth century. First in it, was the English version of the Bible; for, although the present standard is that of King James, published in 1611, it belongs more properly in the history of English literature to an earlier period, modelled, as the new translation was, after Archbishop Parker's, commonly called "The Bishop's Bible," of the year 1568. The first of the instructions given to the translators in King James's time, was, "The ordinary Bible read in the churches, commonly called the Bishop's Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit." We may, therefore, associate the language of our Bibles more truly with the age of Elizabeth than with that of the first of the Stuarts. To the same period belong the first of the great English prose-writers, Richard Hooker, the earliest of that unbroken series of authors, during the last two hundred and fifty years, who have shown the resources of our English prose; Bacon, Taylor, Milton, and Barrow, Dryden, Bolingbroke, Swift, and Burke, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Cowper, and, in our own times, Scott and Southey, Sydney Smith and Landor. Mr. Hallam, in his Constitutional History, turns aside from his subject to express his deep sense of the claims which Hooker, as the author of the "Ecclesiastical Polity," has "to be counted among the great luminaries of English literature. He not only opened the mind, but explored the depths of our native eloquence. So stately and graceful is the march of his periods, so various the fall of his musical cadences upon the ear, so rich in images, só condensed in sentences, so grave and noble his diction, so little is there of vulgarity in his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that I know not whether any later writer has more admirably

displayed the capacities of our language, or produced passages more worthy of comparison with the splendid monuments of antiquity."

"*

The chief glory, however, of the Elizabethan age, is its poetry, at once the most abundant and the highest in the annals of English literature. No fewer than two hundred poets are referred to the period by a catalogue which, by good authority, is thought not to exceed the true number. But it is not number alone. There are the names of Edmund Spenser and of William Shakspeare.

When Spenser, in 1590, gave to the world the first books of "The Faery Queen," it was done in a manner worthy of the age and of his great inspiration. It was dedicated to his Queen-"The most high, mighty, and magnificent empress, renowned for piety, virtue, and all gracious government, Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland, and VIRGINIA.” Yes, there stands the name of that honoured State; and, while there is many a reason for the lofty spirit of her sons, the pulse of their pride may beat higher at the sight of the record of "the ancient dominion" on the first page of the Faery Queen. The poet placed it there as a tribute to her from whom the name was taken, and also to the gallant enterprise of Raleigh and his adventurous followers.

The poem is ushered in not only by the dedication to the sovereign, but by a series of introductory verses addressed to the most illustrious statesmen and soldiers of the court, Hatton, and Burleigh, and Essex, Howard, Walsingham,

* Hallam's Constitutional History of England, vol. i. p. 291.

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