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 forces. 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 medieval 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, That grows on yonder lilylee. This deed was done at the Otterbourne, Earl Douglas was buried at the bracken bush, 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. 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 belongs 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," bas "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, so 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. and Raleigh—to Buckhurst, (whose own muse was slumbering now;) and not only to these, the living men of power and place, but, with a truth of affection worthy of the poet's gentle spirit, to the mourning sister of his lost friend, Sir Philip Sydney, and closing with an address, full of the chivalry of the times, "to all the gratious and beautifulladies in the court." Having occasion now to hasten to a few other subjects, I propose to reserve what I wish to say of the Faery Queen, until the next lecture, when I desire to speak of Spenser as a sacred poet, in connection with some counsel on the subject of Sunday reading. At present, let me recommend that remarkable series of papers from the pen of Professor John Wilson-the Christopher North of Blackwood's Magazine-papers of the highest value as pieces of true imaginative criticism, written with such a glowing admiration of Spenser's genius, that I know of no better means than the perusal of them for extending the study of this great allegory. They are to be found in Blackwood's Magazine for 1833. The large luminary of Spenser's imagination had scarce mounted high enough above the horizon to kindle all it touched, when there arose the still more glorious shape of Shakspeare's genius, radiant like Milton's seraph-"another morn risen on mid-noon." This was the wonderful dramatic era in English letters. Within about fifty years, beginning in the latter part of the sixteenth century, there was a concourse of dramatic authors, the like of which is seen nowhere else in literary history. The central figure is Shakspeare, towering above them all; but there were there, Ben Jonson, and Beaumont, and Fletcher, and Ford, and a multitude of whom a poet has said, |