farthest East. Copernicus had revolutionised astronomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds beyond the sun. The Bible had been rescued from the mortmain of the Church; scholars studied it in the language of its authors, and the people read it in their own tongue. In this rapid development of art, literature, science, and discovery, the English had hitherto taken but little part. But they were ready to reap what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the labours of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their youth and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to them. For more than half a century they freely enjoyed the splendour of this spectacle, until the struggle for political and religious liberty replunged them in the hard realities of life. During that eventful period of spiritual disengagement from absorbing cares, the race was fully conscious of its national importance. It had shaken off the shackles of oppressive feudalism, the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not yet passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroachments of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of the Virgin Queen, with whose idealised personality the people identified their newly acquired sense of greatness. During those fortunate years, the nation, which was destined to expend its vigour in civil struggles and constitutional reforms between 1642 and 1689, and then to begin that strenuous career of colonisation and conquest in both hemispheres, devoted its best mental energy to self-expression in one field of literature. The pageant of renascent humanity to which the English were invited by Italians, Spaniards, and

ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND.

27

Frenchmen, our predecessors in the arts and studies of two centuries, stimulated the poets of the race to their dramatic triumphs. What in those fifty years they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable. It is the portrait of their age, the portrait of an age in which humanity stood self-revealed, a miracle and marvel to its own admiring curiosity.

II.

England was in a state of transition when the Drama came to perfection. That was one of those rare periods when the past and the future are both coloured by imagination, and both shed a glory on the present. The medieval order was in dissolution; the modern order was in process of formation. Yet the old state of things had not faded from memory and usage; the new had not assumed despotic sway. Men stood then, as it were, between two dreams—a dream of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid reminiscences; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreating forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of the modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight of actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been softened; but the chivalrous sentiment remained to inspire the Surreys and the Sidneys of a milder epoch -its high enthusiasm and religious zeal, its devotion to women, its ideal of the knightly character, its cheerful endurance of hardship, its brave reliance on righteous cause. The Papacy, after successive revo

lutions of opinion, had become odious to the large
majority of the nation; but Protestantism had not yet
condensed into a compact body of sectarian doctrines.
The best work of our dramatists, so far from reticent,
so comprehensive as it is, reveals no theological ortho-
doxy, no polemical antagonism to dogmatic creeds.
The poet, whether he sounds the depths of sceptical
despair or soars aloft on wings of aspiration, appeals
less to religious principle than to human emotion, to
doubts and hopes instinctive in the breast of man. It
is as though in this transition state of thought, humanity
were left alone, surveying with clear eyes the uni-
verse, sustained by its own adolescent fearlessness and
strength. The fields, again, of wealth, discovery, and
science, over which we
we plod with measured and
methodic footsteps, spread before those men like a
fairyland of palaces and groves, teeming with strange
adventures, offering rich harvests of heroic deeds. To
the New World Raleigh sailed with the courage of a
Paladin, the boyishness of Astolf mounted on his hip-
pogriff. He little dreamed what unromantic scenes of
modern life, what monotonous migrations of innumer-
able settlers, he inaugurated on the shores of El
Dorado. The Old World was hardly less a land of
wonders. When Faustus clasped Helen in a vision;
when Miramont protested:

Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on 't;
It goes so thundering as it conjured devils :

both characters expressed the spirit of an age when scholarship was a romantic passion. Even the pioneers of science in the seventeenth century were poets.

THE RENAISSANCE.

29

Bruno compares himself upon his philosophic flight to Icarus. Bacon founds the inductive method upon metaphors Idola Specûs, Vindemia Inductionis. Galileo, to his English contemporaries, is 'the Italian star-wright.'

III.

renascent, not newAdam stepped forth

The genius of youthfulness, born, was dominant in that age. again in Eden, gazed with bold eyes upon the earth and stars, felt himself master there, plucked fruit from the forbidden tree. But though still young, though 'bright as at creation's day,' this now rejuvenescent Adam had six thousand centuries of conscious life, how many countless centuries of dim unconscious life, behind him! Not the material world alone, not the world of his unquenchable self alone, not the world of inscrutable futurity alone, but, in addition to all this, a ruinous world of his own works awaiting reconstruction lay around him. The nations moved ' immersed in rich foreshadowings' of the future, amid the dust of creeds and empires, which crumbled like 'the wrecks of a dissolving dream.' Refreshed with sleep, the giant of the modern age rose up strong to shatter and create. Thought and action were no longer to be fettered. Instead of tradition and prescription, passion and instinct ruled the hour. Every nerve was sensitive to pleasure bordering on pain, and pain that lost itself in ecstasy. Men saw and coveted and grasped at their desire. If they hated, they slew. If they loved and could not win, again they slew. If they climbed to the height of their ambition and fell toppling down,

they died with smiles upon their lips like Marlowe's Mortimer :

Weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

Turbulence, not the turbulence of a medieval barony, but the turbulence of artists, lovers, pleasure-seekers, aspirants after pomp and spiritual empire, ruffled the ocean of existence. The characters of men were harshly marked, and separated by abrupt distinctions. They had not been rubbed down by contact and culture into uniformity. Not conformity to established laws of taste, but eccentricity betokening emergence of the inner self, denoted breeding. To adopt foreign fashions, to cut the beard into fantastic shapes, to flourish in particoloured garments, to coin new oaths, to affect a style of speech and manner at variance with one's neighbours, passed for manliness. Everyone lived in his own humour then, and openly avowed his tastes. You might distinguish the inhabitants of different countries, the artisans of different crafts, the professors of different sciences-the lawyer, the physician, the courtier, or the churchman-by their clothes, their gait, their language. Instead of curbing passions or concealing appetites, men gloried in their exercise. They veiled nothing which savoured of virility; and even conversation lacked the reserve of decency which civilised. society throws over it.