of unequalled vigour and unrivalled splendour. The cultivation of classical studies in universities and schools, which exercised a direct influence upon a long period in the history of our drama, fostered as these studies were by the tastes of a learned dynasty;-the introduction and use of the art of printing, which was not indeed with us as with the Germans to become one of the levers of a great national movement, but which was to lend its aid to every form of literature, and to none more effectively than to the dramatic1;--the growing habit of foreign travel and the marvellous rapidity of distant discovery, which expanded the imagination of writers and readers not less surely than they winged the ambition and stimulated the daring of what Frobisher called 'notable' minds among our soldiers and sailors; these are only the most familiar among the influences which contributed to that advance. But in addition to these, it would be to ignore the connexion. between the several developements of our national life, were we not to take prominently into account the political and religious phases through which it now passed. It was after all not from the schools, nor from the foreign sources which were daily becoming more accessible and more familiar, but from the progress of our own national life, that the English drama drew its deepest and its most vital inspiration. Henry VII with all his sagacity, or rather in consequence of the caution which was its chief element, had been unable to do more than prepare for the entrance of England into a wider sphere of action; and for the spiritual movement towards independence, towards the emancipation of the individual from the bonds of tradition, of which a few signs had already appeared in his reign, he had known no answer but immediate and absolute suppression. Henry VIII, unlike his father, was a tyrant by nature and disposition; but his youth had

1 Thus it is no paradox to say, that Shakspere's plays were not first printed to be read, but were first read because they were printed.

fallen in a period when culture was already welcomed as the appropriate ornament of a Court; he was accomplished, and eager to exhibit his accomplishments; he was ambitious, and burning to satisfy his ambition. The nation, like the King himself, felt that the time was at hand for the country to use the strength it had acquired; and though there was little principle or moral purpose in the way in which the influence of England asserted itself in continental quarrels, yet both sovereign and nation entered into them with the readiness of a youth essaying his strength. There was a general desire, fostered by the influence of the personal character of a great minister, to do things in the grand style, both at home and abroad,to display the strength and the wealth of England, to act a prominent and a magnificent part before the world. As yet literature, struggling with artificial forms and a material fallen out of cultivation, could only haltingly follow this tendency, till foreign models taught it sobriety and purity of form; and the drama, unconscious of its higher capabilities, could only seek by means of shows and pageants to gratify the grosser needs of an extravagant imagination. Then came what it is usual to call the English Reformation, of which the first act, the rejection of the control of Rome, well accorded with the consciousness of national strength pervading the people. But upon the great body of that people no spiritual movement had as yet seized of a strength sufficient either to control the arbitrary proceedings of the King, or to urge them in a decided direction to a determinate point. The turns and changes in the King's policy led him at times to promote what at other times he was desirous to suppress; he forced his subjects to devote consideration to theological questions on which it was his pleasure that they should hold definite beliefs; at one season he permitted the study of the English Bible which at another he prohibited; and his dissolution of the monasteries put an end to the moral

control of the poor by those who had hitherto been their almoners. Thus the reign of Henry VIII accomplished much that he had, and much that he had not, designed; and the reigns of his two successors, by driving the nation forwards and backwards from extreme to extreme, brought home to all classes of the population the fact that the Reformation had become to every individual a personal question. Literature, still the handmaid of authority, could but sway to and fro with uneasy self-consciousness; the new learning fermented or sank in formless vessels; and the drama oscillated between licence and oppression,-here advancing in more developed forms as Interlude or Chronicle History into a reflexion of social difficulties or the application of historical lessons to the questions of the present, there adapting itself to the modest task of entertaining, without offending, the Court.

The religious and political agitations of those reigns, and the persecutions which humbly reflect themselves in the uncertain fortunes of the infant drama, had disturbed the people, without offering them that assurance as to the ends which England was to pursue in religion and politics, which could alone lead to any sustained national efforts in any branch of national life. When Queen Elisabeth ascended the throne, she found a people divided with regard to the doctrines of the Reformation; but as a whole exasperated against the results of foreign influence, and resolute to uphold any government which would maintain England independent of foreign dictation, whether from Rome or from Spain.

As the Catholic reaction and the dynastic ambition of Spain grew into definite dangers for those interests with which English Protestantism was in sympathy, and as those dangers soon grew critical for the independence of the nation and its throne, it became necessary for England and her Queen to choose their side, and thus to determine the future of the nation. The course of

action which Elisabeth ultimately adopted no doubt presented itself in a clear and definite shape to the intelligence of those whose counsels she hesitatingly followed, but it was long before it so presented itself either to the Queen herself or to the nation at large. Only gradually, and at first half unconsciously, the sovereign and the nation came to assume their position in the van of the great struggle; nor did Elisabeth at any time become fully aware of the entire scope of the contest of which she came to be regarded as the heroine. Least of all was she aware that besides the national energy which placed itself at her disposal, the steady advance of the movement in her people towards spiritual emancipation was one of her best allies. This movement was to the last met by her with determined hostility; it finds only very isolated expressions in the literature of the age; the drama dealt with it chiefly in its merest outward forms, and usually in a spirit of enmity, narrow though not unprovoked.

Personally, with the self-willed pride of her race and with her sex's love of undivided admiration, Elisabeth desired to be all in all to her people, or at least to be accounted all in all by them. The fact that she was a woman, and that continuing unmarried she remained to the last a typical figure of one who admitted no rival to the nation's devotion, made it possible for her to evoke the desired response. It is much for any great time, and much for any great literary age, to be furnished with a personal centre of loyal emotion. Accordingly, throughout the literature of Elisabeth's age, and nowhere more constantly than in the drama, we meet with that halfliteral, half-poetic worship of the Virgin Queen, which is something more than the ordinary incense poets have in readiness for the reigning monarch. And yet it is obvious that Queen Elisabeth was not really the power which inspired what we term Elisabethan literature. During the former half of her reign, English literature in

its non-dramatic branches differs but slightly from that of the preceding part of the Tudor period. Nor is the advance of the drama itself in its earlier Elisabethan growth in any sense rapid. It was still hesitating before freeing itself from the trammels of classical examples imposed upon it by a taste not essentially national; or it lent itself timidly to the exigences of a fashion imposed by the mere fancies of the Court. To what then is the fact to be attributed, that the better part of a generation had elapsed before the honest pedants and poetical phrasemongers of Elisabeth's earlier years were succeeded by the Sidneys and Spensers who glorified the period of this great crisis in our national history — the time of the struggle with the Spanish arch-foe—and that it was about the same time that the popular stage witnessed the productions of the first among the English dramatists whom we may dignify by the name of Shakspere's predecessors? Was it that the lapse of a quarter of a century was necessary before Gloriana could hope to gather in the fruits of the enterprise due to her accession, and that only step by step the age could rise from contemplating the pallid reproductions of Seneca to enter with an eager ardour of sympathy into the high deeds and thoughts of Mahomet, Scipio, and Tamburlaine ? No but that this interval of time, in which England ' of little body but of mighty heart' had grown apace, had awakened in the nation the full consciousness of the vigour swelling within it, and of the ends to which that vigour might be applied. This it was which encouraged our dramatists-true representatives of their countrymento put forth their strength, at first tentatively, soon in full and victorious self-confidence.

Thus, then, Renascence and Reformation and the political changes which ensued upon them contributed to prepare and fertilise the soil into which was to descend the seed of genius, the gift of Heaven. When