INTRODUCTORY.

In this third division of my Talks, I am going to tell you about the principal writers who appeared from the time Queen Elizabeth ascended the English throne, until the end of the reign of James I. There is no period of our literature which includes so many great names. Within the limits of a little more than half a century, Spenser, Shakspeare, Bacon and Milton were born. And beside these four names that shine with such immortal lustre, are other names of poets, scholars, soldiers, discoverers, statesmen, and orators, who form a group unequaled before or since, in England's history.

Queen Elizabeth herself is a fitting central figure in this age. When she came to the throne, a young and beautiful woman, after the stormy struggles between Catholic and Protestant in her father's and sister's reigns, she seemed to bring peace and prosperity to the land. Her court and her people welcomed her as if she were a creature almost divine. From the first this ideal sovereign inspired the poet's pen, and she appears in his verse as a being glorified by all that myth or legend or his own fancy can suggest.

Elizabeth had been educated by one of the most famous of schoolmasters, good Roger Ascham, who had trained her in Greek, Latin, and other branches of learning. She could speak the principal court languages of Europe, and, better than that,

she was well read in the current literature of her time; interested in the rising poets who sought her patronage; and, indeed, had tried her own fair head at verse-making, and on occasion could turn a clever epigram at rhyme.

It was the tendency of Elizabeth's reign to bring in luxury of living, and all elegancies of dress and manners. The queen was passionately fond of fine clothes and everything handsome about her. She had in her wardrobe three thousand gowns for one item of dress alone, and her lords and ladies were not far behind her in extravagance. One gets in history some idea of the splendid dresses of her courtiers. One of Sir Walter Raleigh's portraits was painted in a white satin doublet, richly embroidered, "with a great string of pearls round his neck, each big as a robin's egg;" and a hat with a long feather, fastened by a great, blazing ruby. Walter Scott, who writes the romance of history, but always keeps close to the fact, tells us of the Earl of Leicester's handsome clothes in his novel of Kenilworth.

The young Englishman when he left college was sent to France or Italy to finish his education, to polish and refine his manners, and he brought back with him all sorts of new fashions. The young tourists from England were noted for following all the extravagancies then in vogue. Old John Lyly advises the young man: "Let not your mind be carried away with vain delights, as with traveling into strange countries, where you will see more wickedness than learn virtue or wit. Neither with costly attire of the new cut, the Dutch hat, the French hose, the Spanish rapier, and the Italian hilt." While Shakspeare hits off this weakness of the time in Portia's merry description of the English lord-"How oddly he is suited. I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere."

But the graduates from Oxford and Cambridge brought back from Italy more than fine clothes and polished manners. They brought the knowledge of a literature which worked a perceptible change on their own. Italian poetry,

even in Chaucer's time, had exerted an influence over English poetry; later, Surrey and Wyatt, as we have just seen, had been disciples of the Italian school. But never was this influence so strongly marked as in this era we are now entering. A flood of romances, in prose and verse, from the rich fountain of Italian literature, poured into England. It seemed as if all at once all the elements that could gratify the taste, stimulate the imagination, and enrich the fancy, were brought to bear upon the age that produced both Shakspeare and Spenser.

In an age so crowded with great writers, both in prose and poetry, it is hard to decide which we shall begin to talk about. But in my imagination the great figures of the time divide themselves into groups: Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, with one or two minor poets, form a circle about their grand central figure, Edmund Spenser; next to this group, apart in solitary greatness, stands Lord Bacon; following him comes Shakespeare, towering like a Colossus above the crowd of dramatic poets that surround him; and last come the lyric poets, all the singers, whose gay music is heard all through the century from the time of Elizabeth to that of Charles II. So, beginning with Spenser and the figures that attend upon him, we will enter upon the Golden Age, or as it is generally called, the Elizabethan Age of English poetry.

7

TALK XVI.

ON EDMUND SPENSER.

EDMUND SPENSER is the second great English poet in Born 1552, the line which begins with Geoffrey Chaucer. It Died 1598. was almost two hundred years after Chaucer had laid down his pen when Spenser's great poem, The Fairy Queen, was published. It is not every year, not every generation of men, even, that produces a great poet.

There is the same vagueness and uncertainty about the events of Spenser's early life that we find when we come to study the biographies of all our great poets. Most of the writers who undertake to tell us of the lives of Chaucer, Spenser or Shakespeare, make tiresome researches into family history, without much result. Evidently Genius is quite independent of genealogies, and the great poet does not, like the snail, carry his house on his back. It is of very little consequence, therefore, that Spenser's parents were of obscure origin, and that Spenser claimed remote kinship with a family of good name and estate.

He was born in London in 1552, or very near that date, and began his education at a London grammar school. He entered Cambridge College early, but left before his studies. were completed-forced to do so, some of his biographers think, by the poverty of his purse. From college he went to the North of England and fell in love there with a beautiful Rosalynde (her last name no one has been able to find out with certainty), who seems to have been unable to love him in return, and to give vent to his disappointment, he wrote The Shepherd's Calendar, which first proved that he was a poet. Let us be grateful to the fair Rosalynde that she