"1

swarming with rogues, thieves, drunkards and discontented persons.' Stubbes comments upon the horrible condition of Elizabethan London, "where the poor lie in the streets upon pallets of straw or else in the mire and dirt as commonly it is seen." Having no covering to keep them from the cold they, "are permitted to die in the streets like dogs or beasts without any mercy or compassion shewed to them at all. And if any be sick of the plague (as they call it) or any other disease, their masters and mistresses are so impudent as straightway they throw them out of their doors. And so being carried forth either in carts or otherwise and thrown in the streets there they end their days most miserably." *

We have seen the dismal ebb to which Learning in Shakespeare's time had fallen. "No opinion says Robert Burton, "was too absurd, prodigious or ridiculous" to find favour with the learned. Their books and treatises were "full of dotage." "If," as he impatiently adds, the learned were

so sottish" with no more brains than SO many beetles, what of the commonalty, what of the rest?" 3

We have seen the equally miserable and distressed condition of Theology. That I have drawn none too lurid a picture is maintained by Burton, to whom I again turn for support. clergy, " says he, were " a low lot, poor, ignorant, sordid, melancholy, wretched, despicable and contemptible." Sacred Theology, he declares, was trampled

and "polluted by idiots and mountebanks, the Heavenly Muses prostituted as some common thing. "The Muses here sit sad," says also Michael Drayton, a sort of swine unseasonably defile those sacred springs."

Drummond of Hawthornden summarises his unhallowed surroundings in a sonnet.

All good hath left this age, all tracks of shame; Mercy is banished, and pity dead ; Justice, from whence it came, to heaven is fled ; Religion, maim'd, is thought an idle name; Faith to distrust and malice hath given place ; Envy with poison'd teeth hath friendship torn ; Renowned Knowledge is a despis'd scorn; Now evil 'tis all evil not to embrace : There is no life, save under servile bands ; To make desert a vassal to their crimes, Ambition with Avarice join hands. O ever-shameful, O most shameless times ! Save that sun's light we see, of good hear tell, This earth we court so much were very hell. Writing in verse to his friends William Jeffreys and George Sandys, Michael Drayton asks hopelessly,

What can'st thou look or hope for from his pen Who lives with beasts, though in the shape [of men.

The "Golden Epoch of Elizabeth " impressed him so little that he considered

This very time wherein we two now live Shall in the compass wound the Muses more Than all the old English ignorance before. According to the testimony of contemporaries England was fogged under a pall of Cimmerian ignorance. Gross habits and viler " Italianate" customs walked unchecked, and unabashed "jeered Heaven in the face. " "O God," cries Drayton, "though Virtue mightily do grieve for all this world, yet will I not believe but that she's fair and lovely. Against learning, ignorance stood :

Like some dull porter at a Palace Gate;
So dull and barbarous lately are we grown
That for man's knowledge it enough doth make
If he can learn to read an almanack.

"

Education was at such a premium that the mere capacity to read and write entitled the possessors to the absurd privileges of "Benefit of Clergy. The Elizabethan nobility Burton brands as "barbarous idiots, dull, illiterate and proud." Devoting their main energies to sports and licentiousness we are told that they contemned thinkers as mere pen and inkhorn men, pedantical slaves." Learning was in their estimation 66 no whit beseeming the calling of gentleman. "'Tis now come to that pass that he is held no gentleman, a very milksop, a clown of no bringing up, that will not drink, fit for no company. He is your only gallant that plays it off finest; no disparagement now to stagger in the streets, reel, rave, etc. but much to his fame and renown. "1

a

Among such aristocracy one can understand Lodge's lament that Knowledge was "not in request. In his Advice to a Son Osborn tells us that "the several books incomparable Bacon was known to read, beside those relating to Law,

I Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1. p. 261. (York Library.)

were objected to him as an argument of his insufficiency to manage the place of Solicitor General. Learning, says Shirley, is not now considered "compatible with native honour." Drummond of Hawthornden notes that :

The man to temperance inclined

Is held but of a base and abject mind. He bewails that, "noble minds live orphan-like forlorn", and adds :

What hapless hap had I now to be born In these unhappy times, and dying days, Of this else-doating world, when good decays, Love is quench'd forth, and virtue held a scorn. "To tell my Country's shame," says Michael Drayton, "I not delight but do bemoan it." As the English now so did the stiff-necked Jews Their noble prophets utterly refuse, And of those men such poor opinion had They counted Isaiah and Ezekiel mad.

He concludes :

1

My noble friend, I would I might have quit
This Age of ours, and that I might have writ,
Before all other, how much the brave pen
Had here been honoured of the Englishmen ;
Goodness and Knowledge held by them in prize,
How hateful to them Ignorance and Vice ;
But, it falls out the contrary is true
And so, my Jeffreys, for this time, adieu!

The intellect of the Country seems to have been mainly engrossed with religious disputation. "Theology rules there," said Grotius writing of England, and when Casaubon was invited by

I Lady of Pleasure IV. 3. 1635,

King James "he found King and people indifferent to pure letters."1 An instructive straw denoting this indifference is surely poor destitute old Stowe's Royal License to beg!

Of letters Poetry seems to have been the branch most particularly in disrepute. The expression " poet" came, we are told, to be a term of reproach, a scorn, a base and contemptible nick-name. "Few nowadays, said Massinger, " dare express themselves a friend to unbefriended Poesie." According to Drayton, Poesie was followed with such fell despite

That she must hence, she may no longer stay,
The dreary Fates prefixed have the day
Of her departure, which is now come on,
And they command her straightways to be gone;
That bestial herd so hotly her pursue,
And to her succour there be very few,
Nay, none at all, her wrongs that will redress,
But she must wander in the wilderness.

I have quoted sufficient to prove that contemporaries were entirely blind to the alleged grace and intellectuality of their surroundings. Yet paradoxically, those times which Drayton dubs "These feverous dog days, blest by no record, but to be everlastingly abhorred," constitute in orthodox eyes the most radiantly learned and poetic epoch in the history of English civilisation. Critics petulantly deny that the noble prophets were utterly refused; London, they tell us, was "rocking and roaring with intellectual fervour." The common herd were clamouring for sweetness and light and, far from hounding