devoutly to be wished.' When we find Cicero, who was so much superior to his contemporaries in refinement, divorcing Terentia on no very positive grounds; contemplating a match with the ugliest woman I ever saw'; marrying Publilia, who might have been his granddaughter; almost immediately divorcing her, and living on friendly terms with the divorced husband of his beloved Tulliola, we are enabled to judge how baneful the old Roman attitude towards marriage would be to the rank and file of modern humanity. A short letter to Atticus on the death of a favourite slave or freedman in his friend's household, puts in a strong light Cicero's gentleness of disposition:

'Poor Athamas! My dear Atticus, your grief is natural, but you must struggle against it. Let philosophy bring about the result that time must effect. Now let us take care of your other slave, Alexis, who is sick at your house in Rome. Is the Quirinal insanitary? If so, you must send him and Tisamenus, who is in charge of him, to my house. The whole upper part is empty, as you know. The change might, I think, have a decided effect.'

It is interesting to observe the deep interest which Cicero takes in questions of diction and style. We are told by Quintilian that he was a severe critic of his son's Latinity, which indeed called for animadversion, if it is true, as Servius tells us on Æn. viii. 168, that young Cicero once wrote direxi litteras duas, a sentence which must have grieved his 'judicious' father.* It has been observed that Cicero reminds one of a modern Englishman more than any other character in so-called ancient history. He might have written this passage from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, except that his language would have been less severe :

'I come now to another part of your letter, which is the orthography, if I may call bad spelling orthography. You spell induce enduce, and grandeur you spell grandure, two faults which few of my housemaids would have been guilty of. Orthography is so necessary for a gentleman that one false spelling may fix a ridicule upon him for the rest of his life.'

It is not only to his son that he plays the censor. The most striking example of his purism about words occurs in a letter to Atticus. He needed a Latin word to represent éπox in the philosophic sense of the suspension of judgment. He had hit on sustinere, but Atticus had suggested inhibere, with which at first he was delighted; afterwards he writes:

* Duas should of course have been binas, and dirigere, 'to draw up,' can be paralleled only in late Latin.

'Now

'Now I do not like it at all. Inhibere is a nautical expression, but I thought it meant to lie on the oars and keep the vessel stationary. I learned that I was wrong when a ship put in yesterday here at Astura. Inhibere does not mean to keep the vessel stationary, but to row backwards, which is quite unsuitable to illustrate the meaning of philosophic suspense in the Academica.'

He then goes on to give authority for the use of sustinere, which he wishes to be restored, and finally remarks :

:

'You see how much more interest I take in the exact meaning of inhibere and sustinere than in the political news, than in the career of Pollio in Spain, and, certainly, than in the news about Metellus and Balbinus.'

Cæsar could forgive his enemies, especially those who used against him only the sword and not the pen. But his clemency, not always based on the noblest motives, has been much exaggerated. Gaul was the scene of terrible acts of retribution. He executed the whole Senate of the Veneti; he permitted a massacre of the Usipetes and Tencteri; he sold as slaves 40,000 natives of Genabum, and cut the right hands off all the brave men whose only crime was that they held to the last against him their town Uxellodunum. Bacon quotes the desperate saying of Cosmus, Duke of Florence,' that though we are commanded to forgive our enemies, it is nowhere enjoined on us to forgive our friends. Cicero, as we have seen, could pardon even his friends. When his blackguard kinsman,' young Quintus, had grace enough to tell his uncle that he felt keenly the estrangement between them, Cicero replied at once with exquisite kindness, 'Why then do you permit the estrangement to exist?' adding, I use the word pateris in preference to committis,' which would have meant, Why do you bring on yourself his anger?' and indeed would have been none too hard. At the beginning of the epoch which we have been considering, in April 46, Cicero wrote to his learned friend Varro, words which neatly sum up his view of the way in which men, such as they were, should get through the troublous times on which they fell:

Be it ours to adhere firmly to a life of study, a practice once essential to my happiness, but now essential to my existence; to be ready to come, ay and eager to run, to help in building up the constitution, if called to that task, whether as master-builders or even only as common masons; if not wanted, to write and read about the science of politics, and from our study, if the Senate and Forum are closed to us, to do our best to guide the destinies of the State.'

ART.

ART. V.--Queen Elizabeth.

TH

By Mandell Creighton, D.D., Bishop of Peterborough. London, 1896.

HERE is no period of English history so enveloped in an atmosphere of sentiment and romance as that of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The triumphs of her rule in politics and war, the splendid services of unrivalled statesmen and warriors, the gay galaxy of wits, courtiers, poets, and dramatists that adorned her reign, arouse the interest and quicken the imagination of the student of the history and literature of England. She was great Gloriana,' the object of a unique chivalrous devotion when the spirit of chivalry had begun to fade, who moved through her Court like a goddess, setting an example of fashion and extravagance which her admiring courtiers only too rapidly followed, and which she at times found it necessary summarily to check. From shire to shire she would pass in triumphal procession in a whirl of shows, while 300 waggons followed with bag and baggage necessary for her domestic comfort, and a smutty regiment who attended the progresses rode in the cars with the pots and kettles, which, with every other article of furniture, were then moved from palace to palace.' Fauns and satyrs fled before her as she rode through the woods, and Diana and her train received her in a masque returning from the chase. Cupid presented her his golden shaft as she passed through the gates of Norwich; and the mythological deities and heroes of Greece and Rome, and the denizens of the New World, mingled in a strange medley with the chivalry of the Middle Ages in the stately courts of Kenilworth.

It is fitting that an age so brilliant, and a personality so striking, should be illustrated with all the splendour that the taste and art of the ninteenth century can command. To say that a book is worthy of the reign of Elizabeth is to give high praise. But we may say it with truth of the volume which we have placed at the head of our article. Throughout its pages Dr. Creighton bears his train of learning with a skill and ease which would not disgrace the most practised of courtiers. In it publisher, artist, and printer vie with one another to produce a work which shall rival the magnificence of the age of Elizabeth. The result is one of the most sumptuous volumes which have ever been published. Different readers will read it for different reasons. For ourselves, in the present article, it is a storehouse of fashions, a wardrobe of the richest costumes which the wealth and fancy of the Elizabethans could devise. The age was one of pageantry and show, pomp and glitter, as well as an age rich in ideas, when the mind of man, freed from the trammels

of

of centuries, surveyed at once under the new literary impulse the treasures of the Old World, and by the triumphs of naval enterprise the great wonders of the New. The black shadows of the Middle Ages, under which man moved a pilgrim and a stranger given up to the dominion of Satan, and where to many there was no joy except in utter scepticism or in direct compact with him, had now passed away, and a fairer vision of Earth and Heaven was revealed to man in the new light of the Renascence. Men now turned aside from the terrors of a Dantean hell and took refuge in the contemplation of the glories of earth, whose far-off regions were no longer in the possession of satyrs, griffins, and demons. The practical mind of Trinculo, at sight of Caliban, gives expression to the regret :

'Were I in England now, as I once was, and had this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man: any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.'

The dream of discovering an El Dorado, the hope of plunder, and religious fervour sent men on expeditions of discovery or conquest across the Spanish Main, and often with most profitable results. The contents of the Madre di Dios taken by Drake, consisting of calicoes, linen, damask, taffetas, silks and other Indian goods, were bought by the City of London for 140,000. Life became one of enthusiasm, exciting enterprise, and enjoyment under the new conditions for its development. The lust of the eye' was appeased by the splendour of attire, the pomp and magnificence of the shows and pageantry. The 'lust of the flesh' gratified itself in a higher standard of living and domestic comfort. Cecil complains 'that England spendeth more on wines in one year than it did in ancient times in four years.' The pride of life' gloried in the possession of knowledge, giving an impetus to the New Philosophy, the outcome of the age which reversed the scientific method of two thousand years in the immortal aphorism, Homo naturæ minister et interpres. The splendour of the age warmed the imagination even of Bacon with a sensuous glow of colour, as he turned contemplatively to buildings, gardens, masques and triumphs, 'toys to come amongst such serious observations, but yet, since Princes will have such things, it is better they should be graced with elegancy than daubed with cost.' It was under such an environment as this, having for its centre London and the Queen,' that the great epic of the age, Spenser's 'Faerie

Queene,'

Queene,' was written, with no higher aim than how to 'fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline'; and hence it soon became the 'delight of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier.'

The pomp and pageantry of the sixteenth century had appropriate setting in the stately mansions which then began to spring up in profusion throughout the country. After the destructive warfare of the previous century, resulting in the ruin of most of the great Barons of England and the downfall of Feudalism, men could now 'sacrifice strength to convenience and security to sunshine' under the new Italian influence. Battlemented walls, moats, barbicans, narrow windows, and gloomy halls made way for the graceful gables rising over the spacious court with arched entrance and fretted front. Diamond-paned windows, with mullions and transoms and painted arms, gave light and grace to the carved, open, oak staircase, leading to spacious rooms with costly hangings or wainscotting, hung with armour, with lofty ornamental panelled ceilings, and elaborately classic-carved chimney-pieces rising high above the spacious fireplaces. Without, pillared galleries looked down on stately terraces descending by broad flights of steps into Italian gardens, with spacious alleys of quaintlydevised yew leading to soft retreats or ornamental fountains, or bathing pools embellished with storied pavement or stained glass. The delicious gardens of the royal retreat at Nonsuch made it a place,' says Hentzner, pitched upon by Pleasure herself, to dwell in along with Health.' Audley End, Saffron Walden, was designed to eclipse all that had previously been erected, and is said to have cost 190,000l. Charlecote, Kenilworth, Somerset House, Hatfield, Stoneyhurst, Burleigh, and a host of others, showed the end of the old order of Feudalism and the beginning of a new era in the social life of England. Beryl ceased to be used in the houses of the nobles, and glass from Normandy and Flanders as well as of English make came into general use. Bacon complains that sometimes houses were 'so full of glass, that one cannot tell where to come to be out of the sun or cold.' Aubrey, writing of Gorhambury, built by Sir Nicholas Bacon, mentions the stately Gallerie, whose glasse windows are all painted, and every pane with severall figures of beast, bird, or flower.' Cabinets filled with gold and silver vessels occupied the recesses, sometimes, as we are told, of the value of 2,000l. Hentzner, describing the curiosities of Hampton Court, mentions 'a certain cabinet called Paradise, where besides that everything glitters so with silver, gold, and jewels, as to dazzle one's eyes, there is a musical instrument

made