The close of the period was adorned by the scholarship and refined good sense of Roger Ascham. A native of Yorkshire, he was sent at an early age to Cambridge, and during a lengthened residence there diligently promoted the study of the new learning. In 1544 he wrote and dedicated to Henry VIII. his Toxophilus, a treatise on Archery, in which, for military and other reasons, he deprecates the growing disuse of that noble art. His exer

tions were vain; we hear indeed of the bow as still a formidable weapon at the battle of Pinkie in 1547; but from that date it disappears from our military history. In 1550 Ascham went to Germany as secretary to Sir Richard Morrisine, who was then proceeding as ambassador to the Imperial Court; and in 1553, while at Brussels, he wrote in the form of a letter to a friend in England a curious unfinished tract, in which the character and career of Maurice of Saxony, whose successful enterprise he had witnessed, and of two or three other German princes, are described with much acuteness.

In 1553 he was appointed Latin Secretary to Edward VI., and retained the office (the same that Milton held under Cromwell) during the reign of Mary. On the accession of Elizabeth he received the additional appointment of reader in the learned languages to the Queen. Elizabeth used to take lessons from him at a stated hour each day. In 1563 he wrote his Schoolmaster, a treatise on education. This work was never finished, and was printed by his widow in 1571. The sense and acuteness of many of his pedagogic suggestions have been much dwelt upon by Johnson. An excellent biography of Ascham may be found in Hartley Coleridge's Northern Worthies.

CHAPTER III.

ELIZABETHAN PERIOD.

1558-1625.

THIS is the golden or Augustan age of English literature. After its brilliant opening under Chaucer, a period of poverty and feebleness had continued for more than a hundred and fifty years. Servile in thought and stiff in expression, it remained unvivified by genius even during the first half of the reign of Elizabeth; and Italy with her Ariosto and Tasso, France with her Marot and Rabelais, Portugal with her Camoens, and even Spain with her Ercilla, appeared to have outstripped England in the race of fame. Hence Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie, written shortly before his death in 1586, after awarding a certain meed of praise to Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser, (whose first work had but lately appeared), does not remember to have seen many more [English poets] that have poetical sinews in them.' But after the year 1580 a change became apparent. England's Helicon, a poetical miscellany (comprising fugitive pieces composed between 1580 and 1600), to which Sidney, Raleigh, Lodge, and Marlowe, contributed, is full of genuine and native beauties. Spenser published the first three books of the Faery Queen in 1590; Shakspeare began to write for the stage about the year 1586; and the Essays of Francis Bacon were first published in 1597. Raleigh published his History of the World in 1614, and the first portion of

Hooker's great work on Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in 1594.

The peaceable and firmly settled state of the country under Elizabeth was largely instrumental in the rise of this literary greatness. Under the tyranny of Henry VIII., and again in the short reigns of Edward and Mary, nothing was settled or secure; no calculations for the future could be made with confidence; and those who had not to fear for their lives and property were afraid to express a free opinion, or act an open independent part. Doubt, suspense, and mutual distrust, paralysed all spontaneous action. At Elizabeth's accession, the perplexed and intimidated nation was almost prepared to receive any form of Christianity which its government chose to impose upon it, provided it could obtain firm social peace. But various considerations concurred at the time to discredit and render unpopular the religion of the pope and the decisions of the Council of Trent: there was the natural uneasiness of the holders of the church lands confiscated in previous reigns, lest, under a Roman Catholic régime, restitution should ultimately become the order of the day; then, in aid of this feeling, came the indignation and horror which the revolting cruelties of Mary's government had everywhere excited; lastly, the decrees of a council which sat with the fear of the emperor and the pope continually before its eyes, and in whose deliberations England and the northern nations took no part, were naturally not regarded as representing in all points the final and infallible utterances of the universal Church.

Elizabeth, whose sagacity detected the one paramount political want of the country, concluded in the second year of her reign a rather inglorious peace with France, and devoted all her energies to the work of strengthening the power of her government, passing good laws, and improving the internal administration of the kingdom. The consequences of the durable internal peace thus

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established were astonishing. Men began to trade, farm, and build with renewed vigour; a great breadth of forest land was reclaimed; travellers went forth to discover islands far away,' and to open new outlets for commerce; wealth, through this multiplied activity, poured into the kingdom; and that general prosperity was the result which led her subjects to invest the sovereign, under whom all this was done, with a hundred virtues and shining qualities not her own. Of this feeling Shakspeare became the mouthpiece and mirror :

She shall be loved and feared; Her own shall bless her;

Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,

And hang their heads with sorrow;-Good grows with her;"
In her days every man shall eat in safety

Under his own vine, what he plants, and sing

The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours,1

There is indeed a reverse to the picture. Ireland was devastated in this reign with fire and sword; and the minority in England who adhered to the ancient faith became the victims of an organised system of persecution and plunder. Open a book by Cardinal Allen, and a scene of martyred priests, of harried and plundered laymen, of tortured consciences and bleeding hearts, will blot out from your view the smiling images of peace and plenty above portrayed. The mass of the people, however, went quietly with the government, believing, nor wholly without grounds, that to adhere to the pope meant something more than merely to accept seven sacraments instead of two; that it meant sympathy with Spain, disloyalty to England, and aid and comfort to her enemies all over the world.

Wealth and ease brought leisure in their train; and leisure demanded entertainment, not for the body only, but also for the mind. The people, for amusement's sake,

1 Henry VIII., Act v. Sec. 4.

took up the old popular drama, which had come down from the very beginning of the middle ages; and, after a process of gradual transformation and elaboration by inferior hands, developed it, in the mouths of its Shakspeare, Johnson, and Fletcher, into the world-famed romantic drama of England. As the reading class increased, so did the number of those who strove to minister to its desires; and although the religious convulsions which society had undergone had checked the movement towards a complete and profound appreciation of antiquity, which had been commenced by Colet, More, and Erasmus, in the universities, so that England could not then, nor for centuries afterwards, produce scholars in any way comparable to those of the Continent, yet the number of translations which were made of ancient authors proves that there was a general taste for at least a superficial learning, and a very wide diffusion of it. Translation soon led to imitation, and to the projection of new literary works on the purer principles of art disclosed in the classical authors. The epics of Ariosto and Tasso were also translated, the former by Harrington, the latter by Carew and Fairfax; and the fact shows both how eargerly the Italian literature was studied by people of education, and how general must have been the diffusion of an intellectual taste. Spenser doubtless framed his allegory in emulation of the Orlando of Ariosto, and the form and idea of Bacon's Essays were probably suggested to him by the Essays of Montaigne.

Let us now briefly trace the progress, and describe the principal achievements, in poetry and in prose writing, during the period under consideration.

Poets:-Spenser, Southwell, Warner, Daniel, Drayton, Donne, Davies, Chapman, Marston, Raleigh.

Among the poets of the period, Spenser holds the first rank. The appearance of his Shepheard's Calender, in