We must also mark how, the University of Saint Andrews having been established first of all, the other academical institutions of the country arose before the close of the sixteenth century. That of Glasgow dates from 1450; King's College in Aberdeen, from 1494; the University of Edinburgh was founded by King James in 1582, and Marischal College of Aberdeen in 1593. Still more important, perhaps, was the foundation which was now laid for a system of popular education in Scotland. There had long been, in the towns, grammar-schools where Latin was taught. The establishment of schools throughout the country was proposed by the Reformed clergy in 1560, the very year in which Parliament sanctioned the Reformation; and the principle was again laid down, a few years later, in the Second Book of Discipline. A considerable number of parochial schools were founded before King James's removal to England; and the setting down of a school in each parish, if it were possible, was ordered for the first time by an Act of the Privy Council, issued in 1616, and ratified by Parliament in 1633.

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON

INTRODUCTION. 1. The Early Years of Elizabeth's Reign-Summary of their Literature.-2. Literary Greatness of the next Eighty Years-Division into Four Eras.REIGN OF ELIZABETH FROM 1580. 8. Social Character of the Time-Its Religious Aspect-Effects on Literature.-4.-Minor Elizabethan Writers-Their Literary Importance-The Three Great Names.-5. The Poetry of Spenser and ShakspeareThe Eloquence of Hooker.-REIGN OF JAMES. 6. Its Social and Literary Character -Distinguished Names-Bacon-Theologians-Poets.-THE TWO FOLLOWING ERAS. 7. Political and Ecclesiastical Changes-Effects on Thinking-Effects on Poetry— Milton's Youth.-8. Moral Aspect of the Time-Effects on Literature.-Reign of CHARLES. 9. Literary Events-Poetry-Eloquence-Theologians-Erudition.-THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE.-10. Literary Events-Poetry CheckedModern Symptoms-Philosophy-Hobbes-Theology-Hall, Taylor, and Baxter.11. Eloquence-Milton's Prose Works-Modern Symptoms-Style of the Old English Prose Writers.

INTRODUCTION.

1. THE era which is now to open on our view, is the most brilliant in the literary history of England. Thought, and imagination, and eloquence, combine to illuminate it with their most dazzling light; its literature assumes the most various forms, and expatiates over the most distant regions of speculation and invention; and its intellectual chiefs, while they breathe the spirit of modern knowledge and freedom, speak to us in tones which borrow an irregular stateliness from the chivalrous past. But the magnificent panorama does not meet the eye at once, as a scenic spectacle is displayed on the rising of the curtain. Standing at the point which we have now reached, we must wait for the unveiling of its features, as we should watch while the mists of dawn, shrouding a beautiful landscape, melt away before the morning sun.

Our period covers a century. But the first quarter of it was very unproductive in all departments of literature: it was much more so than the age that had just closed. Of the poets, and philosophers, and theologians, who have immortalized the name

of Queen Elizabeth, hardly one was born so much as five years before she ascended the throne.

In whatever direction we look during the first half of her reign, we discover an equal inaptitude, among men of letters, to build on the foundations that had been laid in the generation before. A respectable muster-roll of literary names could not be collected from those twenty or twenty-five years, unless it were to include a few of those writers who, properly belonging to the preceding time, continued to labour in this.

In poetry, the Mirror of Magistrates continued merely to heap up bad verses. The miscellaneous collection, called "The Paradise of Dainty Devices," contains hardly any pieces that are above mediocrity; and old Tusser's "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry," though Southey has thought it worthy of republica tion, teaches agriculture in verse, but does not aim at making it poetical. It is only towards the end of this interregnum of genius, that we reach something of poetical promise; and then we have only "The Steel Glass" of Gascoigne, a tolerable satirical poem in indifferent blank verse, with some smaller poems of his which are more lively.

The drama lingered in the state in which Udall and Sackville left it, till about the very time of Shakspeare's youth. Even its best writers deserve but slight commendation. Edwards, however, who hardly improved the art at all, was the best of the contributors to the "Paradise;" and Gascoigne the satirist, though merely a dramatic translator, not only used blank verse in tragic dialogue, but wrote our earliest prose comedy. John Still, who in maturer age became a bishop, composed the best of the original comedies, "Gammer Gurton's Needle;" which, however, is in every way inferior to "Roister Doister."

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In English prose, again, the time was equally barren. Its reputation is redeemed by one great event only; the appearance of the Bishops' Bible, which will soon be commemorated more particularly. Of original writers, it possessed none that are generally remembered, except the venerable Bishop Jewell. But the Apology for the Church of England," the most celebrated work of this learned, able and pious man, was written in Latin. We must not, however, forget Stow's unpretending Chronicles of England and Survey of London; and the readers of Shakspeare may be reminded, that to these obscure years belong the plain but useful historical works of Hall and Holinshed, of which he made so free use.

Learning in the ancient tongues, which had received a check during the ecclesiastical troubles, was row allowed to resume its

course. The Oriental languages were studied sufficiently to give great aid to the Scriptural critics and translators. But classical knowledge, which is said to have declined almost everywhere in the latter half of the century, produced in England no very valuable fruits. Its first effect was the setting afloat a shoal of metrical translations from the Latin poets, with some from the Greek. These were very far from being useless. They not only diffused a taste for the antique, but served as convenient manuals for some of the less instructed among the later poets; Shakspeare himself being, in all likelihood, not slow to appropriate their treasures. But, as specimens either of style or of poetry, they are, one and all, exceedingly bad.

2. The writers being thus finally disposed of, who appeared in the first half of Elizabeth's long reign, our inquiries must dwell very particularly on those by whom they were succeeded. The immense and invaluable series of literary works, which embellished the period now in question, might be regarded as beginning with Spenser's earliest poem, which was published in the year

1579.

"There never was, anywhere, anything like the sixty or seventy years that elapsed from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the Restoration. In point of real force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo the Tenth, or of Louis the Fourteenth, can come at ali into comparison. For, in that short period, we shall find the names of almost all the very great men that this nation has ever produced; the names of Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Sidney, of Raleigh, and Hooker, and Taylor, of Napier, and Milton, and Cudworth, and Hobbes, and many others; men, all of them, not merely of great talents and accomplishments, but of vast compass and reach of understanding, and of minds truly creative and original; not men who perfected art by the delicacy of their taste, or digested knowledge by the justness of their reasonings; but men who made vast and substantial additions to the materials upon which taste and reason must hereafter be employed, and who enlarged, to an incredible and unparalleled extent, both the stores and the resources of the human faculties."*

No age in our literature deserves to be studied so deeply, as that which, in respect of its innate power of thought and invention, is thus justly ranked above the most brilliant eras of ancient Greece and Rome, of modern Italy and France. Nor, when we survey that energetic period from its beginning to its close, do we

* Lord Jeffrey: Contributions to the Edinburgh Review; Vol. II.

discover any point at which its activity can be said, with truth, to have either ceased or flagged. Impediments thrown up in one channel of thought, served only to drive the current forward with redoubled impetuosity in another. Some of the highest minds, indeed, lingered on earth till the bounds of their time were past, casting the shadow of their strength on the feebler age that followed. Allied, likewise, so closely, by the originality and vigour which was common to all, the leaders of our golden age of letters were linked together not less firmly by the common spirit and tone of their works. Let us look in what direction we will; to theology or philosophy, to the drama, or the narrative poem, or the ever-shifting shapes of the lyric: everywhere there meets us, in the midst of boundless dissimilitude imprinted by individual genius and temperament, a similarity of general characteristics as striking as if it had been transmitted with the blood. The great men of that great age, separated from their predecessors by a gap in time, and distinguished from them yet more clearly by their intellectual character, stand aloof, quite as decidedly, from those degenerate successors, amidst whom a few of them moved in the latest stages of their course. Taylor, and Hall, and Baxter, are pupils who learned new lessons in the school which had nurtured Hooker; Hobbes might be called, without injustice to either party, the philosophical step-son and heir of Bacon; and Milton is the last survivor of the princely race, whose intellectual founders were Spenser and Shakspeare.

While the period thus spoken of, reaching from about 1580 to 1660, must be treated as one, it will not be supposed to have been void of changes. Eighty years could not have passed along, in one of the most actively thinking ages of the world, without evolving much that was novel; still less could this have happened in a time when revolutions, political and religious, were bursting out like volcanoes, and when all the relations of society were, more than once, utterly metamorphosed.

Accordingly, we cannot thoroughly understand the intellectual phenomena that arose, unless we begin our scrutiny by regarding them in their order of succession; and the spirit which prevailed in public affairs communicated itself sufficiently to literature, to make the changes of dynasty represent, in a loose way, the successive changes which took place in the realm of letters. We will hastily examine, one after another, the latter half of Elizabeth's reign, the reign of James, that of Charles, and the few years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.