IN INTRODUCTORY. N 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 besides these four names that shine with such immortal lustre, are other names of poets, scholars, soldiers, discoverers, statesmen, and orators, who form a group unequalled 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 had been 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 and Latin and other branches of learning. She could speak the principal court languages of Europe, and, better than that, could use her own language forcibly and well; 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 hand at versemaking, and on occasion could turn a clever epigram in rhyme. It was the tendency of Elizabeth's reign to bring in luxury of living and all kinds of elegancies in dress and manners. The queen was passionately fond of fine clothes and fine surroundings. She had in her wardrobe, for one item of dress alone, three thousand gowns, 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 and to polish and refine his manners, and he brought back with him all sorts of new fashions. The young travellers from England were noted for following all the extravagances then in vogue. Old John Lyly advises the young man, "Let not your minds be carried away with vain delights, as with travelling into far and strange countries, where you will see more wickedness than learn virtue and wit. Neither with costly attire of the new cut, the Dutch hat, the French hose, the Spanish rapier, and the Italian hilt.” And Shakespeare 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 |