And this wilful King befriended learning and letters in his own wilful way. Nay, he came to have ambitions of his own in that direction, when he grew too heavy for practice with the long-bow, or for feats of riding—in which matters he had gained eminence even amongst those trained to sports and exercises of the field.

Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More.

It was with the King’s capricious furtherance that Cardinal Wolsey became so august a friend of learning. The annalists delight in telling us how the great Cardinal went down to St. Paul’s School to attend upon an exhibition of the boys there, who set afoot a tragedy founded upon the story of Dido. And at the boys’ school was then established as head-master that famous William Lilly[70] who had learned Greek in his voyaging into Eastern seas, and was among the first to teach it in England: he was the author too of that Lilly’s Latin Grammar which was in use for centuries, and of which later editions are hanging about now in old New England garrets, from whose mouldy pages our grandfathers learned to decline their pennæ—pennarum. Wolsey wrote a preface for one of the earlier issues of this Lilly’s Grammar; and the King gave it a capital advertisement by proclaiming it illegal to use any other. The Cardinal, moreover, in later years established a famous school at his native place of Ipswich (a rival in its day to that of Eton), and he issued an address to all the schoolmasters of England in favor of accomplishing the boys submitted to their charge in the most elegant literatures.

The great Hall of Christ’s Church College, Oxford, still further serves to keep in mind the memory and the munificence of Cardinal Wolsey: it must be remembered, however, in estimating his munificence that he had only to confiscate the revenues of a small monastery to make himself full-pocketed for the endowment of a college. ’Tis certain that he loved learning, and that he did much for its development in the season of his greatest power and influence; certain, too, that his ambitions were too large for the wary King, his master, and brought him to that dismal fall from his high estate, which is pathetically set forth in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.:

Another favorite of Henry in the early days of his kingship, and one bearing a far more important name in the literary annals of England than that of Wolsey, was Sir Thomas More. He was a Greek of the very Greeks, in both character and attainment. Born in the heart of London—in Milk Street, now just outside of the din and roar of Cheapside, he was a scholar of Oxford, and was the son of a knight, who, like Sir Thomas himself, had a reputation for shrewd sayings—of which the old chronicler, William Camden,[71] has reported this sample:—

But, says the chronicler—this good knight did himself thrust his hand three several times into such a bag, and with such ensuing results as preserved him hale and sound to the age of ninety or thereabout. The son inherited this tendency to whimsical speech, joining with it rare merits as a scholar: and it used to be said of him as a boy, that he could thrust himself into the acting of a Latin comedy and extemporize his part, with such wit and aptness, as not to break upon the drift of the play. He studied, as I said, at Oxford; and afterward Law at Lincoln’s Inn; was onewhile strongly inclined to the Church, and under influence of a patron who was a Church dignitary became zealous Religionist, and took to wearing in penance a bristling hair-shirt—which (or one like it) he kept wearing till prison-days and the scaffold overtook him, as they overtook so many of the quondam friends of Henry VIII. For he had been early presented to that monarch—even before Henry had come to the throne—and had charmed him by his humor and his scholarly talk: so that when More came to live upon his little farm at Chelsea (very near to Cheyne Row where Carlyle died but a few years since) the King found his way thither on more than one occasion; and there are stories of his pacing up and down the garden walks in familiar talk with the master.

There, too, came for longer stay, and for longer and friendlier communings, the great and scholarly Erasmus (afterward teacher of Greek at Cambridge)—and out of one of these visitations to Chelsea grew the conception and the working out of his famous Praise of Folly, with its punning title—Encomium Moriæ.[72]

The King promised preferment to More—which came in its time. I think he was in Flanders on the King’s business, when upon a certain day, as he was coming out from the Antwerp Cathedral, he encountered a stranger, with long beard and sunburnt face—a man of the “Ancient Mariner” stamp, who had made long voyages with that Amerigo Vespucci who stole the honor of naming America: and this long-bearded mariner told Sir Thomas More of the strange things he had seen in a country farther off than America, called Utopia. Of course, it is something doubtful if More ever really encountered such a mariner, or if he did not contrive him only as a good frontispiece for his political fiction. This is the work by which More is best known (through its English translations); and it has given the word Utopian to our every-day speech. The present popular significance of this term will give you a proper hint of the character of the book: it is an elaborate and whimsical and yet statesmanlike forecast of a government too good and honest and wise to be sound and true and real.

Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name Utopia, which is Greek for Nowhere. If, indeed, men were all honest, and women all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might all live in a Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites—the Socialists—the Knights of Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this reservoir of the ideal maxims of statecraft. In this model country, gold was held in large disrespect; and to keep the scorn of it wholesome, it was put to the vilest uses: a great criminal was compelled to wear gold rings in his ears: chains were made of it for those in bondage; and a particularly obnoxious character put to the wearing of a gold head-band; so too diamonds and pearls were given over to the decoration of infants; and these, with other baby accoutrements, they flung aside in disgust, so soon as they came to sturdy childhood. When therefore upon a time, Ambassadors came to Utopia, from a strange country, with their tricksy show of gold and jewels—the old Voyager says:—

Also in this model state industrial education was in vogue; children all, of whatsoever parentage, were to be taught some craft—as “masonrie or smith’s craft, or the carpenter’s science.” Unlawful games were decried—such as “dyce, cardes, tennis, coytes [quoits]—do not all these,” says the author, “sende the haunters of them streyghte a stealynge, when theyr money is gone?”

The Russian Count Tolstoi’s opinion that money is an invention of Satan and should be abolished, is set forth with more humor and at least equal logic, in this Latin tractate of More’s.

In the matters of Religion King Utopus decreed that

Yet this same self-contained Sir Thomas More did in his after controversies with Tyndale use such talk of him—about his “whyning and biting and licking and tumbling in the myre,” and “rubbing himself in puddles of dirt,”—as were like anything but the courtesies of Utopia. Indeed it is to be feared that theologic discussion does not greatly provoke gentleness of speech, in any time; it is a very grindstone to put men’s wits to sharpened edges. But More was a most honest man withal;—fearless in advocacy of his own opinions; eloquent, self-sacrificing—a tender father and husband—master of a rich English speech (his Utopia was written in Latin, but translated many times into English, and most languages of Continental Europe), learned in the classics—a man to be remembered as one of the greatest of Henry VIII.’s time; a Romanist, at a date when honestest men doubted if it were worthiest to be a King’s man or a Pope’s man;—not yielding to his royal master in points of religious scruple, and with a lofty obstinacy in what he counted well doing, going to the scaffold, with as serene a step as he had ever put to his walks in the pleasant gardens of Chelsea.

Cranmer, Latimer, Knox, and Others.

A much nobler figure is this, to my mind, than that of Cranmer,[73] who appears in such picturesque lights in the drama of Henry VIII.—who gave adhesion to royal wishes for divorce upon divorce; who always colored his religious allegiances with the colors of the King; who was a scholar indeed—learned, eloquent; who wrought well, as it proved, for the reformed faith; but who wilted under the fierce heats of trial; would have sought the good will of the blood-thirsty Mary; but who gave even to his subserviencies a half-tone that brought distrust, and so—finally—the fate of that quasi-martyrdom which has redeemed his memory.

He stands very grandly in his robes upon the memorial cross at Oxford: and he has an even more august presence in the final scene of Shakespeare’s play, where amidst all churchly and courtly pomp, he christened the infant—who was to become the Royal Elizabeth, and says to the assembled dignitaries:

Tennyson, in his drama of Queen Mary (a most unfortunate choice of heroine) gives a statuesque pose to this same Archbishop Cranmer; but Shakespeare’s figures are hard to duplicate. He was with Henry VIII. as counsellor at his death; was intimate adviser of the succeeding Edward VI.: and took upon himself obligations from that King (contrary to his promises to Henry) which brought him to grief under Queen Mary. That brave thrust of his offending hand into the blaze that consumed him, cannot make us forget his weaknesses and his recantations; nor will we any more forget that he it was, who gave (1543) to the old Latin Liturgy of the Church that noble, English rhythmic flow which so largely belongs to it to-day.

It is quite impossible to consider the literary aspects of the period of English history covered by the reign of Henry VIII., and the short reigns of the two succeeding monarchs, Edward VI. and Mary, without giving large frontage to the Reformers and religious controversialists. Every scholar was alive to the great battle in the Church. The Greek and Classicism of the Universities came to have their largest practical significance in connection with the settlement of religious questions or in furnishing weapons for the ecclesiastic controversies of the day. The voices of the poets—the Skeltons, the Sackvilles, the Wyatts, were chirping sparrows’ voices beside that din with which Luther thundered in Germany, and Henry VIII. thundered back, more weakly, from his stand-point of Anglicanism.

We have seen Wolsey in his garniture of gold, going from court to school; and Sir Thomas More, stern, strong, and unyielding; and Archbishop Cranmer, disposed to think rightly, but without the courage to back up his thought; and associated with these, it were well to keep in mind the other figures of the great religious processional. There was William Tyndale, native of Gloucestershire, a slight, thin figure of a man; honest to the core; well-taught; getting dignities he never sought; wearied in his heart of hearts by the flattering coquetries of the King; perfecting the work of Wyclif in making the old home Bible readable by all the world. His translation was first printed in Wittenberg about 1530:[75] I give the Lord’s Prayer as it appeared in the original edition:—

But Tyndale was not safe in England; nor yet in the Low Countries whither he went, and where the long reach of religious hate and jealousy put its hand upon him and brought him to a death whose fiery ignominies are put out of sight by the lustrous quality of his deservings.

I see too amongst those great, dim figures, that speak in Scriptural tones, the form of Hugh Latimer, as he stands to-day on the Memorial Cross in Oxford. I think of him too—in humbler dress than that which the sculptor has put on him—even the yeoman’s clothes, which he wore upon his father’s farm, in the Valley of the Soar, when he wrought there in the meadows, and drank in humility of thought, and manly independence under the skies of Leicestershire[76]—where (as he says), “My father had walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine.” He kept his head upon his shoulders through Henry’s time—his amazing wit and humor helping him to security;—was in fair favor with Edward; but under Mary, walked coolly with Ridley to the stake, where the fires were set, to burn them both in Oxford.

Foxe[77] too is to be remembered for his Stories of the Martyrs of these, and other times, which have formed the nightmare reading for so many school-boys.

I see, too, another figure that will not down in this coterie of Reformers, and that makes itself heard from beyond the Tweed. This is John Knox,[78] a near contemporary though something younger than most I have named, and not ripening to his greatest power till Henry VIII. had gone. Born of humble parentage in Scotland in the early quarter of the century, he was a rigid Papist in his young days, but a more rigid Reformer afterward; much time a prisoner; passing years at Geneva; not altogether a “gloomy, shrinking, fanatic,” but keeping, says Carlyle, “a pipe of Bordeaux in that old Edinboro house of his;” getting to know Cranmer, and the rest in England; discussing with these, changes of Church Service; counselling austerities, where Cranmer admitted laxities; afraid of no man, neither woman;—publishing in exile in Mary’s day—The first Blaste of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of Women, and repenting this—quietly no doubt—when Elizabeth came to power. A thin, frail man; strong no ways, but in courage, and in brain; with broad brows—black cap—locks floating gray from under it, in careless whirls that shook as he talked; an eye like a falcon’s that flashed the light of twenty years, when sixty were on his shoulders; in after years, writhing with rheumatic pains—crawling upon his stick and a servant’s arm into his Church of St. Andrews; lifted into his pulpit by the clerk and his attendant—leaning there on the desk, a wilted heap of humanity—panting, shaking, quivering—till his breath came, and the psalm and the lifted prayer gave courage; then—fierce torrents of speech (and a pounding of the pulpit till it seemed that it would fly in shivers), with a sharp, swift, piercing utterance that pricked ears as it pricked consciences, and made the roof-timbers clang with echoes.

Of all these men there are no books that take high rank in Literature proper—unless we except the Utopia of More, and the New Testament of Tyndale: but their lives and thought were welded by stout blows into the intellectual texture of the century and are not to be forgotten.

Verse-Writing and Psalmodies.

And now, was there really no dalliance with the Muses in times that brought to the front such fighting Gospellers as we have talked of?

Yes, even Thomas More did write poems—having humor in them and grammatic proprieties, and his Latin prosody is admired of Classicists: then there were the versifiers of the Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins, and the Whittingham who succeeded John Knox at Geneva—sharing that Scotchman’s distaste for beautiful rubrics, and we suspect beautiful verses also—if we may judge by his version of the Creed. This is a sample:—

From the Apostles’ Creed again, we excerpt this:—

Hopkins,[79] who was a schoolmaster of Suffolk, and the more immediate associate of Sternhold, thus expostulates with the Deity:—

As something worthier from these old psalmists’ versing, I give this of Sternhold’s:—

It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely Saxonism of such psalms than the Stabat Maters and Te Deums and Jubilates, which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess Katharine of Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such psalmodies received small crumbs of favor from the Court, the English Bible was by no means a free-goer into all companies.

Truly this English realm was a strange one in those times, and this a strange King—who has listened approvingly to Hugh Latimer’s sermons—who harries Tyndale as he had harried Tyndale’s enemy—More; who fights the Pope, fights Luther, holds the new Bible (even Cranmer’s) in leash, who gives pension to Sternhold, works easy riddance of all the wives he wishes, pulls down Religious Houses for spoils, calls himself Defender of the Faith, and maybe goes to see (if then on show) Gammer Gurton’s Needle,[81] and is hilariously responsive to such songs as this:—

Wyatt and Surrey.

The model poets, however, of this reign[82]—those who kept alive the best old classic traditions, and echoed with most grace and spirit the daintiness of Italian verse, were the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt. The latter was son of an old courtier of Henry VII., and inheritor of an estate and castle in Kent, which he made noteworthy by his decorative treatment, and which is even now counted worthy a visit by those journeying through the little town of Maidstone. He was, for those times, brilliantly educated; was in high favor with the King (save one enforced visit to the Tower); he translated Petrarch, and in his own way imitated the Italian poet’s manner, and was, by common consent, the first to graft the “Sonnet” upon English forms of verse. I find nothing however in his verse one-half so graceful or gracious as this tribute to his worth in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”—

Surrey was well born: was son to the Duke of Norfolk who figures in the Shakespearean play of Henry VIII., and grandson to the Surrey who worsted the Scotch on Flodden Field: he was companion of the King’s son, was taught at the Universities, at home and abroad. There was no gallant more admired in the gayer circles of the court; he too loved Petrarch, and made canzonets like his; had a Geraldine (for a Laura), half real and half mythical. The further story once obtained that he went with a gay retinue to Florence, where the lists were opened—in the spirit of an older chivalry—to this Stranger Knight, who challenged the world to combat his claims in behalf of the mythical Geraldine. And—the story ran—there were hot-heads who contended with him; and he unhorsed his antagonists, and came back brimming with honors, to the court—before which Hugh Latimer had preached, and where Sternhold’s psalms had been heard—to be imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent, in that Windsor Castle where he had often played with the King’s son. The tale[83] is a romantic one; but—in all that relates to the Florentine tourney—probably untrue.

I give you a little taste of the graceful way in which this poet sings of his Geraldine:—

Surrey is to be held in honor as the first poet who wrote English blank verse; he having translated two books of the Æneid in that form. But this delicate singer, this gallant soldier cannot altogether please the capricious monarch; perhaps he is too fine a soldier; perhaps too free a liver; perhaps he is dangerously befriended by some ladies of the court: Quite certain it is that the King frowns on him; and the frowns bring what they have brought to so many others—first, imprisonment in the Tower, and then the headsman’s axe. In this way the poet died at thirty, in 1547: his execution being one of the last ordered by Henry VIII., and the King so weak that he could only stamp, instead of signing the death warrant.

Honest men breathed freer, everywhere, when the King died, in the same year with Surrey: and so, that great, tempestuous reign was ended.

A Boy-King, a Queen, and Schoolmaster.

Edward VI. succeeded his father at the age of ten years—a precocious, consumptive boy, who gave over his struggle with life when only sixteen; and yet has left his “Works,” printed by the Roxburgh Club. There’s a maturity about some of the political suggestions in his “Journal”—not unusual in a lively mind prematurely ripening under stress of disease; yet we can hardly count him a literary king.

The red reign of Mary, immediately following, lasted only five years, for which, I think, all Christian England thanked God: In those five years very many of the strong men of whom we have talked in this chapter came to a fiery end.

Only one name of literary significance do we pluck from the annals of her time; it is that of Roger Ascham,[84] the writer of her Latin letters, and for a considerable time her secretary. How, being a Protestant as he was, and an undissembling one, he kept his head upon his shoulders so near her throne, it is hard to conjecture. He must have studied the art of keeping silence as well as the arts of speech.

He was born in that rich, lovely region of Yorkshire—watered by the River Swale—where we found the young Wyclif: his father was a house-steward; but he early made show of such qualities as invited the assistance of rich friends, through whose offices he was entered at St. John’s College, Cambridge, at fifteen, and took his degree at eighteen. He was full of American pluck, aptness, and industry; was known specially for his large gifts in language; a superb penman too, which was no little accomplishment in that day; withal, he excelled in athletics, and showed a skill with the long-bow which made credible the traditions about Robin Hood. They said he wasted time at this exercise; whereupon he wrote a defence of Archery, which under the name of Toxophilus has come down to our day—a model even now of good, homely, vigorous English. “He that will write well in any tongue,” said he, “must follow this counsel—to speak as the common people do—to think as wise men do.” Our teachers of rhetoric could hardly say a better thing to-day.

The subject of Archery was an important one at that period; the long-bow was still the principal war weapon of offence: there were match-locks, indeed, but these very cumbrous and counting for less than those “cloth-yard” shafts which had won the battle of Agincourt. The boy-King, Edward, to whom Ascham taught penmanship, was an adept at archery, and makes frequent allusion to that exercise in his Journal. In every hamlet practice at the long-bow was obligatory; and it was ordered by statute that no person above the age of twenty-four, should shoot the light-flight arrow at a distance under two hundred and twenty yards. What would our Archery Clubs say to this? And what, to the further order—dating in Henry VIII.’s time—that “all bow-staves should be three fingers thick and seven feet long?”

This book of Ascham’s was published two years before Henry’s death, and brought him a small pension; under the succeeding king he went to Augsburg, where Charles V. held his brilliant court; but neither there, nor in Italy, did he lose his homely and hearty English ways, and his love of English things.

In his tractate of the Schoolmaster, which appeared after his death, he bemoans the much and idle travel of Englishmen into Italy. They have a proverb there, he says, “Un Inglese italianato é un diabolo incarnato” (an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate). Going to Italy, when Tintoretto and Raphael were yet living, and when the great Medici family and the Borgias were spinning their golden wheels—was, for a young Englishman of that day, like a European trip to a young American of ours: Ascham says—“Many being mules and horses before they went, return swine and asses.”

There is much other piquant matter in this old book of the Schoolmaster; as where he says:—

And this brings us to say that this good, canny, and thrifty Roger Ascham was the early teacher, in Greek and Latin, of the great Princess Elizabeth, and afterward for years her secretary. You would like to hear how he speaks of her:—

He never speaks of her but with a hearty tenderness; nor did she speak of him, but most kindly. At his death, she said, “She would rather that £10,000 had been flung into the sea.” And—seeing her money-loving, this was very much for her to say.

In our next chapter we shall meet this prudent and accomplished Princess face to face—in her farthingale and ruff—with the jewels on her fingers, and the crown upon her head—bearing herself right royally. And around her we shall find such staid worthies as Burleigh and Richard Hooker; and such bright spirits as Sidney and Raleigh, and that sweet poet Spenser, who was in that day counting the flowing measures of that long song, whose mellow cadences have floated musically down from the far days of Elizabeth to these fairer days of ours.

CHAPTER VI.

In our last talk we entered upon that brilliant sixteenth century, within whose first quarter three great kings held three great thrones:—Charles V. of Spain, Francis I. of France, and Henry VIII. of England. New questions were astir; Art—in the seats of Art—was blazing at its best: the recent fall of Constantinople under the Turk had sent a tide of Greek scholars, Greek art, and Greek letters flowing over Western Europe, and drifting into the antiquated courts of Oxford and Cambridge. I spoke of the magnificent Wolsey, and of his great university endowments; also, of that ripe scholar, Sir Thomas More, who could not mate his religion, or his statesmanship with the caprices of the King, and so, died by the axe. We saw Cranmer—meaning to be good, if goodness did not call for strength; we heard Latimer’s swift, homely speech, and saw Tyndale with his English Testament—both these coming to grief; and we had glimpses of John Knox shaking the pulpit with his frail hand, and shaking all Scotch Christendom with his fearless, strident speech.

We heard the quaint psalmody of Sternhold, and the sweeter and more heathen verse of Wyatt and of Surrey; lastly, I gave a sketch of that old schoolmaster, Roger Ascham, who by his life, tied the reigns of Henry and of Elizabeth together, and who taught Greek and Latin and penmanship and Archery to that proud princess—whom we encounter now—in her high ruff, and her piled-up head-dress, with a fair jewelled hand that puts a man’s grip upon the sceptre.

Elizabethan England.

Elizabeth was in her twenty-sixth year when she came to the throne, and it was about the middle of the sixteenth century; the precise year being 1558. The England she was to dominate so splendidly was not a quiet England: the fierce religious controversies which had signalized the reign of Henry VIII.—who thwacked with his kingly bludgeon both ways and all ways—and which continued under Edward VI.—who was feebly Protestant; and which had caught new vigor under Mary—who was arrant and slavish Papist—had left gouts of blood and a dreadful exasperation. Those great Religious Houses, which only a quarter of a century before, were pleasantly embayed in so many charming valleys of Great Britain—with their writing-rooms, their busy transcribing clerks—their great gardens, were, most of them, despoiled—and to be seen no more. An old Venetian Ambassador,[85] writing to the Seigneury in those days, says—“London itself is disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of Churches and Monasteries which once belonged to Friars and Nuns.” Piers Plowman, long before, had attacked the sins growing up in the pleasant Abbey Courts; Chaucer had echoed the ridicule in his Abbot riding to Canterbury, with jingling trappings: Gower had repeated the assault in his Vox Clamantis, and Skelton had turned his ragged rhymes into the same current of satire. But all would have availed nothing except the arrogant Henry VIII. had set his foot upon them, and crushed them out.

There was a wild justice in it—if not an orderly one. The spoils went to fill the Royal coffers; many of those beautiful properties were bestowed upon favorites; many princely estates are still held in England, by title tracing back to those days of spoliation—a fact which will be called to mind, I suspect—with unction, in case of any great social revolution in that country. Under Mary, some of these estates had been restored to Church dignitaries; but the restoration had not been general: and Elizabeth could not if she would, and would not if she could, sanction any further restitution.

She was Protestant—but rather from policy than any heartiness of belief. It did not grieve her one whit, that her teacher, Roger Ascham, had been private secretary to bloody Mary: the lukewarmness of her great minister, Lord Burleigh, did not disturb her; she always kept wax tapers burning by a crucifix in her private chamber; a pretty rosary gave her no shock; but she was shocked at the marriage of any member of the priesthood, always. In fact, if Spanish bigotry had not forced her into a resolute antagonism of Rome, I think history would have been in doubt whether to count her most a Lutheran, or most a Roman.

Yet she made the Papists smoke for it—as grimly as ever her sister Mary did the Protestants—if they stood one whit in the way of England’s grasp on power.

Personality of the Queen.

I think our friend Mr. Froude, whose history we all read, is a little unfair toward Queen Bess, as he was a little over-fair, and white-wash-i-ly disposed in the case of Henry VIII.: both tendencies being attributable to a mania this shrewd historian has—for unripping and oversetting established forms of belief. I think that he not only bears with a greedy zeal upon her too commonly manifest selfishness and heartlessness, but that he enjoys putting little vicious dabs of bad color upon her picture—as when he says, “she spat, and swore like a trooper.” Indeed it would seem that this clever biographer had carried a good deal of his fondness for “vicious dabs” in portraiture into his more recent post-mortem exhibits; as if it were his duty and pleasure to hang out all sorts of soiled linen, in his office of Clean-Scrubber: Yet, I wish to speak with all respect of the distinguished historian—whose vigor is conspicuous—whose industry is remarkable, whose crisp sentences are delightful, but whose accuracy is not of the surest; and whose conscience does, I think, sometimes go lame—under strain of his high, rhetorical canter.

The authority for all most damnatory statements with respect to the private life of the Queen, rests upon those Spanish Relations—so minute as to be suspicious—if they were not also so savagely bitter as to twist everything to the discredit of the Protestant Sovereign. Signor Soranzo—the Venetian ambassador (whom Froude does not cite—but who had equal opportunities of observation with the Spanish informer), says of Elizabeth (in a report—not written for publication, but lying for years in the archives of Venice): “Such an air of dignified majesty pervades all her actions that no one can fail to judge her a queen. She is a good Greek and Latin scholar; and beside her native tongue she speaks Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian benissimo—and her manners are very modest and affable.”[86]

I talk thus much—and may talk more—about the personality of Queen Elizabeth, because she must be counted—in a certain not very remote sense—one of the forces that went to endow what is called the English Literature of her day—so instructed was she; so full of talent; so keen-sighted; so exact—a most extraordinary woman. We must not think her greatness was factitious, and attributable to her only because she was a queen. There could be no greater mistake. She would have been great if she had been a shoemaker’s daughter; I do not mean that she would have rode a white horse at Tilbury, and made the nations shake: but she would have bound more shoes, and bound them better, and looked sharper after the affairs of her household than any cobbler’s wife in the land. Elizabeth would have made a wonderful post-mistress—a splendid head of a school—with perhaps a little too large use of the ferule: and she would have had her favorites, and shown it; but she would have lifted her pupils’ thoughts into a high range of endeavor; she would have made an atmosphere of intellectual ambition about her; she would have struck fire from flinty souls; and so she did in her court: She inspired work—inspired imagination; may we not say that she inspired genius. That auburn hair of hers (I suppose we should have called it red, if her name had been Abigail) made an aureole, around which wit coruscated by a kind of electric affinity. It was counted worth toil to have the honor of laying a poem at her gracious feet, who was so royally a Queen—whose life, and power, and will and culture, made up a quadrature of poems.

Burleigh and Others.

And who was there of literary significance about Elizabeth in those early days of her reign? Roger Ascham was still doling out his sagacious talk, and his good precepts; but he was not a force—only what we might call a good creature. There was Sackville[87] (afterward the elegant Earl of Dorset); he was in his prime then, and had very likely written his portion of the Mirror for Magistrates—a fairish poetic history of great unfortunate people—completed afterward by other poets, but hardly read nowadays.

Old Tusser,[88] too—the farmer-poet—lived in these times; an Essex man, of about the same age as Ascham, but who probably never came nearer to the court than to sing in the choir of old St. Paul’s. He had University experience, which, if it did not help his farming, on the banks of the Stour, did, doubtless, enable him to equip his somewhat prosy poems with such classic authentication and such directness and simplicities as gave to his Pointes of Husbandrie very great vogue. Many rhyming saws about farming, still current among old-fashioned country-folk, trace back to Master Tusser, who lived and farmed successively (tradition says not very successfully) at Ipswich, Dereham, and Norwich. His will, however, published in these later times, shows him to have been a man of considerable means.

Then there was Holinshed,[89] who, though the date of his birth is uncertain, must have been of fair working age now—a homely, honest, simple-hearted chronicler (somewhat thievish, as all the old chroniclers were) but whose name is specially worth keeping in mind, because he—in all probability—supplied Shakespeare’s principal historic reading, and furnished the crude material, afterward beaten out into those plaques of gold, which we call Shakespeare’s Historic Plays. Therefore, we must always, I think, treat Holinshed with respect. Next, there was the great Lord Burleigh,[90] the chief minister and adviser of the Queen—whom she set great store by: the only man she allowed to sit in her presence; and indeed he was something heavy, both in mind and in person; but far-sighted, honest, keen, cautious, timid—making his nod count more than most men’s words, and in great exigencies standing up for the right, even against the caprices of the sovereign. Whoever goes to Stamford in England should not fail to run out—a mile away only—to the princely place called Burleigh House (now the property of the Marquis of Exeter) which was the home of this minister of Elizabeth’s—built out of his savings, and equipped now with such paintings, such gardens, such magnificent avenues of oak, such great sweeps of velvet lawn, such herds of loitering deer as make it one of the show-places of England. Well—this sober-sided, cautious Burleigh (you will get a short, but good glimpse of him in Scott’s tragic tale of Kenilworth) wrote a book—a sort of earlier Chesterfield’s Letters, made up of advices for his son Robert Cecil, who was cousin, and in early life, rival of the great Francis Bacon. I will take out a tid-bit from this book, that you may see how this famous Lord Burleigh talked to his son: