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had been made English; and before 1579, Vergil, Ovid, Cicero, Demosthenes, and many Greek and Latin plays were translated. In this way the best models were brought before the English people, and it is in the influence of the spirit of Greek and Roman literature on literary form and execution that we are to find one of the vital causes of the greatness of the later Elizabethan literature.

The Earlier Elizabethan Prose, 1558–1579, began with the Scholemaster of ASCHAM, published 1570. This book, which is on education, is the work of the scholar of the New Learning of the time of Henry VIII. who has lived on into another time. It is not, properly speaking, Elizabethan, it is like a stranger in a new land and among new manners.

2. Theological reform stirred men to literary work. A great number of satirical ballads and pamphlets and plays issued every year from obscure presses and filled the land. Writers, like George Gascoigne and, still more, BARNABY GOOGE, represent in their work the hatred the young men had of the old religious system. It was a spirit which did not do much for literature, but it quickened the habit of composition, and made it easier. The Bible also became common property, and its language glided into all theological writing and gave it a literary tone; while the publication of JOHN Fox's Acts and Monuments, or Book of Martyrs, 1563, gave to the people all over England a book which, by its simple style, the ease of its story-telling, and its popular charm, made the very peasants who heard it read feel what is meant by literature.

3. The love of stories again awoke. The old English tales and ballads were eagerly read and collected. Italian Tales by various authors were translated and sown so broadcast over London by William Painter, in his collection, The Palace of Pleasure, 1566, by George Turbervile and others, that it is said they were to be bought at every bookstall. A great number of subjects for prose and poetry were thus made ready for literary men, and fiction became possible in English literature.

Another influence of the same kind bore on literature. It was that given by the stories of the voyagers, who, in the new commercial activity of the country, penetrated into strange lands. Before 1579 books had been published on the northwest passage. Frobisher had made his voyages, and Drake had started, to return in 1580 to amaze all England with the story of his sail round the world, and of the riches of the Spanish main. We may trace everywhere in Elizabethan literature the impression made by the wonders told by the sailors and captains who explored and fought from the North Pole to the Southern Seas.

4. The history of the country and its manners was not neglected. A whole class of antiquarians wrote steadily, if with some dulness, on this subject. GRAFTON, STOW, HOLINSHED, and others at least supplied materials for the study and use of the historical drama.

5. Lastly, we have proof that there was a large number of persons writing who did not publish their works. It was considered at this time that to write for the public injured a man, and, unless he were driven by poverty, he kept his manuscript by him. But things were changed when a great genius like Spenser took the world by storm; when Lyly's Euphues enchanted the whole of court society; when a great gentleman, like Sir Philip Sidney, became a writer.. Literature was made the fashion, and, the disgrace being taken from it, the production became enormous. Manuscripts written and laid by were at once sent forth; and, when the rush began, it grew by its own force. Those who had previously been kept from writing by its unpopularity now took it up eagerly, and those who had written before wrote twice as much now. The great improvement also in literary quality is easily accounted for by this-that men strove to equal such work as Sidney's or Spenser's, and that a wider and sharper criticism arose."

LESSON 19.

THE PROSE OF THE LATER ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE, 1579– 1603. This begins with the publication of Lyly's Euphues in 1579, and with the writing of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and his Defence of Poetrie, 1580-81. The Euphues and the Arcadia carried on the story-telling literature; the Defence of Poetrie created a new form of literature, that of criticism.

The Euphues was the work of JOHN LYLY, poet and dramatist. It is in two parts, Euphues and Euphues' England. In six years it ran through five editions, so great was its popularity. Its prose style is too poetic, but it is admirable for its smoothness and charm, and its very faults were of use in softening the rudeness of previous prose. The story is long and is more a loose framework into which Lyly could fit his thoughts on love, friendship, education, and religion than a true story. The second part is made up of several stories in one, and is a picture of the Englishman abroad. It made its mark, because it fell in with all the fantastic and changeable life of the time. Its far-fetched conceits, its extravagance of gallantry, its endless metaphors from the classics and natural history, its curious and gorgeous descriptions of dress, and its pale imitation of chivalry were all reflected in the life and talk and dress of the court of Elizabeth. It became the fashion to talk Euphuism,' and, like the Utopia of More, Lyly's book has created an English word.

The Arcadia was the work of SIR PHILIP SIDNEY and, though written in 1580, did not appear till after his death. It is more poetic in style than the Euphues, and Sidney himself, as he wrote it under the trees of Wilton, would have called it a poem. It is less the image of the time than of the Most people know that bright and noble figure, the friend of Spenser, the lover of Stella, the last of the old knights, the poet, the critic, and the Christian, who, wounded

man.

to the death, gave up the cup of water to a dying soldier. We find his whole spirit in the story of the Arcadia, in the first two books and a part of the third, which alone were written by him. It is a romance mixed up with pastoral stories after the fashion of the Spanish romances. The characters are real, but the story is confused by endless digressions. The sentiment is too fine and delicate for the world. The descriptions are picturesque, and the sentences are made as. perfect as possible. A quaint or poetic thought or an epigram appears in every line. There is no real art in it or in its prose. But it is so full of poetical thought that it became a mine into which poets dug for subjects.

Criticism began with Sidney's Defence of Poetrie. Its style shows us that he felt how faulty the prose of the Arcadia was. The book made a new step in the creation of a dignified English prose. It is still too flowery, but in it the fantastic prose of his own Arcadia and of the Euphues dies. As criticism it is chiefly concerned with poetry. It defends, against STEPHEN GOSSON's School of Abuse, in which poetry and plays were attacked from the Puritan point of view, the nobler uses of poetry. Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser are praised, and the other poets made little of in its pages. It was followed by WEBBE's Discourse of English Poetrie, written to stirre up some other of meet abilitie to bestow travell on the matter. Already the other was travailing, and the Arte of English Poesie, supposed to be written by GEORGE PUTTENHAM, was published in 1589. It is the most elaborate book on the whole subject in Elizabeth's reign, and it marks the strong interest now taken in poetry in the highest society that the author says he writes it to help the courtiers and the gentlewomen of the court to write good poetry, that the art may become vulgar for all Englishmen's use.'

LATER THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE.-Before we come to the Poetry we will give an account of the Prose into which the tendencies of the earlier years of Elizabeth grew. The first is

that of theology. For a long time it remained only a literature of pamphlets. Puritanism, in its attack on the stage and in the Martin Marprelate controversy upon episcopal government in the Church, flooded England with small books. Lord Bacon even joined in the latter controversy, and Nash, the dramatist, made himself famous in the war by the vigor and fierceness of his wit. Over this troubled sea rose at last the stately work of RICHARD HOOKER. It was in 1594 that the first four books of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a defence of the Church against the Puritans, were given to the world. Before his death he finished the other four. The book has remained ever since a standard work. It is as much moral and political as theological. Its style is grave, clear, and often musical. He adorned it with the figures of poetry, but he used them with temperance, and the grand and rolling rhetoric with which he often concludes an argument is kept for its right place. On the whole it is the first monument of splendid literary prose that we possess.'

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"Hooker affords our first example of an elaborate, high-sounding, 'periodic style.' His sentences, in their general character, are long and involved. With all their excellencies, they are not good models for English periods. In writing our first elaborate theological treatise, his fine ear was irresistibly caught by the rhythm of Latin models; and, while he learned from them a more even proportion of sentence, he learned also to build an elaborate rhythm at the expense of native idiom. Attention to clearness and simplicity in the structure of paragraphs was a thing unknown in the age of Elizabeth, and Hooker was, in this respect, neither better nor worse than the good writers of his time."William Minto.

THE ESSAY." We may place alongside of it, as the other great prose work of Elizabeth's later time, the development of the Essay in LORD BACON'S Essays, 1597. Their highest literary merit is their combination of charm and even of poetic prose with conciseness of expression and fulness of thought. The rest of Bacon's work belongs to the following reign. The splendor of the form, and of the English prose of the Advance

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