of Europe in that century, it circulated from there, not in England alone, but also very widely throughout the whole continent of Europe. His was the best translation since that of Elfric, in the old Anglo-Saxon days. It was the best, chiefly because the translator tried to get the sense of the passages rather than to carry over literally the Hebrew and the Greek words into their dictionary equivalents in English. Lyric verse. The first half of the sixteenth century was marked by a revival of interest in lyric verse as well as in political and religious writings. Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, was a writer of good and stirring satirical humor. As is usually the case with English humor, his had always in view a serious and practical end. Tennyson has described the inner spirit of this man in the following way: Courtier of many courts, he loved the more His own grey towers, plain life, and lettered peace, The lark above, the nightingale below And answer them in song. His son, also Sir Thomas Wyatt, wrote many fanciful love songs, as did Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. The "Songs and Sonnets" of these two men, Surrey and the younger Wyatt, were published in 1557, along with many other similar poems, in a collection known as Tottel's Miscellany, by a man named Richard Tottel. This was the beginning of the legion of poetic anthologies in English. Then came the great days of Queen Elizabeth. Lyric poetry continued in the work of Sir Philip Sidney, of Sir Walter Raleigh, and of Edmund Spenser, as well as scattered itself here and there among the dramatic writings of the time. Sidney has always been looked back to as the ideal of the age of chivalry. The outward events of his life and the inner fineness of his character gave every reason for the charm which his character and life have exerted since his day. Before the dramatists of the day began their greater works, Sidney stood as second in literary fame to Spenser alone. His Astrophel and Stella sonnets rise to the first rank among sonnets of love. Perhaps no one of them is better than this, Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame, Who seek, who hope, who love, who live by thee; If thou praise not, all other praise is shame. Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame A nest for my young praise in laurel tree: Nor, if I would, could I just title make, That any laud thereof to me should grow, Without my plumes from others' wings I take: For nothing from my wit or will doth flow, Since all my words thy beauty doth indite, And Love doth hold my hand, and makes me write. Stella, the "star" of his love life, was Penelope Devereux, of the family of the Earl of Essex, and the word “Astrophel is a Greek combination meaning star-lover. John Richard Green in his History of the English People has called attention (in the very famous character sketch which he draws of Queen Elizabeth) to the love of anagrams in that day. "Astrophel " is an illustration, for it is but a disguise of Sidney's own name. Philip Sidney was changed slightly into Philisides, a Greek-Latin combination, and this was transformed into the pure Greek compound which means, as we have said, star-lover. Sidney was the author of much excellent prose. His prose romance, Arcadia, richly poetical in its imagery, was one of the most thoughtfully witty writings of the time. His essay entitled a Defence of Poesy is used to this day in the schools, at times, for the same purposes as a textbook is used. Raleigh wrote poetry well enough to warrant Spenser's calling him the "Summer's Nightingale." The melancholy of Raleigh's tone, no doubt, accounted in part for such an allusion. The most quoted lines from Raleigh are these: Even such is Time, that takes on trust Our youth, our joys, our all we have, Who, in the dark and silent grave, But from this earth, this grave, this dust, General Literature. Like Sidney, Raleigh was also a writer of prose. His account of his voyage to the Orinoco, under the title The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, is available still in popular collections and libraries; but his History of the World, beginning with the Creation (a custom among early historians which Washington Irving finely satirizes in his Knickerbocker History), and continuing down to the second Macedonian War, B.C. 168, is the first strong indication of the enlargement of the interest of the English mind in matters that were far beyond the personal interests of the Englishman himself. Raleigh's own unfortunate career shadows the work occasionally, as in the concluding magnificent apostrophe: "Oh, eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world, and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it over with these two narrow words Hic Jacet." Much popular ballad writing was done at this time, these Ballads serving the purpose of the newspaper of to-day both in giving information of current events and in critical comment upon them. There was much writing of patriotic poetry, notably the Ballad of Agincourt, the meter of which Tennyson employed in The Charge of the Light Brigade. There was also some satirical poetry of worth, especially that of Donne, about whom Lowell in the nineteenth century became so enthusiastic, and that of William Drummond of Hawthornden. Hobbes and Locke were anticipated in their thinking upon political science by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Love poets were very numerous. Many of their more fantastic productions were collected in the Paradise of Dainty Devices, published in 1576, nine years after Tottel's Miscellany. Translations which remain as among the best ever done into English were made of Homer by George Chapman, of the Essays of Montaigne by John Florio, of Plutarch by Sir Thomas North, of Ariosto and Tasso by Harrington and Fairfax, respectively. To understand how great a work that of Chapman's was, one need only read the essay by James Russell Lowell upon Chapman, and the ode by John Keats entitled, On first looking into Chapman's Homer: Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific and all his men Then there was the popular theological literature represented by John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, bringing literature to the very hearts and minds of the lowest peasants; and the learned theological literature, such as the book which, next to the Bible, was the source of the style of John Ruskin, namely, Richard Hooker's The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a defense of the Church against the Puritans and "the first monument of splendid literary prose that we possess." History was represented by Raphael Holinshed, in his Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published in 1577, and furnishing later the "arguments," as the outlines of the stories were called, for some of the "histories" by Shakespeare, and for those by many others before him. Love stories were translated into English prose by the score. A collection made in 1566 by William Painter, and called The Palace of Pleasure, was sold at every bookstall in the kingdom. Tragic poems relating the misadventures of famous characters were printed in the Mirror for Magistrates, on the model furnished by Boccaccio and imitated in the fifteenth century by Lydgate. The name of Thomas Sackville, who was at first the Earl of Dorset and later Lord Bockhurst, is the chief one to associate with this collection. It was he, too, who, along with Thomas Norton, brought forth the first quite serious attempt at tragedy in the English drama. Their play was called Gorboduc. A crude affair it was, both in the bloodiness of its events and in the extravagance of its style. Nevertheless it was notable even in style, for in it the authors marked an epoch by the employment of blank verse, for centuries afterwards accepted as the best form for the expression of tragic |