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William Tyndale translated the New Testament. He was condemned and burnt at Antwerp.

Other translations of the Bible were Coverdale's, Cranmer's, or the Great Bible, The Geneva Bible, etc.

Craumer, Latimer, Ridley, and John Rogers were martyrs in Queen Mary's time.

Eminent scholars of the age were Grocyn, Colet, Linacre, Sir Thomas More, Erasmus (a Hollander), Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Thomas Wilson, etc.

The last three labored to cultivate the English language as well as the Latin and Greek.

The principal chroniclers of the time were Robert Fabyan, Edward Hall, Lord Berners, translator of Froissart's Chronicles, and John Bellenden,. who translated a Latin History of Scotland.

Sir Thomas Malory collected the Arthurian Legends.

Sir John Fortesque and Reginald Pecock were among the ablest men of the time.

John Bale wrote Miracle Plays and Lives of British Writers.

John Leland was the first English Antiquarian.

The "Paston Letters" were written by the Paston family, and throw much light on the domestic manners of the time.

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A HE period usually styled the Elizabethan or the Golden Age of English Literature is embraced within the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., beginning about the middle of Elizabeth's reign, reaching its meridian splendor in the reign of her successor, and gradually declining with the reign of Charles I. It was the culmination of the forces of the preceding age. New discoveries had opened new mines of thought and enterprise; the knowledge accumulated in the age just ended was assimilated in this, and as getting learning had been the fashion of the preceding age, appearing learned was the fashion of this. The fact that all three of the sovereigns encouraged literature, and that Elizabeth and James were both ambitious of literary distinction, were incentives to their followers, and literary pursuits became the fashion of the day. The women were as learned as the men, in many instances more so. In praise of Elizabeth's learning, her old tutor, Roger Ascham, says:

"I believe that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, she readeth here, at Windsor, more Greek every day than some prebendary of this Church doth Latin in a whole week."*

With such a woman as Queen, what wonder that a host of learned women followed in her train. The three sisters, Lady

*Deducting the flattery from this, the fact still remains that Elizabeth gave much time to study.

Bacon, Lady Burleigh, and Lady Killigrew; Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke; Lady Jane Grey, and many other women, read Plato and Cicero in the original, and made frequent translations.

The political condition of England was favorable to the production of literature. Never before had the nation been so prosperous. Never before had a sovereign selected wiser and more judicious counsellors than those by whom Elizabeth surrounded herself. Wisdom and moderation characterized the reign. The terrible ordeal of "turn or burn," the watchword in Mary's time, was transmuted into an ordinance of peace and toleration. Wealth and prosperity flowed into the kingdom; intellectual labor was rewarded, and intellectual recreations demanded. The old institution of chivalry had left enough of its genuine spirit to tinge the age with the love of romance and adventure, and to produce such knights as Raleigh and Sidney, while the classical learning of the preceding century gave a solid basis for the glow of imaginative genius in this.

It was an age not only of literary advancement, but of progress in refinement of every kind. Various improvements in household arrangements crept in. Chimneys to the houses became quite common, and in the seventeenth century fireplaces were built nearly in the present style.*

Less attention, however, seems to have been given to domestic and genuine home comforts than to exterior display and ornamentation. The three thousand dresses of the Queen serve to indicate the luxury and extravagance of the time. Brilliancy in everything characterized the age. Diamonds flash, silks rustle, and all is pageantry and show. Not a courtier but would have thrown his velvet cloak over the mud, as Sir Walter Raleigh did, for Elizabeth's dainty foot to pass They lived an ideal and unreal life. All the world to them was, indeed, a stage, and the men and women merely

over.

It was not until the reign of James I. that forks were used to eat with. Soon after, tables with leaves were used, and the salt became the dividing line at table between the aristocracy and common people, the latter being seated below the salt. Before this time, the dais, or raised platform, had separated the two classes in the dining-hall. After the middle of the seventeenth century the hall itself ceases to be mentioned as the chief room of the house.

players. Genuine feeling was displaced by feigned passions, and earnest living by unreal acting.

It was an age of imagination, and we are not surprised at the character of the literature. When pageantries and brilliant displays found most favor with the Queen, what wonder that the Drama should be the prevailing literature of the day, and that the dramatists should exceed in number all other writers of the age.

That this age should give rise to the greatest poet as well as the greatest dramatist is what might be expected--the poet's poet "of imagination all compact," and that his theme should be the typified exploits of Arthur and his knights, and that his poem should be called the Faerie Queen, is also just what might be expected from this chivalrous, courtly age. The long-fettered imagination had burst all bonds of restraint, and now revelled in its untried freedom. A new field of literary enterprise was thrown open, and the writers, trammelled by no rules or antecedents, were guided by genius and fancy. It was a period of creative conception.

The first half of Elizabeth's reign was not prolific in great writers. Other countries in Europe were far in advance of England in the productions of literature.*

The three great names of the Elizabethan period are SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER, and BACON. Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist, if not the greatest literary genius the world has ever seen; Spenser, the second of England's great nondramatic poets; and Bacon, the first of philosophers who urged utility as the end of scientific investigations. Any one

* Italy, under the rule of Lorenzo de Medici and his son, Pope Leo X., had attained to a high degree of elegance in literature, and Ariosto, Michael Angelo, and Machiavelli, each in his own department of letters and art, had contributed to the wealth of Italian lore. The real period of French literature was in the seventeenth century, yet we find the names of Philippe de Comines, of Marot and Rabelais, Calvin and Montaigne, prior to the great burst of intellectual splendor in England, while the greatest of Portuguese writers, Camoëns, died just as the literature of England was beginning to dazzle the world. Spain more nearly coincided with England in her period of literature, yet she had had her Boscan, Garcellasso, Mendoza, and Ercilla. Her greatest genius, Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, died on the same day that Shakespeare died.*

* Lope de Vega and Calderon, of Spain, lived later in the same century.

of these great names would have distinguished an age; but, surrounding these three, were innumerable brilliant writers, all aglow with the kindled enthusiasm for literature. The theatre, the court, and the church afforded the chief stimulus to literary genius.

Poetry.

Fulness characterized the poetry of the age, and long poems were the rule. The author had no fear of wearying the reader. Books were a new source of entertainment, and were eagerly devoured by the enthusiastic readers. No great poet had appeared since Chaucer, though a hundred and fifty years had elapsed. When, therefore, Spenser's Faerie Queen and Shepherd's Calendar appeared, it was an era in the literary world.

EDMUND SPENSER (1553–1599) was born in London. His early life was spent in humble circumstances, and, after graduating at Cambridge, he spent some time in the north of England, where he wrote his Shepherd's Calendar, and fell in love with some fair Rosalind, supposed by biographers to have been a sister of another poet, Samuel Daniel. She, however, did not reciprocate Spenser's attachment, and many years after he married a lady whose first name alone is recorded, Elizabeth. The beautiful marriage hymn, the Epithalamium, which he wrote in her praise, is one of the most exquisite love songs in the language.

Spenser counted among his warmest friends the generous Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh. Through their influence he was introduced to courtly circles and gained the patronage of the Queen. He was commissioned with some public trust in Ireland, which he performed so faithfully that Elizabeth gave him a present of three thousand acres of land near Cork,--the confiscated property of the insurgent Earl of Desmond. Here Spenser was obliged to live, that being one of the conditions of the grant. His residence, Kilcolman Castle, occupied a commanding view of the surrounding country. The river Mulla ran through his grounds, and by its banks the poet enjoyed many hours of study and retirement. Here Raleigh visited him, and here they read together the yet unpublished manuscript of the Faerie Queen. Through Raleigh's persuasion Spenser returned with him to London and presented to the Queen the finished

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