LITMIR.BIZ

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grand-daughter of Henry the seventh as she was, and opposed on principle, as she was, to the ultimatum to which they were visibly and stedfastly tending; but, at the same time, her sagacity and prudence enabled her to ward off the immediate result. She secured her throne, – she was able to maintain, in the rocking of those movements, her own political and spiritual supremacy, – she made gain and capital for absolutism out of them, – the inevitable reformation she herself assumed, and set bounds to: whatever new freedom there was, was still the freedom of her will; she could even secure the throne of her successor: it was mischief for Charles I. that she was nursing. The consequence of all this was —the Age of Elisabeth.

      That was what this Queen meant it should be literally, and that was what it was apparently. But it so happened, that her will and humours on some great questions jumped with the time, and her dire necessities compelled her to lead the nation on its own track; or else it would have been too late, perhaps, for that exhibition of the monarchical institution, – that revival of the heroic, and ante-heroic ages, which her reign exhibits, to come off here as it did at that time.

      It is this that makes the point in this literary history. This is the key that unlocks the secret of the Elizabethan Art of Delivery and Tradition. Without any material resources to sustain it – strong in the national sentiments, – strong in the moral forces with which the past controls the present, – strong in that natural abhorrence of change with which nature protects her larger growths, – that principle which tyranny can test so long with impunity – which it can test with impunity, till it forgets that this also has in nature its limits, – strong in the absence of any combination of opposition, to the young awakening England of that age, that now hollow image of the past, that phantom of the military force that had been, which seemed to be waiting only the first breath of the popular will to dissolve it, was as yet an armed and terrific reality; its iron was on every neck, its fetter was on every step, and all the new forces, and world-grasping aims and aspirations which that age was generating were held down and cramped, and tortured in its chains, dashing their eagle wings in vain against its iron limits.

      As yet all England cowered and crouched, in blind servility, at the foot of that terrible, but unrecognised embodiment of its own power, armed out of its own armoury, with the weapons that were turned against it. So long as any yet extant national sentiment, or prejudice, was not yet directly assailed – so long as that arbitrary power was yet wise, or fortunate enough to withhold the blow which should make the individual sense of outrage, or the feeling of a class the common one – so long as those peaceful, social elements, yet waited the spark that was wanting to unite them – so long 'the laws of England' might be, indeed, at a Falstaff's or a Nym's or a Bardolph's 'commandment,' for the Poet has but put into 'honest Jack's' mouth, a boast that worse men than he, made good in his time – so long, the faith, the lives, the liberties, the dearest earthly hopes, of England's proudest subjects, her noblest, her bravest, her best, her most learned, her most accomplished, her most inspired, might be at the mercy of a woman's caprices, or the sport of a fool's sheer will and obstinacy, or conditioned on some low-lived 'favorites' whims. So long: And how long was that? – who does not know how long it was? – that was long enough for the whole Elizabethan Age to happen in. In the reign of Elizabeth, and in the reign of her successor, and longer still, that was the condition of it – till its last act was finished – till its last word was spoken and penned – till its last mute sign was made – till all its celestial inspiration had returned to the God who gave it – till all its Promethean clay was cold again.

      This was the combination of conditions of which the Elizabethan Literature was the result. The Elizabethan Men of Letters, the organisers and chiefs of the modern civilization were the result of it.

      These were men in whom the genius of the North in its happiest union of developments, under its choicest and most favourable conditions of culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, unbroken, northern vigour, was at last subjected to the stimulus and provocation which the ancient learning brings with it to the northern mind – to the now unimaginable stimulus which, the revival of the ancient art and learning brought with it to the mind of Europe in that age, – already secure, in its own indigenous development, already advancing to its own great maturity under the scholastic culture – the meagre Scholastic, and the rich Romantic culture – of the Mediaeval Era. The Elizabethan Men of Letters are men who found in those new and dazzling stores of art and literature which the movements of their age brought in all their freshly restored perfection to them, only the summons to their own slumbering intellectual activities, – fed with fires that old Eastern and Southern civilizations never knew, nurtured in the depths of a nature whose depths the northern antiquity had made; they were men who found in the learning of the South and the East – in the art and speculation that had satisfied the classic antiquity – only the definition of their own nobler want.

      The first result of the revival of the ancient learning in this island was, a report of its 'defects.' The first result of that revival here was a map – a universal map of the learning and the arts which the conditions of man's life require – a new map or globe of learning on which lands and worlds, undreamed of by the ancients, are traced. 'A map or globe' on which 'the principal and supreme sciences,' the sciences that are essential to the human kind, are put down among 'the parts that lie fresh and waste, and not converted by the industry of man.' The first result of the revival of learning here was 'a plot' for the supply of these deficiencies.

      The Elizabethan Men of Letters were men, in whom the revival of 'the Wisdom of the Ancients,' which in its last results, in its most select and boasted conservations had combined in vain to save antiquity, found the genius of a happier race, able to point out at a glance the defect in it; men who saw with a glance at those old books what was the matter with them; men prepared already to overlook from the new height of criticism which this sturdy insular development of the practical genius of the North created, the remains of that lost civilization – the splendours rescued from the wreck of empires, – the wisdom which had failed so fatally in practice that it must needs cross from a lost world of learning to the barbarian's new one, to find pupils – that it must needs cross the gulf of a thousand years in learning – such work had it made of it – ere it could revive, – the wisdom rescued from the wreck it had piloted to ruin, not to enslave, and ensnare, and doom new ages, and better races, with its futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. And they were men of a different turn of mind entirely from those who lay themselves out on enterprises having that tendency. The result of this English survey of learning was the sanctioned and organised determination of the modern speculation to those new fields which it has already occupied, and its organised, but secret determination, to that end of a true learning which the need of man, in its whole comprehension in this theory of it, constitutes.

      But the men with whom this proceeding originates, the Elizabethan Men of Letters, were, in their own time, 'the Few.' They were the chosen men, not of an age only, but of a race, 'the noblest that ever lived in the tide of times;' men enriched with the choicest culture of their age, when that culture involved not the acquisition of the learning of the ancients only, but the most intimate acquaintance with all those recent and contemporaneous developments with which its restoration on the Continent had been attended. Was it strange that these men should find themselves without sympathy in an age like that? – an age in which the masses were still unlettered, callous with wrongs, manacled with blind traditions, or swaying hither and thither, with the breath of a common prejudice or passion, or swayed hither and thither by the changeful humours and passions, or the conflicting dogmas and conceits of their rulers. That is the reason why the development of that age comes to us as a Literature. That is why it is on the surface of it Elizabethan. That is the reason why the leadership of the modern ages, when it was already here in the persons of its chief interpreters and prophets, could get as yet no recognition of its right to teach and rule – could get as yet nothing but paper to print itself on, nothing but a pen to hew its way with, nor that, without death and danger dogging it at

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