emotion. Interludes, pageants, and to some extent masques, with still other forms of stage plays, were almost innumerable from this time on. Bacon. Then there were the Essays of Sir Francis Bacon, 1597. Bacon was a scientist, a traveler, a philosopher, a statesman, and a man of letters. He was also a good speaker. Ben Jonson said of him: "He was full of gravity in his speaking. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spake; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end." Bacon once wrote that he had taken all knowledge as his province, that he desired to clear the field of knowledge of all frivolous and useless theorizing and unscientific experimentation, and to stimulate invention. It was a large and a difficult task that he set himself, but to him " Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better, too." He wanted men to follow definite inquiries, and make direct experiments. The kind of thing that Benjamin Franklin did later, searching after hitherto unknown causes by working among known and definite effects, as in the case of sending up kites into the thunder-clouds, was precisely what Bacon approved; and it was under his stimulus that science was born again. Nature, he taught men, is a great quarry in which men should employ their minds as tools to secure therefrom truths which might be formed into the things that will be of use to man. This, he thought, men should do instead of doing as the philosophers so often did, namely, turning their logical wits round and round and in and about their empty minds. He wrote much, both in Latin and in English; but it is his essays alone that have been widely read. They are much admired, and are eminently worthy of that admiration. They present the high thinking of a moralist, a statesman, and a man of general affairs. Bacon was born about three years earlier than Shakespeare, and lived ten years later. In intellect he was, we think, the second man of his day, Shakespeare alone standing superior to him. Euphuism. Two books by John Lyly, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, and its sequel, Euphues and his England, are indispensable to one who wishes to study the manners and customs of the Elizabethan era. Besides social manners, love and education and religion were topics which were treated in these books by Lyly. His style was so distinctive that a name has been coined to describe it, "Euphuism." This style was characterized by balance of phrase, which indicated contrasts of thought, by alliteration, which marked the balanced phrases over against each other, by unending fantastic similes, drawn largely from pseudo-science, and even by rhymed prose. The style had great influence upon Lyly's contemporaries and his immediate successors. Even Shakespeare falls into it frequently, however much he may ridicule it through the mouth of Holofernes, the pedant in Love's Labour's Lost. Furthermore, it was of great value in the development of English prose style, because of the effect it had in the bringing about of more symmetry in the English sentence, though it was badly overdone by Lyly himself. Lyly owed much of his form and its embellishments to Latin writers, especially Cicero and the elder Pliny; hence the well-balanced phrases. Sidney's Arcadia was more free in style, and soon supplanted the Euphues in favor. II. EDMUND SPENSER His importance. - "The Nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the Faerie Queen as the most precious jewel of their coronet." Thus the historian Gibbon spoke of the illustrious family of Northamptonshire, named the Spencers, and of the principal work of their kinsman, Edmund Spenser. His lesser works. The first publication worthy of note from the pen of Spenser was the Shepherd's Calendar, in 1579, a poem in twelve "eclogues," one for each month of the year. It is an artificial thing, as any eclogue, or poem representing sophisticated city folk under the guise of shepherds or of any other plain country folk, is sure to be. It is artificial also, for it is written, as to a greater or less degree was all this author's work, according to a theory that all poetic wording acquires some of its beauty from being taken, not from the popular speech of the time, but from that which is at least slightly archaic or old. Then, in addition to this, there is an attempt in the poem to return to the Old English alliterative form. Yet the poem is genuine in its feeling, for it sprang from a painfully real personal experience, the author's falling in love with some fair lady with whom it was impossible for him to become intimately friendly. The Shepherd's Calendar was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale is a poem of 1388 lines in the ten-syllable rhyming couplet employed by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. It is vigorous and vivacious. The Tale is a fable, in which an Ape and a Fox, meaning imitation and cunning, tiring of earning a living by labor, resolve to resort to their wits. The relation of the adventures which follow is not bitter or malicious in tone, as satires usually are, particularly British political satires, yet in the keenness of the arraignment which is made of the military, clerical, and courtly vices and follies of the day, it is unsurpassed. The poem is one of universal import, for impudent pretense is the same in all times and places in human society as well as in the beastly kingdom. Evidence of this sameness in human society lies in the fact that during the reign of George III, one year after the close of the Revolutionary War in America, that part of the poem which dealt with the coalition ministry formed by Sir Reynold Fox under King Ape, was reprinted and dedicated to the prime minister, the Honorable Charles James Fox. Perhaps next to the Faerie Queen, Mother Hubberd's Tale is the best of Spenser's poems. Too much neglected is the Fate of the Butterfly. Two episodes in this poem, the one relating the origin of the unmatchable beauty of the wings of the butterfly race, and the other explaining the cause of the poisonous rancor and hate which the spiders bear to the butterflies, are extraordinarily delicate, gladhearted, and lovely. It is such passages as these that make of literature a sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil. Spenser's next important poem was Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 1595. This poem was written in celebration of the author's return to Ireland, after an absence of some time in England, and it gives the reason for his making the journey away from the fair country which had for so long been his adopted home. It was the "Shepherd of the Ocean," Sir Walter Raleigh, the poem tells, who induced the land shepherd, Colin Clout, to make the journey to England, in order that his talent for poesy, so richly enjoyed by Raleigh, should not remain hidden forever in the obscurity of his own household. So he had sailed to the goodly realm of the great Queen. The most interesting parts of the poem are two. The first part, which is an answer to the question who else besides himself gave delight at court with the notes of their musical verse, includes a description of various poets and other literary men then living in England, among them Shakespeare, Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention, Doth like himself heroically sound. The second part seems to renew the impassioned devotion of the poet to his early love, Rosalind, Ah, far be it (quoth Colin Clout) from me, To her my love I lowly do prostrate, To her my life I wholly sacrifice: My thought, my heart, my love, my life, is she. Astrophel, an elegy upon the death of "the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney," was included in the same volume with Colin Clout's Come Home Again. Another volume in the same year, 1595, contained the eighty-eight Sonnets entitled Amoretti, and a noble Marriage Ode entitled Epithalamion. The Prothalamion was printed in 1596, and is a song in honor of the marriage of two daughters of the Earl of Worcester. In this year also came the four hymns in celebration of Love and Beauty, two written as if the author were in the rawness of youth and two in maturity. Then four short "Anacreontic " |