coquette; ready enough to box the ears of one of her courtiers, and threaten with an oath to unfrock one of her bishops; despotic in her bearing towards all over whom she had complete control; cursed, indeed, with every internal impulse which leads to reckless action,she was still a thinker; and thought revealed insecurities in her position, in considering which even her imperious will was puzzled into irresolution, and shrank from the plain road of force to feel its way through the crooked paths of hypocrisy and craft.

This comprehensiveness of thought did not, in the men of letters, interfere with loftiness of thought; but it connected thought with life, gave it body and form, and made it fertile in those weighty maxims which, while they bear directly on practical conduct, and harmonize with the experience of men, are also characterized by that easy elevation of view and of tone which distinguishes philosophic wisdom from prudential moralizing. The Elizabethan thinkers instinctively recognized the truth that real thinking implies the action of the whole nature, and not of a single isolated faculty. They were men of large understandings; but their understandings rarely acted apart from observation and imagination, — from sentiment, passion, and character. They not only reasoned, but they had reason. They looked at things, and round things, and into things, and through things.

Though they were masters of the processes of logic, their eminent merit was their broad grasp of the premises of logic, and their ready anticipation of the results of logic. They could argue; but they preferred to flash the conclusions of argument rather than to recite its details, and their minds darted to results to which slower intelligences creep. From the fact that they had reason in abundance, they were somewhat chary of reasons. Their thinking, indeed, gives us the solid, nutritious, enriching substance of thought. While it comprehends the outward facts of life, it connects them with those great mental facts beheld by the inner eye of the mind. It thus combines massive good sense with a Platonic elevation of spiritual perception, and especially avoids the thinness and juicelessness which are apt to characterize the greatest efforts of the understanding, when understanding is divorced from character.

This equipoise and interpenetration of the faculties of the mind and the feelings of the heart, which give to these writers their largeness, dignity, sweetness, and power, are to be referred in a great degree to the imaginative element of their natures. They lived, indeed, in an imaginative age, an age in which thought, feeling, aspiration, character, whether low or exalted, aimed to embody themselves in appropriate external forms, and be made visible to the eye. In the great poets and

philosophers this imagination existed both as ecstatic insight of spiritual facts and as shaping power, -as both the "vision and the faculty divine"; but all over the Elizabethan society, in dress, in manners, in speech, in the badges of professions, in amusements, in pageants and spectacles, — character, class, and condition, in all their varieties, were directly imaged. Lamb calls all this a visible poetry; and much which we now read as poetry was simply the transference into language of the common facts of the time.

This imaginative tendency of the national mind appeared in a still higher form in that chivalrous cast of feeling and of thought which we observe in all the nobler men of the time. "High-erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy," is Sir Philip Sidney's definition of the gentleman; and this was the standard to which many aspired, if few reached it. This chivalry was a poetic reflection of the feudal age, which was departing in its rougher and baser realities, but lingering in its beautiful ideas and ideals, especially in the knightly love of adventure and the knightly reverence for woman. It gave an air of romance to acts, enterprises, and amusements which sometimes had their vulgar side. Raleigh tilted in silver armor before the Queen, but the silver from which the armor was made had been stolen from Spanish merchantmen. Sidney was eager

to fight in single combat with the defamer of his uncle Leicester, though his uncle richly deserved the gibbet. Cumberland was a knight-errant of the seas, strangely blending the love of glory with the love of gold, the spirit of wild adventure with the spirit of commercial thrift. Something imaginative, something which partook of the sentiment of the old time, was mingled with the bustling practicalities of the present. If we look at a man like Sir Francis Drake from the mere understanding, we find it difficult to decide whether his enterprises were private or national, whether the patriot predominated over the pirate, or the pirate over the patriot; but if we look at him from the Elizabethan point of view, it is not difficult to discern an enthusiastic, chivalric, loyal, Protestant spirit as the presiding element of his being and the source of his pecuniary He did many things which, if done now, would very properly send the perpetrator of them to the gallows; yet, as a man, he was very much superior to many a modern statesman and judge, who would conscientiously order his execution. Vitally right, but formally wrong, he in the Elizabethan age was immensely honored.

success.

This slight reference to a few of the Elizabethan men of action shows that literature was but one out of many

expressions of the roused energies of the national heart

and brain, and that those who performed actions which poetry celebrates were as numerous as the poets. As the external inducements to adopt literature as a profession were not so great as in our day, as there was no reading public in our sense of the term, we are at first surprised that so much genius was diverted into this path. But both Elizabeth and James were learned sovereigns; both were writers; and in the courts of both literature and learning were the fashion, and often the avenues to distinction in Church and State. It was recognized that literary ability was but one phase of general ability. Buckhurst was an eminent statesman. Sidney and Spenser were men of affairs. Raleigh could do anything. Bacon was a lawyer and jurist. Hooker, Hall, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, and Donne were in the Church. The patronage of educated and accomplished nobles was extended to numerous writers like Daniel and Drayton, who could not have subsisted by the sale of their works. None of these can be styled authors by profession: that sad distinction was confined to the dramatists. In the time of Elizabeth and James the theatre was almost the only medium of communication between writers and the people, and attracted to it all those who aimed to gain a livelihood out of the products of their hearts and imaginations. Its literature was the popular literature of