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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.

Letters were the only ships that could pass those seas. But it makes a new style in literature, when such men as these, excluded from their natural sphere of activity, get driven into books, cornered into paragraphs, and compelled to unpack their hearts in letters. There is a new tone to the words spoken under such compression. It is a tone that the school and the cloister never rang with,--it is one that the fancy dealers in letters are not able to deal in. They are such words as Caesar speaks, when he puts his legions in battle array,--they are such words as were heard at Salamis one morning, when the breeze began to stiffen in the bay; and though they be many, never so many, and though they be musical, as is Apollo's lute, that Lacedemonian ring is in each one of them. There is great business to be done in them, and their haste looks through their eyes. In the sighing of the lover, in the jest of the fool, in the raving of the madman, and not in Horatio's philosophy only, you hear it.

We do not need to apply the key of times to those indirectly historical remains in which the real history, the life and soul of a time, is always best found, and in which the history of such a time, if written at all, must necessarily be inclosed; we do not need to unlock these works to perceive the indications of suppressed movements in that age, in which the most illustrious men of the age were primarily concerned, the history of which has not yet fully transpired. We do not need to find the key to the cipher in which the history of that time is written, to perceive that there was to have been a change in the government here at one time, very different from the one which afterwards occurred, if the original plans of these men had succeeded. It is not the Plays only that are full of that frustrated enterprise.

These were the kind of men who are not easily baffled. They changed their tactics, but not their ends; and the enterprises which were conducted with so much secresy under the surveillance of the Tudor, began already to crown themselves as certainties, and compare their 'olives of endless age' with the spent tombs of brass' and 'tyrant's crests,' at that sure prospect which, a change of dynasties at that moment seemed to open,--at least, to men who were in a position then to estimate its consequences.

Who better qualified could be found to head the dangerous enterprise for the deliverance of England from that shame, than the chief in whom her Alfred arose again to break from her neck a baser than the Danish yoke, to restore her kingdom and found her new empire, to give her domains, that the sun never sets on,--her Poet, her Philosopher, her Soldier, her Legislator, the builder of her Empire of the Sea, her founder of new 'States.'

That great result which the chief minds of the Modern Ages, under the influence of the new culture, in that secret association of them were able to achieve, that new and all comprehending science of life and practice which they made it their business to perfect and transmit, could not, indeed, as yet be communicated directly to the many. The scientific doctrines of the new time were necessarily limited in that age to the few. But another movement corresponding to that, simultaneous in its origin, related to it in its source, was also in progress here then, proceeding hand in hand with this, playing its game for it, opening the way to its future triumph. This was that movement of the new time,--this was that consequence, not of the revival of learning only, but of the growth of the northern mind which touched everywhere and directly the springs of government, and made 'bold power look pale,' for this was the movement in 'the many.'

This was the movement which had already convulsed the continent; this was the movement of which Raleigh was from the first the soldier; this was 'the cause' of which he became the chief. It was as a youth of seventeen, bursting from those old fastnesses of the Middle Ages that could not hold him any longer, shaking off the films of Aristotle and his commentators, that he girded on his sword for the great world-battle that was raging already in Europe then. It was into the thickest of it, that his first step plunged him. For he was one of that company of a hundred English gentlemen who were waiting but for the first word of permission from Elizabeth to go as volunteers to the aid of the Huguenots. This was the movement which had at last reached England. And like these other continental events which were so slow in taking effect in England when it did begin to unfold here at last; there was a taste of 'the island' in it, in this also.

It was not on the continent only, that Raleigh and other English statesmen were disposed to sustain this movement. It was not possible as yet to bring the common mind openly to the heights of those great doctrines of life and practice which the Wisdom of the Moderns also embodies, but the new teachers of that age knew how to appreciate, as the man of science only can fully appreciate, the worth of those motives that were then beginning to agitate so portentously so large a portion of the English people. The Elizabethan politicians nourished and patronised in secret that growing faction. The scientific politician hailed with secret delight, hailed as the partner of his own enterprise, that new element of political power which the changing time began to reveal here then, that power which was already beginning to unclasp on the necks of the masses, the collar of the absolute will--that was already proclaiming, in the stifled undertones of 'that greater part which carries it,' another supremacy. They gave in secret the right hand of a joyful fellowship to it. At home and abroad the great soldier and statesman, who was the first founder of the Modern Science, headed that faction. He fought its battles by land and sea; he opened the New World to it, and sent it there to work out its problem.

It was the first stage of an advancement that would not rest till it found its true consummation. That infinity which was speaking in its confused tones, as with the voice of many waters, was resolved into music and triumphal marches in the ear of the Interpreter. It gave token that the nobler nature had not died out under the rod of tyranny; it gave token of the earnestness that would not be appeased until the ends that were declared in it were found.

They experienced many defeats. The hopes of youth, the hopes of manhood in turn grew cold. That the 'glorious day' which 'flattered the mountain tops' of their immortal morning with its sovereign eye would never shine on them; that their own, with all its unimagined splendours obscured so long, would go down hid in those same 'base clouds,' that for them the consummation was to 'peep about to find themselves dishonourable graves' was the conviction under which their later tasks were achieved. It did not abate their ardour. They did not strain one nerve the less for that.

This is not the place for the particulars of this history or for the barest outline of them. They make a volume of themselves. But this glimpse of the circumstances under which the works were composed which it is the object of this volume to open, appeared at the last moment to be required, in the absence of the Historical Key which the proper development of them makes, to that Art of Delivery and Tradition by means of which the secrets of the Elizabethan Age have been conveyed to us.

EXTRACTS FROM THE LIFE OF RALEIGH.--RALEIGH'S SCHOOL

For he was not a mere blind historical agent, driven by fierce instincts, intending only their own narrow ends, without any faculty of comprehensive survey and choice of intentions; impelled by thirst of adventure, or thirst of power, or thirst of gold, to the execution of his part in the great human struggle for conservation and advancement; working like other useful agencies in the Providential Scheme--like 'the stormy wind fulfilling his pleasure.'

During all the vicissitudes of his long and eventful public life, Raleigh was still persistently a scholar. He carried his books--his 'trunk of books' with him in all his adventurous voyages; and they were his 'companions' in the toil and excitement of his campaigns on land. He studied them in the ocean-storm; he studied them in his tent, as Brutus studied in his. He studied them year after year, in the dim light which pierced the deep embrasure of those walls with which tyranny had thought to shut in at last his world-grasping energies.

The promotion of Raleigh at Court was all that was needed to make him the centre and organiser of that new intellectual movement which was then just beginning there. He addressed himself to the task as if he had been a man of literary tastes and occupations merely, or as if that particular crisis had been a time of literary leisure with him, and there were nothing else to be thought of just then. The relation of those illustrious literary partners of his, whom he found already in the field when he first came to it, to that grand development of the English genius in art and philosophy which follows, ought not indeed to be overlooked or slightly treated in any thorough history of it. For it has its first beginning here in this brilliant assemblage of courtiers, and soldiers, and scholars,--this company of Poets, and Patrons and Encouragers of Art and Learning. Least of all should the relation which the illustrious founder of this order sustains to the later development be omitted in any such history,--'the prince and mirror of all chivalry,' the patron of the young English Muse, whose untimely fate keeps its date for ever green, and fills the air of this new 'Helicon' with immortal lamentations. The shining foundations of that so splendid monument of the later Elizabethan genius, which has paralyzed and confounded all our criticism, were laid here. The extraordinary facilities which certain departments of literature appeared to offer, for evading the restrictions which this new poetic and philosophic development had to encounter from the first, already began to attract the attention of men acquainted with the uses to which it had been put in antiquity, and who knew what gravity of aim, what height of execution, that then rude and childish English Play had been made to exhibit under other conditions;--men fresh from the study of those living and perpetual monuments of learning, which the genius of antiquity has left in this department. But the first essays of the new English scholarship in this untried field,--the first attempts at original composition here, derive, it must be confessed, their chief interest and value from that memorable association in which we find them. It was the first essay, which had to be made before those finished monuments of art, which command our admiration on their own account wholly, could begin to appear. It was 'the tuning of the instruments, that those who came afterwards might play the better.' We see, of course, the stiff, cramped hand of the beginner here, instead of the grand touch of the master, who never comes till his art has been prepared to his hands,--till the details of its execution have been mastered for him by others. In some arts there must be generations of essays before he can get his tools in a condition for use. Ages of prophetic genius, generations of artists, who dimly saw afar off, and struggled after his perfections, must patiently chip and daub their lives away, before ever the star of his nativity can begin to shine.

One of those innovations, one of those movements in which the new ground of ages of future culture is first chalked out--a movement whose end is not yet, whose beginning we have scarce yet seen--was made in England, not very far from the time in which Sir Walter Raleigh, began first to convert the eclat of his rising fortunes at home, and the splendour of his heroic achievements abroad, and all those new means of influence which his great position gave him, to the advancement of those deeper, dearer ambitions, which the predominance of the nobler elements in his constitution made inevitable with him. Even then he was ready to endanger those golden opinions, waiting to be worn in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon, and new-won rank, and liberty and life itself, for the sake of putting himself into his true intellectual relations with his time, as a philosopher and a beginner of a new age in the human advancement. For 'spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues.'

If there was no Professor's Chair, if there was no Pulpit or Bishop's Stall waiting for him, and begging his acceptance of its perquisites, he must needs institute a chair of his own, and pay for leave to occupy it. If there was no university with its appliances within his reach, he must make a university of his own. The germ of a new 'universality' would not be wanting in it. His library, or his drawing-room, or his 'banquet,' will be Oxford enough for him. He will begin it as the old monks began theirs, with their readings. Where the teacher is, there must the school be gathered together. And a school in the end there will be: a school in the end the true teacher will have, though he begin it, as the barefoot Athenian began his, in the stall of the artisan, or in the chat of the Gymnasium, amid the compliments of the morning levee, or in the woodland stroll, or in the midnight revel of the banquet.

He taught them, as the masters taught of old, in dialogues--in words that could not then be written, in words that needed the master's modulation to give them their significance. For the new doctrine had need to be clothed in a language of its own, whose inner meaning only those who had found their way to its inmost shrine were able to interpret.

Originally an art of necessity, with practice, in the skilful hands of those who employed it, it came at length to have a charm of its own. In such hands, it became an instrument of literary power, which had not before been conceived of; a medium too of densest ornament, of thick crowding conceits, and nestling beauties, which no style before had ever had depth enough to harbour. It established a new, and more intimate and living relation between the author and his reader,--between the speaker and his audience. There was ever the charm of that secret understanding lending itself to all the effects. It made the reader, or the hearer, participator in the artist's skill, and joint proprietor in the result. The author's own glow must be on his cheek, the author's own flash in his eye, ere that result was possible. The nice point of the skilful pen, the depth of the lurking tone was lost, unless an eye as skilful, or an ear as fine, tracked or waited on it. It gave to the work of the artist, nature's own style;--it gave to works which had the earnest of life and death in them the sport of the 'enigma.'

Of course it would be absurd, or it would involve the most profound ignorance of the history of literature in general, to claim that the principle of this invention had its origin here. It had already been in use, in recent and systematic use, in the intercourse of the scholars of the Middle Ages; and its origin is coeval with the origin of letters. The free-masonry of learning is old indeed. It runs its mountain chain of signals through all the ages, and men whom times and kindreds have separated ascend from their week-day toil, and hold their Sabbaths and synods on those heights. They whisper, and listen, and smile, and shake the head at one another; they laugh, and weep, and complain together; they sing their songs of victory in one key. That machinery is so fine, that the scholar can catch across the ages, the smile, or the whisper, which the contemporary tyranny had no instrument firm enough to suppress, or fine enough to detect.

'But for her father sitting still on hie, Did warily still watch the way she went, And eke from far observed with jealous eye, Which way his course the wanton Bregog bent.

Him to deceive, for all his watchful ward, The wily lover did devise this slight. First, into many parts, his stream he shared, That whilst the one was watch'd, the other might

Pass unespide, to meet her by the way. And then besides, those little streams, so broken, He under ground so closely did convey, That of their passage doth appear no token.'

It was the author of the 'Faery Queene,' indeed, his fine, elaborate, fertile genius burthened with its rich treasure, and stimulated to new activity by his poetical alliance with Raleigh, whose splendid invention first made apparent the latent facilities which certain departments of popular literature then offered, for a new and hitherto unparalleled application of this principle. In that prose description of his great Poem which he addresses to Raleigh, the distinct avowal of a double intention in it, the distinction between a particular and general one, the emphasis with which the elements of the ideal name, are discriminated and blended, furnish to the careful reader already some superficial hints, as to the capabilities of such a plan to one at all predisposed to avail himself of them. And, indeed, this Poet's manifest philosophical and historical tendencies, and his avowed view of the comprehension of the Poet's business would have seemed beforehand to require some elbow-room,--some chance for poetic curves and sweeps,--some space for the line of beauty to take its course in, which the sharp angularities, the crooked lines, the blunt bringing up everywhere, of the new philosophic tendency to history would scarcely admit of. There was no breathing space for him, unless he could contrive to fix his poetic platform so high, as to be able to override these restrictions without hindrance.

'Of me,' says Raleigh, in a response to this obscure partner of his works and arts,--a response not less mysterious, till we have found the solution of it, for it is an enigma.

RALEIGH'S SCHOOL, CONTINUED.--THE NEW ACADEMY.

As You Like It.

But all was not over with him in the old England yet--the present had still its chief tasks for him.

We must look at this, as well as at some other demonstrations of which this time was the witness, to see what new mastership this is that was coming out here so signally in this age in various forms, and in more minds than one; what soul of a new era it was that had laughed, even in the boyhood of its heroes, at old Aristotle on his throne; that had made its youthful games with dramatic impersonations, and caricatures, and travesties of that old book-learning; that in the glory of those youthful spirits--'the spirits of youths, that meant to be of note and began betimes'--it thought itself already competent to laugh down and dethrone with its 'jests'; that had laughed all its days in secret; that had never once lost a chance for a jibe at the philosophy it found in possession of the philosophic chairs--a philosophy which had left so many things in heaven and earth uncompassed in its old futile dreamy abstractions.

Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, Hang up philosophy,

was the word of the poet of this new school in one of his 'lofty and passionate' moods, at a much earlier stage of this philosophic development. 'See what learning is!' exclaims the Nurse, speaking at that same date from the same dictation, for there is a Friar 'abroad' there already in the action of that play, who is undertaking to bring his learning to bear upon practice, and opening his cell for scientific consultation and ghostly advice on the questions of the play as they happen to arise; and it is his apparent capacity for smoothing, and reconciling, and versifying, not words only, but facts, which commands the Nurse's admiration.

This doctrine of a practical learning, this part operative of the new learning for which the founders of it beg leave to reintegrate the abused term of Natural Magic, referring to the Persians in particular, to indicate the extent of the field which their magical operations are intended ultimately to occupy; this idea, which the master of this school was illustrating now in the Tower so happily, did not originate in the Tower, as we shall see.

This was the learning in which the art of a new age and race first spoke, and many an old foolish, childish, borrowed notion went off like vapour in it at its first word, without any one's ever so much as stopping to observe it, any one whose place was within. It is the school of a criticism much more severe than the criticism which calls its freedom in question. It is a school in which the taking of names in vain in general is strictly forbidden. That is the first commandment of it, and it is a commandment with promise.

It is in the later and more finished works of this school that the key to the secret doctrines of it, which it is the object of this work to furnish, is best found. But the fact, that in the very rudest and most faulty plays in this collection of plays, which form so important a department of the works of this school, which make indeed the noblest tradition, the only adequate tradition, the 'illustrated tradition' of its noblest doctrine--the fact that in the very earliest germ of this new union of 'practic and theoric,' of art and learning, from which we pluck at last Advancements of Learning, and Hamlets, and Lears, and Tempests, and the Novum Organum, already the perilous secret of this union is infolded, already the entire organism that these great fruits and flowers will unfold in such perfection is contained, and clearly traceable,--this is a fact which appeared to require insertion in this history, and not, perhaps, without some illustration.

This is 'great Nature's' Poet and Interpreter, and he takes us always into 'the continent of nature'; but man is his chief end, and that island which his life makes in the universal being is the point to which that Naturalist brings home all his new collections. This is the Poet of the Woods, but man,--man at the summit of his arts, in the perfection of his refinements, is always the creature that he is 'collecting' in them. In his wildest glades, this is still the species that he is busied with. He has brought him there to experiment on him, and that we may see the better what he is. He has brought him there to improve his arts, to reduce his conventional savageness, to re-refine his coarse refinements, not to make a wild-man of him. This is the Poet of the Woods; but he is a woodman, he carries an axe on his shoulder. He will wake a continental forest with it and subdue it, and fill it with his music.

The illustration here, indeed, approaches the allegorical form, in the obtrusive, untempered predominance of the qualities represented, so overdone as to wear the air of a caricature, though the historical combination is still here. These diagrams are alive evidently; they are men, and not allegorical spectres, or toys, though they are 'painted in character.'

'Common sense' is the word here already. 'Common sense' is the word that this new Academe is convulsed with when the curtain rises. And though it is laughter that you hear there now, sending its merry English peals through those musty, antique walls, as the first ray of that new beam enters them; the muse of the new mysteries has also another mask, and if you will wait a little, you shall hear that tone too. Cries that the old mysteries never caught, lamentations for Adonis not heard before, griefs that Dionysus never knew, shall yet ring out from those walls.

Under that classic dome which still calls itself Platonic, the questions and experiments of the new learning are beginning. These youths are here to represent the new philosophy, which is science, in the act of taking its first step. The subject is presented here in large masses. But this central group, at least, is composed of living men, and not dramatic shadows merely. There are good historical features peering through those masks a little. These youths are full of youthful enthusiasm, and aspiring to the ideal heights of learning in their enthusiasm. But already the practical bias of their genius betrays itself. They are making a practical experiment with the classics, and to their surprise do not find them 'good for life.'

It is man's life, and the culture of it, erected into an art or science, that these books contain. In the lowness of the lowest, and in the aspiration of the noblest, the powers whose entire history must make the basis of a successful morality and policy are found. It is all abstracted or drawn into contemplation, 'that the precepts of cure and culture may be more rightly concluded.' 'For that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.'

It is not necessary to illustrate this criticism in this case, because in this case the design looks through the execution everywhere. The criticism of the Novum Organum, the criticism of the Advancement of Learning, and the criticism of Raleigh's History of the World, than which there is none finer, when once you penetrate its crust of profound erudition, is here on the surface. And the scholasticism is not more obtrusive here, the learned sock is not more ostentatiously paraded, than in some critical places in those performances; while the humour that underlies the erudition issues from a depth of learning not less profound.

LETTER FROM DON ARMADO TO THE KING.

'Thine in all compliments of devoted and heart-burning heat of duty.

'DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO.'

And in another letter from the same source, the dramatic criticism on that style of literature which it was the intention of this School 'to reform altogether' is thus continued.

'Thine in the dearest design of industry.'

--Vinegia, Vinegia, Chi non te vede, ei non te pregia.

He is in earnest of course. Is the Poet so too? 'What is the end of study?'--let me know.

'O they have lived long in the alms-basket of WORDS,' is the criticism on this learning with which this showman, whoever he may he, explains his exhibition of it. And surely he must be, indeed, of the school of Antony Dull, and never fed with the dainties bred in a book, who does not see what it is that is criticised here;--that it is the learning of an unlearned time, of a barbarous time, of a vain, frivolous debased, wretched time, that has been fed long--always from "the alms-basket of words." And one who is acquainted already with the style of this school, who knows already its secret signs and stamp, would not need to be told to look again on the intellect of the letter for the nomination of the party writing, to the person written to, in order to see what source this pastime comes from,--what player it is that is behind the scene here. 'Whoe'er he be, he bears a mounting mind,' and beginning in the lowness of the actual, and collecting the principles that are in all actualities, the true forms that are forms in nature, and not in man's speech only, the new IDEAS of the New Academy, the ideas that are powers, with these 'simples' that are causes, he will reconstruct fortuitous conjunctions, he will make his poems in facts; he will find his Fairy Land in her kingdom whose iron chain he wears.

'The gentles were at their games,' and the soul of new ages was beginning its re-creations.

For this is but the beginning of that 'Armada' that this Don Armado--who fights with sword and pen, in ambush and in the open field--will sweep his old enemy from the seas with yet.

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