Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest," etc.

Either is very far from the mellifluous numbers of Shakespeare or even of Sidney, but the lesson had to be learned at somebody's cost. Surrey at his best, it should be said, considerably improves upon the above lines.

More important still was a second feat in pioneering, the glory of which belongs to Surrey alone. This was his use of the iambic five-foot unrhymed verse-blank verse-in his translation of the Eneid. It may seem a small thing for him to have taken the ordinary five-foot line which he was using in his sonnets, and which Chaucer had already proved the virtues of in couplets and otherwise, and simply omit the rhyme. But it was no small thing to throw away thus every musical device but metre and still achieve poetry. Surrey did not always do the latter.

"Aurora now from Titan's purple bed

With new daylight had overspread the earth;
When by her windows the Queen the peeping day
Espied, and navy with 'splay'd sails depart

The shore, and eke the port of vessels void,”

But the begin

these are not the sort of lines we are used to now. ning was made. The instrument was rudely forged which in fifty years was to be shaped into the very greatest instrument of English poetry and wielded by the greatest poet of all time.

The brief Roman Catholic reaction under Mary, with its three hundred victims sent to the stake, among them Latimer and Cranmer, was more calamitous than the Protestant misrule of Henry's latter years, and when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, England's affairs were in a sad condition. Elizabeth, however, was precisely the woman to steer the middle course through which alone lay the way to safety and peace. Her sympathies were neither with Rome, nor with the extreme reformers, soon to be known as Puritans, who would have abolished every trace of Catholicism in their worship. In a liberal spirit, slowly but surely, she worked her reforms, and when, thirty years later, the ambitious Philip II. of Spain was defeated with the loss of his Armada, the Protestant faith was finally and securely established in England by the same blow which determined the political greatness of the nation.

It is difficult for historians to record dispassionately the glories of Elizabeth's long reign, an age that justly challenges comparison with the age of Pericles in Greece, of Augustus in Rome, or of the De' Medici in Florence. It was then that the full effects of the Renaissance and the Reformation were at length felt in the island kingdom. All classes of people were seized with a noble restlessness and curiosity which were the precursors of great achievements. Venturesome mariners like Drake, and traders like Jenkinson, explored the farthest corners of the earth and brought back wealth and tales of wonder from Muscovy, China, and Peru. Statesmen like Burleigh fostered prosperity at home. Courtiers like Sidney and Raleigh added the graces of culture to the virtues of bravery and made Elizabeth's court as resplendent as it was powerful. Queen Elizabeth herself was a mistress of nearly every polite accomplishment from Greek and Italian to dancing and archery, loved study, loved music, loved pageants and pastimes, and assisted in all ways in the re-quickening of life that was going on about her. Finally, poets and philosophers were not wanting with the genius to respond to the spirit of the age, to reflect its temper and minister to its ideals. There were Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Jonson, any one of whom would have made the age illustrious, besides many others so richly endowed that only the greatness of these four has overshadowed their names.

It will be noted that the Elizabethan Age, as defined in literature, does not exactly coincide with Elizabeth's reign. Some twenty years from the time of her accession must be regarded as still preliminary, and then some twenty years must be allowed after her death before the generation headed by the mighty four had spent its force. The new poetry, we have seen, was actually introduced in 1557 by the publication of Tottel's Miscellany, which contained especially numerous specimens of both Wyatt's and Surrey's verse; but though it proved highly popular with readers it did not at once stimulate any productions of importance. Perhaps only Thomas Sackville, Lord Buck