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THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, AND THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS

'The times, in many cases, give great light to true interpretations.' Advancement of Learning.

The fact that the immemorial liberties of the English PEOPLE, and that idea of human government and society which they brought with them to this island, had been a second time violently overborne and suppressed by a military chieftainship, – one for which the unorganised popular resistance was no match, – that the English People had been a second time 'conquered' – for that is the word which the Elizabethan historian suggests – less than a hundred years before the beginning of the Elizabethan Age, is a fact in history which the great Elizabethan philosopher has contrived to send down to us, along with his philosophical works, as the key to the reading of them. It is a fact with which we are all now more or less familiar, but it is one which the Elizabethan Poet and Philosopher became acquainted with under circumstances calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the sensibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and expositions of it which our time can furnish us.

That this second conquest was unspeakably more degrading than the first had been, inasmuch as it was the conquest of a chartered, constitutional liberty, recovered and established in acts that had made the English history, recovered on battle-fields that were fresh, not in oral tradition only; inasmuch as it was effected in violation of that which made the name of Englishmen, that which made the universally recognised principle of the national life; inasmuch, too, as it was an undivided conquest, the conquest of the single will– the will of the 'one only man' – not unchecked of commons only, unchecked by barons, unchecked by the church, unchecked by council of any kind, the pure arbitrary absolute will, the pure idiosyncrasy, the crowned demon of the lawless, irrational will, unchained and armed with the sword of the common might, and clothed with the divinity of the common right; that this was a conquest unspeakably more debasing than the conquest 'commonly so called,' – this, which left no nobility, – which clasped its collar in open day on the proudest Norman neck, and not on the Saxon only, which left only one nation of slaves and bondmen – that this was a subjugation– that this was a government which the English nation had not before been familiar with, the men whose great life-acts were performed under it did not lack the sensibility and the judgment to perceive.

A more hopeless conquest than the Norman conquest had been, it might also have seemed, regarded in some of the aspects which it presented to the eye of the statesman then; for it was in the division of the former that the element of freedom stole in, it was in the parliaments of that division that the limitation of the feudal monarchy had begun.

But still more fatal was the aspect of it which its effects on the national character were continually obtruding then on the observant eye, – that debasing, deteriorating, demoralising effect which such a government must needs exert on such a nation, a nation of Englishmen, a nation with such memories. The Poet who writes under this government, with an appreciation of the subject quite as lively as that of any more recent historian, speaks of 'the face of men' as a 'motive' – a motive power, a revolutionary force, which ought to be sufficient of itself to raise, if need be, an armed opposition to such a government, and sustain it, too, without the compulsion of an oath to reinforce it; at least, this is one of the three motives which he produces in his conspiracy as motives that ought to suffice to supply the power wanting to effect a change in such a government.

'If not the face of men, The sufferance of our souls, the time's abuse, – If these be motives weak, break of betimes.'

There is no use in attempting a change where such motives are weak.

That this political degradation, and its deteriorating and corrupting influence on the national character, was that which presented itself to the politician's eye at that time as the most fatal aspect of the question, or as the thing most to be deprecated in the continuance of such a state of things, no one who studies carefully the best writings of that time can doubt.

And it must be confessed, that this is an influence which shows itself very palpably, not in the degrading hourly detail only of which the noble mind is, in such circumstances, the suffering witness, and the secretly protesting suffering participator, but in those large events which make the historic record. The England of the Plantagenets, that sturdy England which Henry the Seventh had to conquer, and not its pertinacious choice of colours only, not its fixed determination to have the choosing of the colour of its own 'Roses' merely, but its inveterate idea of the sanctity of 'law' permeating all the masses – that was a very different England from the England which Henry the Seventh willed to his children; it was a very different England, at least, from the England which Henry the Eighth willed to his.

That some sparks of the old fire were not wanting, however, – that the nation which had kept alive in the common mind through so many generations, without the aid of books, the memory of that 'ancestor' that 'made its laws,' was not after all, perhaps, without a future – began to be evident about the time that the history of 'that last king of England who was the ancestor' of the English Stuart, was dedicated by the author of the Novum Organum to the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles I., not without a glance at these portents.

Circumstances tending to throw doubt upon the durability of this institution – circumstances which seemed to portend that this monstrous innovation was destined on the whole to be a much shorter-lived one than the usurpation it had displaced – had not been wanting, indeed, from the first, in spite of those discouraging aspects of the question which were more immediately urged upon the contemporary observer.

It was in the eleventh century; it was in the middle of the Dark Ages, that the Norman and his followers effected their successful landing and lodgement here; it was in the later years of the fifteenth century, – it was when the bell that tolled through Europe for a century and a half the closing hour of the Middle Ages, had already begun its peals, that the Tudor 'came in by battle.'

That magnificent chain of events which begins in the middle of the fifteenth century to rear the dividing line between the Middle Ages and the Modern, had been slow in reaching England with its convulsions: it had originated on the continent. The great work of the restoration of the learning of antiquity had been accomplished there: Italy, Germany, and France had taken the lead in it by turns; Spain had contributed to it. The scientific discoveries which the genius of Modern Europe had already effected under that stimulus, without waiting for the New Organum, had all originated on the continent. The criticism on the institutions which the decaying Roman Empire had given to its Northern conquerors, – that criticism which necessarily accompanied the revival of learning began there. Not yet recovered from the disastrous wars of the fifteenth century, suffering from the diabolical tyranny that had overtaken her at that fatal crisis, England could make but a feeble response as yet to these movements. They had been going on for a century before the influence of them began to be visible here. But they were at work here, notwithstanding: they were germinating and taking root here, in that frozen winter of a nation's discontent; and when they did begin to show themselves on the historic surface, – here in this ancient soil of freedom, – in this natural retreat of it, from the extending, absorbing, consolidating feudal tyrannies, – here in this 'little world by itself' – this nursery of the genius of the North – with its chief races, with its union of races, its 'happy breed of men,' as our Poet has it, who notes all these points, and defines its position, regarding it, not with a narrow English partiality, but looking at it on his Map of the World, which he always carries with him, – looking at it from his 'Globe,' which has the Old World and the New on it, and the Past and the Future, – 'a precious stone set in the silver sea,' he calls it, 'in a great pool, a swan's nest': – when that seed of all ages did at last show itself above the ground here, here in this nursery of hope for man, it would be with quite another kind of fruit on its boughs, from any that the continent had been able to mature from it.

It was in the later years of the sixteenth century, in the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth, that the Printing press, and the revived Learning of Antiquity, and the Reformation, and the discovery of America, the new revival of the genius of the North in art and literature, and the Scientific Discoveries which accompanied this movement on the continent, began to combine their effects here; and it was about that time that the political horizon began to exhibit to the statesman's eye, those portents which both the poet and the philosopher of that time, have described with so much iteration and amplitude. These new social elements did not appear to promise in their combination here, stability to the institutions which Henry the Seventh, and Henry the Eighth had established in this island.

The genius of Elizabeth conspired with the anomaly of her position to make her the steadfast patron and promoter of these movements, – worthy 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 the heels, and threatening it, at every turn, so that it could only wave, in mute gesticulation, its signals to the future. It had to affect, in that time, bookishness and wiry scholasticism. It had to put on sedulously the harmless old monkish gown, or the jester's cap and bells, or any kind of a tatterdemalion robe that would hide, from head to heel, the waving of its purple. 'Motley's the only wear,' whispers the philosopher, peering through his privileged garb for a moment. King Charles II. had not more to do in reserving himself in an evil time, and getting safely over to the year of his dominion.

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.

The founders of the new science of nature and practice were men unspeakably too far above and beyond their time, to take its bone and muscle with them. There was no language in which their doctrines could have been openly conveyed to an English public at that time without fatal misconception. The truth, which was to them arrayed with the force of a universal obligation, – the truth, which was to them religion, would have been, of course, in an age in which a single, narrow-minded, prejudiced Englishwoman's opinions were accepted as the ultimate rule of faith and practice, 'flat atheism.' What was with them loyalty to the supremacy of reason and conscience, would have been in their time madness and rebellion, and the majority would have started at it in amazement; and all men would have joined hands, in the name of truth and justice, to suppress it. The only thing that could be done in such circumstances was, to translate their doctrine into the language of their time. They must take the current terms – the vague popular terms – as they found them, and restrict and enlarge them, and inform them with their new meanings, with a hint to 'men of understanding' as to the sense in which they use them. That is the key to the language in which their books for the future were written.

But who supposes that these men were so wholly super-human, so devoid of mortal affections and passions, so made up of 'dry light,' that they could retreat, with all those regal faculties, from the natural sphere of their activity to the scholar's cell, to make themselves over in books to a future in which their mortal natures could have no share, – a future which could not begin till all the breathers of their world were dead? Who supposes that the 'staff' of Prospero was the first choice of these chiefs? – these 'heads of the State,' appointed of nature to the Cure of the Common-Weal.

The leading minds of that age are not minds which owed their intellectual superiority to a disproportionate development of certain intellectual tendencies, or to a dwarfed or inferior endowment of those natural affections and personal qualifications which tend to limit men to the sphere of their particular sensuous existence. The mind of this school is the representative mind, and all men recognise it as that, because, in its products, that nature which is in all men, which philosophy had, till then, scorned to recognise, which the abstractionists had missed in their abstractions, – that nature of will, and sense, and passion, and inanity, is brought out in its true historical proportions, not as it exists in books, not as it exists in speech, but as it exists in the actual human life. It is the mind in which this historical principle, this motivity which is not reason, is brought in contact with the opposing and controlling element as it had not been before. In all its earth-born Titanic strength and fulness, it is dragged up from its secret lurking-places, and confronted with its celestial antagonist. In all its self-contradiction and cowering unreason, it is set face to face with its celestial umpire, and subjected to her unrelenting criticism. There are depths in this microcosm which this torch only has entered, silences which this speaker only has broken, cries which he only knows how to articulate.

'The soundest disclosing and expounding of men is by their natures and ends,' so the one who is best qualified to give us information on this question tells us, – by their natures and ends; 'the weaker sort by their natures, and the wisest by their ends'; and 'the distance' of this wisest sort 'from the ends to which they aspire,' is that 'from which one may take measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires.'

The first end which these Elizabethan Men of Letters grasped at, the thing which they pursued with all the intensity and concentration of a master passion, was —power, political power. They wanted to rule their own time, and not the future only. 'You are hurt, because you do not reign,' is the inuendo which they permit us to apply to them as the key to their proceedings. 'Such men as this are never at heart's ease,' Caesar remarks in confidence to a friend, 'whiles they behold a greater than themselves.' 'Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,' he adds, 'and tell me truly what thou think'st of him.' These are the kind of men that seek instinctively 'predominance,' not in a clique or neighbourhood only, – they are not content with a domestic reflection of their image, they seek to stamp it on the state and on the world. These Elizabethan Men of Letters were men who sought from the first, with inveterate determination, to rule their own time, and they never gave up that point entirely. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, they were determined to make their influence felt in that age, in spite of the want of encouragement which the conditions of that time offered to such an enterprise. But they sought that end not instinctively only, but with the stedfastness of a rational, scientifically enlightened purpose. It was an enterprise in which the intense motivity of that new and so 'conspicuous' development of the particular and private nature, which lies at the root of such a genius, was sustained by the determination of that not less superior development of the nobler nature in man, by the motivity of the intellect, by the sentiment which waits on that, by the motive of 'the larger whole,' which is, in this science of it, 'the worthier.'

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.

That this, at all events, was a state of things that was not going to endure, became palpable about that time to the philosophic mind. The transition from the rule of a sovereign who was mistress of 'the situation,' who understood that it was a popular power which she was wielding – the transition from the rule of a Queen instructed in the policy of a tyranny, inducted by nature into its arts, to the policy of that monarch who had succeeded to her throne, and whose 'CREST' began to be reared here then in the face of the insulted reviving English nationality, – this transition appeared upon the whole, upon calmer reflection, at least to the more patient minds of that age, all that could reasonably at that time be asked for. No better instrument for stimulating and strengthening the growing popular sentiment, and rousing the latent spirit of the nation, could have been desired by the Elizabethan politicians at that crisis, 'for the great labour was with the people' – that uninstructed power, which makes the sure basis of tyrannies – that power which Mark Antony takes with him so easily – the ignorant, tyrannical, humour-led masses – the masses that still roar their Elizabethan stupidities from the immortal groups of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. We ourselves have not yet overtaken the chief minds of this age; and the gulf that separated them from those overpowering numbers in their own time, to whose edicts they were compelled to pay an external submission, was broad indeed. The difficulty of establishing an understanding with this power was the difficulty. They wanted that 'pulpit' from which Brutus and Mark Antony swayed it by turns so easily – that pulpit from which Mark Antony showed it Caesar's mantle. They wanted some organ of communication with these so potent and resistless rulers – some 'chair' from which they could repeat to them in their own tongue the story of their lost institutions, and revive in them the memory of 'the kings their ancestors' – some school in which they could collect them and instruct them in the scientific doctrine of the commons, the doctrine of the common-weal and its divine supremacy. They wanted a school in which they could tell them stories – stories of various kinds – such stories as they loved best to hear – Midsummer stories, or Winter's tales, and stories of their own battle-fields – they wanted a school in which they could teach the common people History (and not English history only), with illustrations, large as life, and a magic lantern to aid them, – 'visible history.'

But to wait till these slow methods had taken effect, would be, perhaps, to wait, not merely till their estate in the earth was done, but till the mischief they wished to avert was accomplished. And thus it was, that the proposal 'to go the beaten track of getting arms into their hands under colour of Caesar's designs, and because the people understood them not,' came to be considered. To permit the new dynasty to come in without making any terms with it, without insisting upon a definition of that indefinite power which the Tudors had wielded with impunity, and without challenge, would be to make needless work for the future, and to ignore criminally the responsibilities of their own position, so at least some English statesmen of that time, fatally for their favour with the new monarch, were known to have thought. 'To proceed by process,' to check by gradual constitutional measures that overgrown and monstrous power in the state, was the project which these statesmen had most at heart. But that was a movement which required a firm and enlightened popular support. Charters and statutes were dead letters till that could be had. It was fatal to attempt it till that was secured. Failing in that popular support, if the statesman who had attempted that movement, if the illustrious chief, and chief man of his time, who headed it, did secretly meditate other means for accomplishing the same end – which was to limit the prerogative – such means as the time offered, and if the evidence which was wanting on his trial had been produced in proof of it, who that knows what that crisis was would undertake to convict him on it now? He was arrested on suspicion. He was a man who had undertaken to set bounds to the absolute will of the monarch, and therefore he was a dangerous man. [He (Sir Walter Raleigh), together with the Lord Chobham, Sir J. Fortescue, and others, would have obliged the king to articles before he was admitted to the throne, and thought the number of his countrymen should be limited. —Osborne's Memorials of King James.] The charges that were made against him on that shameless trial were indignantly repelled. 'Do you mix, me up with these spiders?' (alluding, perhaps, more particularly to the Jesuit associated with him in this charge). 'Do you think I am a Jack Cade or a Robin Hood?' he said. But though the evidence on this trial is not only in itself illegal, and by confession perjured, but the report of it comes to us with a falsehood on the face of it, and is therefore not to be taken without criticism; that there was a movement of some kind meditated about that time, by persons occupying chief places of trust and responsibility in the nation – a movement not favourable to the continuance of 'the standing departments' in the precise form in which they then stood – that the project of an administrative reform had not, at least, been wholly laid aside – that there was something which did not fully come out on that trial, any one who looks at this report of it will be apt to infer.

It was a project which had not yet proceeded to any overt act; there was no legal evidence of its existence produced on the trial; but suppose there were here, then, already, men 'who loved the fundamental part of state,' more than in such a crisis 'they doubted the change of it' – men 'who preferred a noble life before a long' – men, too, 'who were more discreet' than they were 'fearful,' who thought it good practice to 'jump a body with a dangerous medicine that was sure of death without it;' suppose there was a movement of that kind arrested here then, and the evidence of it were produced, what Englishman, or who that boasts the English lineage to-day, can have a word to say about it? Who had a better right than those men themselves, those statesmen, those heroes, who had waked and watched for their country's weal so long, who had fought her battles on land and sea, and planned them too, not in the tented field and on the rocking deck only, but in the more 'deadly breach' of civil office, whose scaling-ladders had entered even the tyrant's council chamber, – who had a better right than those men themselves to say whether they would be governed by a government of laws, or by the will of the most despicable 'one-only-man power,' armed with sword and lash, that ever a nation of Oriental slaves in their political imbecility cowered under? Who were better qualified than those men themselves, instructed in detail in all the peril of that crisis, – men who had comprehended and weighed with a judgment which has left no successor to its seat, all the conflicting considerations and claims which that crisis brought with it, – who better qualified than these to decide on the measures by which the hideous nuisances of that time should be abated; by which that axe, that sword, that rack, that stake, and all those burglar's tools, and highwayman's weapons, should be taken out of the hands of the mad licentious crew with which an evil time had armed them against the common-weal – those weapons of lawless power, which the people had vainly, for want of leaders, refused before-hand to put into their hands. Who better qualified than these natural chiefs and elected leaders of the nation, to decide on the dangerous measures for suppressing the innovation, which the Tudor and his descendants had accomplished in that ancient sovereignty of laws, which was the sovereignty of this people, which even the Norman and the Plantagenet had been taught to acknowledge? Who better qualified than they to call to an account – 'the thief,' the 'cut-purse of the empire and the rule,' who 'found the precious diadem on a shelf, and stole and put it in his pocket'?

['Shall the blessed Sun of Heaven prove a micher, and eat blackberries'? A question not to be asked! Shall the blessed 'Son of England' prove a thief, and take purses? A question to be asked. 'The poor abuses of the time want countenance.'

Lear. Take that from me, my friend, who have the power to seal the accuser's lips.]

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.'

But then, of course, it is only by the rarest conjunction of circumstances, that the movements and plans which such a state of things gives rise to, can get any other than the most opprobrious name and place in history. Success is their only certificate of legitimacy. To attempt to overthrow a government still so strongly planted in the endurance and passivity of the people, might seem, perhaps, to some minds in these circumstances, a hopeless, and, therefore, a criminal undertaking.

'That opportunity which then they had to take from us, to resume, we have again,' might well have seemed a sufficient plea, so it could have been made good. But it is not strange that some few, even then, should find it difficult to believe that the national ruin was yet so entire, that the ashes of the ancient nobility and commons of England were yet so cold, as that a system of despotism like that which was exercised here then, could be permanently and securely fastened over them. It is not strange that it should seem to these impossible that there should not be enough of that old English spirit which, only a hundred years before, had ranged the people in armed thousands, in defence of LAW, against absolutism, enough of it, at least, to welcome and sustain the overthrow of tyranny, when once it should present itself as a fact accomplished, instead of appealing beforehand to a courage, which so many instances of vain and disastrous resistance had at last subdued, and to a spirit which seemed reduced at last, to the mere quality of the master's will.

That was a narrow dominion apparently to which King James consigned his great rival in the arts of government, but that rival of his contrived to rear a 'crest' there which will outlast 'the tyrants,' and 'look fresh still' when tombs that artists were at work on then 'are spent.' 'And when a soldier was his theme, my name – my name [namme de plume] was nor far off.' King James forgot how many weapons this man carried. He took one sword from him, he did not know that that pen, that harmless goose-quill, carried in its sheath another. He did not know what strategical operations the scholar, who was 'an old soldier' and a politician also, was capable of conducting under such conditions. Those were narrow quarters for 'the Shepherd of the Ocean,' for the hero of the two hemispheres, to occupy so long; but it proved no bad retreat for the chief of this movement, as he managed it. It was in that school of Elizabethan statesmanship which had its centre in the Tower, that many a scholarly English gentleman came forth prepared to play his part in the political movements that succeeded. It was out of that school of statesmanship that John Hampden came, accomplished for his part in them.

The papers that the chief of the Protestant cause prepared in that literary retreat to which the Monarch had consigned him, by means of those secret channels of communication among the better minds which he had established in the reign of Elizabeth, became the secret manual of the revolutionary chiefs; they made the first blast of the trumpet that summoned at last the nation to its feet. 'The famous Mr. Hamden' (says an author, who writes in those 'next ages' in which so many traditions of this time are still rife) 'a little before the civil wars was at the charge of transcribing three thousand four hundred and fifty-two sheets of Sir Walter Raleigh's MSS., as the amanuensis himself told me, who had his close chamber, his fire and candle, with an attendant to deliver him the originals and take his copies as fast as he could write them.' That of itself is a pretty little glimpse of the kind of machinery which the Elizabethan literature required for its 'delivery and tradition' at the time, or near the times, in which it was produced. That is a view of 'an Interior' 'before the civil wars.' It was John Milton who concluded, on looking over, a long time afterwards, one of the unpublished papers of this statesman, that it was his duty to give it to the public. 'Having had,' he says, 'the MS. of this treatise ["The Cabinet Council"] written by Sir Walter Raleigh, many years in my hands, and finding it lately by chance among other books and papers, upon reading thereof, I thought it a kind of injury to withhold longer the work of so eminent an author from the public; it being both answerable in style to other works of his already extant, as far as the subject would permit, and given me for a true copy by a learned man at his death, who had collected several such pieces.'

'A kind of injury.' – That is the thought which would naturally take possession of any mind, charged with the responsibility of keeping back for years this man's writings, especially his choicest ones – papers that could not be published then on account of the subject, or that came out with the leaves uncut, labouring with the restrictions which the press opposed then to the issues of such a mind.

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.

But at the same time, this was a power which the wise men of that age were far from being willing to let loose upon society then in that stage of its development; very far were they from being willing to put the reins into its hands. To balance the dangers that were threatening the world at that crisis was always the problem. It was a very narrow line that the policy which was to save the state had to keep to then. There were evils on both sides. But to the scientific mind there appeared to be a choice in them. The measure on one side had been taken, and it was in all men's hearts, but the abysses on the other no man had sounded. 'The danger of stirring things,' – the dangers, too, of that unscanned swiftness that too late ties leaden pounds to his heels were the dangers that were always threatening the Elizabethan movement, and defining and curbing it. The wisest men of that time leaned towards the monarchy, the monarchy that was, rather than the anarchy that was threatening them. The will of the one rather than the wills of the many, the head of the one rather than 'the many-headed.' To effect the change which the time required without 'wrenching all' – without undoing the work of ages – without setting at large from the restraints of reverence and custom the chained tiger of an unenlightened popular will, this was the problem. The wisest statesmen, the most judicious that the world has ever known were here, with their new science, weighing in exactest scales those issues. We must not quarrel with their concessions to tyranny on the one hand, nor with their determination to effect changes on the other, until we are able to command entirely the position they occupied, and the opposing dangers they had always to consider. We must not judge them till they have had their hearing. What freedom and what hope there is of it upon the earth to-day, is the legacy of their perseverance and endurance.

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.

Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another. Driven from the open field, they fought in secret. 'I will bandy with thee in faction, I will o'errun thee with policy, I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways,' the Jester who brought their challenge said. The Elizabethan England rejected the Elizabethan Man. She would have none of his meddling with her affairs. She sent him to the Tower, and to the block, if ever she caught him meddling with them. She buried him alive in the heart of his time. She took the seals of office, she took the sword, from his hands and put a pen in it. She would have of him a Man of Letters. And a Man of Letters he became. A Man of Runes. He invented new letters in his need, letters that would go farther than the sword, that carried more execution in them than the great seal. Banished from the state in that isle to which he was banished, he found not the base-born Caliban only, to instruct, and train, and subdue to his ends, but an Ariel, an imprisoned Ariel, waiting to be released, able to conduct his masques, able to put his girdles round the earth, and to 'perform and point' to his Tempest.

'Go bring the RABBLE, o'er whom I give thee power, here to this place,' was the New Magician's word.

[Here is another version of it.

'When Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, lived, every room in Gorhambury was served with a pipe of water from the pond distant about a mile off. In the lifetime of Mr. Anthony Bacon the water ceased, and his lordship coming to the inheritance could not recover the water without infinite charge. When he was Lord Chancellor, he built Verulam House close by the pond yard, for a place of privacy when he was called upon to dispatch any urgent business. And being asked why he built there, his lordship answered that, seeing he could not carry the water to his House, he would carry his House to the water.]

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.