beginnings of the language in which it is written. A study of the literature and the intellectual development of England through the Elizabethan Age, should. precede the thorough study of the American writers. This portion of English history is held in common by both nations. The elements of race and environment, as they affected our English ancestors, must be fully understood in order for us to appreciate the character and spirit of the founders of our nation. We must weigh the great events of British history and their influence upon the development of the English race. We must acquaint ourselves with the history and development of English thought and language; with the great minds that have shaped and moulded these from Cædmon to Chaucer and from Chaucer to Shakespeare. This done, we have mastered Book I. of the History of American Thought and Literature. It remains then to trace the intellectual evolution of a part of the English people under a new environment, amid new scenes of action.
Epoch. — (Tyler, 11-15.) Our literature made its first feeble beginnings in a most fortunate time, a time—
"When the firmament of English literature was all ablaze with the light of her full-orbed and most dazzling writers, the wits, the dramatists, scholars, orators, singers, philosophers, who formed that incomparable group of titanic men gathered in London during the earlier years of the seventeenth century." — Tyler.
When Jamestown was settled in 1607, Spenser had been dead only eight years; Shakespeare was at the
