II
The Essays
The Elizabethan age is the most creative period in English literature. The foreign wars in which the young Chaucer bore a part had ended in the abandonment of the English claim to the French crown. The civil Wars of the Roses had brought forward the Tudor family, who in Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, gave to the English nation three of the ablest rulers it has ever produced. By the marriage of one of the Tudors the Scottish king who had become heir to the English throne was to carry peace with him into England after three centuries of warfare on the northern border. For the first time Englishmen had leisure to devote their energies to other interests than war upon their neighbors. Fortunately, just at this time, the great wave of the Renaissance, the new birth of letters, having spent itself in Italy and crossed France and Spain, reached the shores of England. There it was eagerly welcomed by men, who, if they had not the poise and mental reach of the Italians of the Renaissance, or the gayety and sense of form of their French contemporaries, had yet more daring and more intellectual curiosity. The same spirit of adventure that carried Sir Francis Drake around the globe induced the Elizabethans to try all sorts of new forms in literature. Shakspere would not be "our myriad-minded
