indeed for me to add aught to the praises so lavishly heaped upon the mighty Enchanter by all good judges both at home and abroad; be it enough to say that the lowest English clown who, wedged tight among his fellows in some barn, listens breathless to Lear's outbursts or to Iago's whispers, is sharing in a feast such as never fell to the lot of either Pericles or Augustus, of Leo the Tenth or Louis the Fourteenth.[1] In the last twelve years of Elizabeth's life, London had privileges far beyond any favours ever bestowed on Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, or Weimar; the great Queen might have gathered together in one room Spenser, Shakespere, Bacon, and Hooker; to say nothing of her other guests, the statesmen who outwitted Rome, the seamen who singed the proud Spaniard's beard, the knights who fought so manfully for the good cause in Munster, in Normandy, and in Flanders. Nowhere does the spirit of that high-reaching age breathe stronger than in Spenser's verse; how widely apart stands his Protestant earnestness both from the loose godlessness of Ariosto, and from the burning Roman zeal of Tasso, that herald of the coming Papal reaction! A shout of triumph burst forth from England when the Faery Queen was given to her in 1590; our island had at last a great poet, such as she had not beheld for two centuries. Now began the golden age of her literature; and this age was to last for about fourscore years. Many a child that clapped its tiny hands over the earliest news of the
- ↑ The last Act of Othello is a rare specimen of Shakespere's diction; of every five nouns, verbs, and adverbs, four are Teutonic. Of course he is far more Teutonic in comedy than in tragedy.
