A Group of Great Names.
But the greater names which went to illustrate with their splendor the times of Elizabeth, only began to come to people’s knowledge after she had been upon the throne some twenty years.
Spenser was a boy of five, when she came to power: John Lilly, the author of Euphues which has given us the word euphuistic, and which provoked abundant caricatures, of more or less fairness—was born the same year with Spenser; Sir Philip Sidney a year later; Sir Walter Raleigh a year earlier (1553); Richard Hooker, the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity, in 1554; Lord Bacon in 1561; Shakespeare in 1564. These are great names to stand so thickly strewed over ten or twelve years of time. I do not name them, because I lay great stress on special dates: For my own part, I find them hard things to keep in mind—except I group them thus—and I think a man or woman can work and worry at worthier particularities than these. But when Elizabeth had been twenty years a Queen, and was in the prime of her womanly powers—six years after the slaughter of St. Bartholomew—when the first English colony had just been planted in Virginia, and Sir Francis Drake was coasting up and down the shores of California; when Shakespeare was but a lad of fourteen, and poaching (if he ever did poach there—which is doubtful) in Charlecote Park; when Francis Bacon was seventeen, and was studying in Paris—Philip Sidney was twenty-four; in the ripeness of his young manhood, and just returned from Holland, he was making love—vainly as it proved—to the famous and the ill-fated Penelope Devereaux.
Richard Hooker—of the same age, was teaching Hebrew in the University of Oxford, and had not yet made that unfortunate London marriage (tho’ very near it) by which he was yoked with one whom old Izaak Walton—charitable as the old angler was—describes as a silly, clownish woman, and withal a perfect Xantippe.
The circumstances which led to this awkward marriage show so well the child-like simplicity of this excellent man, that they are worth noting. He had come up to London, and was housed where preachers were wont to go; and it being foul weather, and he thoroughly wetted, was behoven to the hostess for dry clothes, and such other attentions as made him look upon her as a special Providence, who could advise and care for him in all things: So, he accepted her proffer to him of her own daughter, who proved to him quite another sort of Providence, and a grievous thorn in the side; and when his friends, on visits to his homestead in after years, found the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity—rocking the cradle, or minding the sheep, or looking after the kettles, and expressed sympathy—“My dear fellows,” said he—“if Saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this Life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my Wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labor (as indeed I do daily) to submit mine to his will and possess my soul in patience and peace.”
I don’t know if any of our parish will care to read the Ecclesiastical Polity; but if you have courage thereto, you will find in this old master of sound and cumbrous English prose, passages of rare eloquence, and many turns of expression, which for their winning grace, their aptitude, their quality of fastening themselves upon the mind, are not overmatched by those of any Elizabethan writer. His theology is old and rankly conservative; but he shows throughout a beautiful reverence for that all-embracing Law, “whose seat (as he says) is the Bosom of God, and whose voice is the Harmony of the World.”[91]