But in the part of this work referred to, from which the ensuing extracts are made, it was the life, and not merely the writings of the founders of this school which was produced in evidence of this claim. It was the life in which these disguised ulterior aims show themselves from the first on the historic surface, in the form of great contemporaneous events, events which have determined and shaped the course of the world's history since then; it was the life in which these intents show themselves too boldly on the surface, in which they penetrate the artistic disguise, and betray themselves to the antagonisms which were waiting to crush them; it was the life which combined these antagonisms for its suppression; it was the life and death of the projector and founder of the liberties of the New World, and the obnoxious historian and critic of the tyrannies of the Old, it was the life and death of Sir Walter Raleigh that was produced as the Historical Key to the Elizabethan Art of Tradition. It was the Man of the Globe Theatre, it was the Man in the Tower with his two Hemispheres, it was the modern 'Hercules and his load too,' that made in the original design of it, the Frontispiece of this volume.
'But stay I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced and made a constellation there.
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like night,
And despairs day, but for thy Volume's light.
['To draw no envy Shake-spear on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame.'—BEN JONSON.]
The machinery that was necessarily put in operation for the purpose of conducting successfully, under those conditions, any honourable or decent enterprise, presupposes a forethought and skill, a faculty for dramatic arrangement and successful plotting in historic materials, happily so remote from anything which the exigencies of our time have ever suggested to us, that we are not in a position to read at a glance the history of such an age; the history which lies on the surface of such an age when such men—men who are men—are at work in it. These are the Elizabethan men that we have to interpret here, because, though they rest from their labours, their works do follow them—the Elizabethan Men of Letters; and we must know what that title means before we can read them or their works, before we can 'untie their spell.'
CHAPTER II.
THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, AND THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS.
'The times, in many cases, give great light to true interpretations.' Advancement of Learning.
'On fair ground
I could beat forty of them.'
'I could myself
Take up a brace of the best of them, yea the two tribunes.'
'But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic,
And manhood is called foolery when it stands
Against a falling fabric.'—Coriolanus.