Fortunately there are plenty of them. In proportion to the population, far, very far more than we have even at the present day, when every year the reviews find it necessary to cry out over the increasing tide of new books. Of poets, in what other age could the historian enumerate forty of the higher and nearly two hundred of the lower rank? Of the forty, most are well remembered and read even to the present day; for instance, Chapman, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Robert Greene, Marston, Sackville, Sylvester, Donne, Drayton, Drummond, Gascoigne, Marlowe, Raleigh, Spenser, Wither, may be taken as poets still read and loved, while the list does not include Shakespeare and the dramatists. Nearly two hundred and forty poets! Why, with a population of a hundred millions of English-speaking people now in the world, we have not a half or a sixth of that number, while in the same proportion we should have to equal in number the Elizabethan singers—about 5000. But in that age every gentleman wrote verse; the cultivation of poetry was like the cultivation of music. Every man could play an instrument; every man could take his part in a glee or madrigal; so, also, every man could turn his set of verses, with the result of a fine and perfect flower of poetry which has never been surpassed.
But they were not only poets. They had every kind of literature in far greater abundance, considering the small number of educated people, than exists in our own time, and in as great variety. Consider! There are now scattered over the whole world a hundred millions of English-speaking people, of whom at least five-sixths read something, if it is only a penny newspaper, and at least a half read books of some kind. In Elizabeth's reign there were about six millions, of whom more than half could not read at all. The reading public of Great Britain and Ireland, considered with regard to numbers, resembled what is now found in Holland, Norway, or Denmark. Yet from so small a people came this mass of literature, great, varied, and immortal.
In the matter of fiction alone they were already rich. There were knightly books: the Morte d'Arthur, the Seven Champions, Amadis of Gaul, Godfrey of Bouillon, Palmerin of England, and many more. There were story-books, as the Seven Wise Masters, the Gesta Romanorum, the Amorous Fiammetta, the jest books of Skogin, Tarleton, Hobson, Skelton, Peele, and others. There was the famous Euphues, Sidney's Arcadia, all the pastoral romances, and the "picaresque" novels of Nash and Dekker. Then there were the historians and chroniclers, as Stow, Camden, Speed, Holinshed; the essayists, as Sir Thomas Browne, Ascham, Bacon; the theologians, of whom there were hundreds; the satirists, as Bishop Hall and Marston; the writers of what we should call light literature—Greene, Nash, Peele, and Dekker. And there were translations, as from the Italian, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Biondello, Tasso, and others; from the French, Froissart, Montaigne, Plutarch (Amyot), the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (in the Hundred Merry Tales), and the stories of the Forest and the Palace of Pleasure. And there were all the dramatists. Never before or since has the country been better supplied with new literature and good books.
Remember, again, everything was new. All the books were new; the printing-press was new; you could almost count the volumes that had been issued. It was reckoned a great thing for Dr. Dee to have three thousand printed books. Every scholar found a classic which had not been translated, and took him in hand. Every traveller brought home some modern writer, chiefly Italian, previously unknown. Every sailor brought home the record of a voyage to unknown seas and to unknown shores. It was a time when the world had become suddenly conscious of a vast, an inconceivable widening, the results of which could not yet be foretold. But the knowledge filled men with such hopes as had never before been experienced. Scholars and poets, merchants and sailors, rovers and adventurers, all alike were moved by the passion and ecstasy of the time. Strange time! Wonderful time! We who read the history of that time too often confine our attention to the political history. We are able, with the help of Froude, quite clearly to understand the perplexities and troubles of the Maiden Queen; we see her, in her anxiety, playing off Spaniard against Frenchman, to avoid destruction should they act together. But the people know and suspect none of these things. State affairs are too high for them. They only see the brightness of the sky and the promise of the day; they only feel the quickening influence of the spring; their blood is fired; they have got new hopes, a new faith, new openings, new learning. And they bear themselves accordingly. That is to say, with extravagances innumerable, with confidence and courage lofty, unexampled. Why, it fires the blood of this degenerate time only to think of the mighty enlargement of that time. When one considers when they lived and what they talked, one understands Kit Marlowe and Robert Greene, and that wild company of scholars and poets; they would cram into whatever narrow span of life was granted them all—all—all—that life can give of learning and poetry, and feasting and love and joy. They were intoxicated with the ideas of their time. They were weighed down with the sheaves—the golden harvest of that wondrous reaping. Who would not live in such a time? The little world had become, almost suddenly, very large, inconceivably large. The boys of London, playing about the river stairs and the quays, listened to the talk of men who had sailed along those newly-discovered coasts of the new great world, and had seen strange monsters and wild people. In the taverns men—bearded, bronzed, scarred—grave men, with deep eyes and low voice, who had sailed to the Guinea coast, round the Cape to Hindostan, across the Spanish Main, over the ocean to Virginia, sat in the tavern and told to youths with flushed cheeks and panting, eager breath queer tales of danger and escape between their cups of sack. We were not yet advanced beyond believing in the Ethiopian with four eyes, the Arimaspi with one eye, the Hippopodes or Centaurs, the Monopoli, or men who have no head, but carry their faces in their breasts and their eyes in their shoulders. None of these monsters, it is true, had ever been caught and brought home; but many an honest fellow, if hard pressed by his hearers, would reluctantly confess to having seen them. On the other hand, negroes and red Indians were frequently brought home and exhibited. And there were crocodiles, alive or stuffed; crocodiles' skins, the skins of bears and lions, monkeys, parrots, flying-fish dried, and other curious things. And there were always the legends—that of the land of gold, the Eldorado; that of the kingdom of Prester John; that of St. Brandan's Island; and, but this was later, the theory—proved with mathematical certainty—of the great southern continent. Enough, and more than enough, to inflame the imagination of adventurers, to drive the lads aboard ship, to make them long for the sails to be spread and to be making their way anywhere—anywhere—in search of adventure, conquest, glory, and gold.
BURGHLEY HOUSE
Such an enlargement, such hopes, can never again return to the world. That is impossible, save on one chance. We cannot make the world any wider; by this time we know it nearly all; the pristine mystery—the awfulness of the unknown—has wellnigh gone out of every land, even New Guinea and Central Africa. Yet there is this one chance. Science may and will widen the world—for her own disciples—in many new and unexpected ways. The sluggish imagination of the majority is little touched even by such marvels as the electric telegraph, the phonograph, the telephone. For them science in any form cannot enlarge their boundaries. Suppose, however, a thing to be achieved which should go right home to the comprehension, brain, and heart of every living man. Suppose that science should prevent, conquer, and annihilate disease. Suppose our span of life enlarged to two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years, and that suddenly. Think of the wild exaltations, the extravagances, the prodigalities, the omnivorous attempts of the scholar, the universal grasp of the physicist, the amazing and audacious experiments of chemist, electrician, biologist, and the long reach of the statesman! Think of these things, I say, and remember that in the age of Elizabeth, of Raleigh, Drake, Marlowe, Nash, Greene, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser, Bacon, and the rest similar causes produced similar effects.
We have seen the development of the mediæval house from the simple common hall. The Elizabethan house shows an immense advance in architecture. I believe that the noblest specimen now remaining is Burghley House in Northamptonshire, built by Cecil, Lord Burghley and first Earl of Exeter. The house is built about a square court. The west front has a lofty square tower. Let us, with Burghley House before us, read what Bacon directs as to building. The front, he says, must have a tower, with a wing on either side. That on the right was to consist of nothing but a "goodly room of some forty feet high"—he does not give the length—"and under it a room for dressing or preparing place at times of triumphs." By triumphs he means pageants, mummings, and masques. "On the other side, which is the household side, I wish it divided at the first into a hall and a chapel (with a partition between), both of good state and bigness. And these not to go all the length, but to have at the further end a winter and a summer parlor, both fair." Here are to be the cellars, kitchens, butteries, and pantries. "Beyond this front is to be a fair court, but three sides of it of a far lower building than the front. And in all the four corners of the court fair staircases, cast into turrets on the outside, and not within the row of buildings themselves.... Let the court not be paved, for that striketh up a great heat in summer and much cold in winter. But only some side alleys with a cross, and the quarters to graze being kept shorn, but not too near shorn." Stately galleries with colored windows are to run along the banquet side; on the household side, "chambers of presence and ordinary entertainments, with bedchambers." Beyond this court is to be a second of the same square, with a garden and a cloister. Other directions he gives which, if they were carried out, would make a very fine house indeed. But these we may pass over. In short, Bacon's idea of a good house was much like a college. That of Clare, Cambridge, for instance, would have been considered by Bacon as a very good house indeed, though the arrangement of the banqueting-room was not exactly as the philosopher would have it. The College of Christ's in its old form, with the garden square beyond, was still more after the manner recommended by Bacon.