1074 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
named writers approach in their composition the English of to-day ; 
and this change cannot be accounted for merely by asserting that 
Wyatt and Surrey were courtiers and aristocrats, and had travelled 
in France and Spain. 
The sixteenth century was also the era of the Protestant Reform- 
ation ; and, with the interminable controversies on the subject of 
religion, came also a quickening of the national intelligence, and 
an extension of the benefits of education. 
New aims, new desires, new aspirations, needed once more the 
inspired voice to give them utterance; and under the Tudor 
sovereigns came the dawn of that glorious age, which, reaching 
its apogee under the last of that race, has been called the Eliza- 
bethan Period. To this era may be ascribed the birth of the true 
drama, the offspring of the Moral Plays, and a descendant of the 
much older Miracle Plays, the last-named dating back to the 
twelfth century. All through the long reign of Elizabeth the 
nation was in constant peril from plots at home, and the 
enmity of Spain abroad, when Spain was to the Englishman 
of the sixteenth century what Russia is to the Briton of to-day. 
Gradually England felt its rising strength, and the exploits of 
the buccaneers on the Spanish Main, the gallant struggle for 
liberty in the Netherlands, and, above all, the crowning victory 
over the Armada in the Chena. stirred the soul of the nation 
to its core, and proved fertile sources of inspiration to the poet, 
the dramatist, and the prose-writer. To this age belong Marlowe, 
Shakespeare, Sydney, Spenser, and Bacon,—the mere mention of 
whose names to the student of English literature is sufficient to 
mark the influence that this heroic epoch had in the birth and 
development of genius. Marlow was the dramatist of the period, 
Spenser the poet, and Bacon the philosopher ; but Shakespeare 
was all these in one, and more. 
Of Shakespeare we may say in the words of Hallam: “The 
name of Shakespeare is the greatest in our literature—it is the 
greatest in all literature. No man ever came near him in the 
creative powers of the mind; no man ever had such strength at 
once, and such variety of imagination.” 
Like Spenser and Chaucer, Shakespeare’s birth and early history 
are ugaes in obscurity ; like Chaucer he towers aloft above 
his fellows ; yet he, too, had his forerunners, and in each of the 
arts in which he excelled he had his rivals among contemporaries. 
This was not the age of the courtly gallant ; but out of the solid 
Saxon basis on which the nation was founded sprang the “ Poor 
Scholars” such as Nash, Peile, Greene, and Marlowe. Well 
educated, and with expensive tastes, which they were debarred 
from exercising by their poverty, they placed no limit on their 
satires, having nothing to lose but their lives. Their time was 
spent in rioting, drunkenness, and debauchery ; but, strange to 
