WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 367 



the style of the vernacular. By these means much of the 

 learning popularised by our poets, essayists, and dramatists 

 came to us at second-hand, and bore the stamp of con- 

 temporary genius. In like manner, the best works of Italian, 

 French, Spanish, and German literature were introduced into 

 Great Britain together with the classics. The age favoured 

 translation, and English readers, before the close of the 

 sixteenth century, were in possession of a cosmopolitan 

 library in their mother tongue, including choice specimens of 

 ancient and modern masterpieces. 



These circumstances sufficiently account for the richness 

 and variety of Elizabethan literature. They also help to 

 explain two points which must strike every student of that 

 literature its native freshness, and its marked unity of style. 



Elizabethan literature was fresh and native, because it was 

 the utterance of a youthful race, aroused to vigorous self- 

 consciousness under conditions which did not depress or 

 exhaust its energies. The English opened frank eyes upon 

 the discovery of the world and man, which had been effected 

 by the Renaissance. They were not wearied with collecting, 

 collating, correcting, transmitting to the press. All the hard 

 work of assimilating the humanities had been done for them. 

 They had only to survey and to enjoy, to feel and to express, 

 to lay themselves open to delightful influences, to con the 

 noble lessons of the past, to thrill beneath the beauty and 

 the awe of an authentic revelation. Criticism had not laid 

 its cold, dry finger on the blossoms of the fancy. The new 

 learning was still young enough to be a thing of wonder and 

 entrancing joy. To absorb it sufficed. Like the blood made 

 in the veins of a growing man by strong meat and sound 

 wine, it coursed to the brain and created a fine frenzy. That 

 was a period of bright ideas, stimulating creative faculty, 

 animating the people with hope and expectation, undimmed, 

 untarnished by the corrosion of the analytic reason. * Nobly 

 wild, not mad,' the adolescent giants of that age, Marlowe 

 and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare, broke into spontaneous 

 numbers, charged with the wisdom and the passion of the 

 ages fused in a divine clairvoyance. 



