370 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



due to the felicitous circumstances of the nation in that 

 earlier period. 



II 



What, then, is the characteristic of Elizabethan poetry? 

 I think the answer to this question lies in the words 

 freedom, adolescence, spontaneity; mainly freedom. The 

 writers of that age were free from the bondage to great 

 names, Virgil or Cicero or Seneca. They owned no allegiance 

 to great languages, like the Latin ; to famous canons of taste, 

 like the Aristotelian unities ; to scholastic authority and 

 academical prescription. They were politically and socially 

 free, adoring the majesty of England in the person of their 

 sovereign, and flattering a national ideal when they burned 

 poetic incense to Elizabeth. That strain of servility which 

 jars upon our finer sense in the romantic epics of Ariosto 

 and Tasso is wholly absent from ' The Faery Queen.' They 

 were notably free in all that appertains to religion. Where 

 but in England could a playwright have used words at once 

 so just and so bold as these of Dekker? 



The best of men 



That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer 

 A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit : 

 The first true gentleman that ever breathed. 



A delicate taste can hardly be offended by this reference to 

 Christ, and yet we feel that it could not have been made 

 except in an age of undisputed liberty. Their freedom was 

 the freedom of young strength, untrammelled energies, with 

 El Dorado in the western main, and boundless regions for 

 the mind to traverse. This makes their touch on truth and 

 goodness and beauty so right, so natural, so unerring. They 

 have the justice of perception, the clarity of vision, the 

 cleanliness of feeling which belong to generous and healthy 

 manhood in its earliest prime. The consequence of this 

 freedom was that each man in that age wrote what he 

 thought best, wrote out of himself, and sang spontaneously. 

 He had no fear of academies, of censorship, of critical coteries, 



