"ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND " 441 



once enter this kingdom of poetic imagination and there feel 

 himself secure from the aggressions of vexatious cares. 



The choice of subject for his drama was thoroughly character- 

 istic ; for with all his love of humanity in its high and its low 

 degrees, the circumstances and motives of the aristocratic class 

 men born to responsibility and leadership, having the old- 

 time grace of manner and spirit most readily engaged his 

 interest and affection. But above all, aristocracy, for him, 

 meant that the strong should serve the weak, and should also 

 represent, as Aristotle explained, "ancient wealth and excel- 

 lence." 



Imaginative work was to have furnished relaxation from the 

 more taxing tasks Mr. Shaler had planned for the future ; it was 

 to have been, so to speak, the musical accompaniment of his 

 declining years, for as yet his pen had but begun "to glean his 

 teeming brain." In his power to maintain his own world of 

 thought irrespective of the casual surroundings, he proved his 

 kinship with the poets of the Tudor times. Had there been the 

 right kind of a tavern a Mermaid Tavern or a coffee- 

 house in Cambridge, he might have written there, or wherever 

 vivid men crowded together. In a paper in which he describes 

 his mode of writing, he says : - 



In my earlier experiences, as before noted, the lack of continuity was 

 marked, every suggestion came to an end in a few lines, rarely more than a 

 score. Now, with the dramatic purpose before me, the rush of conceptions 

 was almost baffling and their persistence such as to perplex me when engaged 

 in other tasks. To give an instance, one of many, showing the curious per- 

 sistence of these dramatic conceptions where they did not belong, I will tell 

 the story of how the picture of the progress of the Spanish Armada up the 

 British Channel came into the conscious field. I had written some days be- 

 fore the part of the third play of the " Elizabeth" up to the end of the scene 

 on Tilbury Field, and here put the work aside with no idea of what should 

 come next. I should have said that the whole business was quite as much 

 out of my mind as a chapter of the "Arabian Nights," for I was engaged in 

 looking after the affairs of a public dinner over which I had to preside and 

 act as toastmaster. In the middle of the feast, while, so far as I could judge, 



