Vol. I. No. 30 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL DEVOTED-TO-THE: BEST: INTERESTS:OF THENORTHSHORE 
BEVERLY, MASS., SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1904 
Three Cents 
MASTERS OF 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
Chaucer to Spenser, 1400 — 1553. 
BY D. F. LAMSON. 
When the sun of Chaucer had set, 
no other great light appeared above 
the horizon until Edmund Spenser 
arose to sing the glories of the Virgin 
Queen and her Court. The century 
after Chaucer was for the most part a 
century of mental dullness and gloom. 
Warton, in his History of English 
Poetry, has compared the appearance 
of Chaucer to ‘‘a premature day inan 
English spring, after which the gloom 
of winter returns, and the buds and 
blossoms which have been called forth 
by a transient sunshine are nipped by 
frosts and scattered by storms.” For 
more than a hundred years, from the 
death of Chaucer to the time of Henry 
VIII., there is no really great name 
in English literaturé. The wars and 
cruelties and vices of the age left no 
room for the cultivation of letters. 
Poetry of a sort continued to be writ- 
ten, but it was without imagination 
and without grace; and as for the 
writing of prose, it was almost a lost 
att. It was a dreary level of literary 
mediocrity. Writers like Occleve and 
Lydgate wrote verses, plays and 
masques, largely feeble imitations of 
Chaucer’s matchless numbers. Out 
of the intellectual commonplace, how- 
ever, rose one man, a scholar and 
linguist, whose work sheds its benign 
radiance down to our own time; this 
was William Tindale, one of the first 
and noblest laborers in the field of 
Bible translation, and one who gave 
the Bible its literary form. Tindale 
was a master of clear, vigorous, idiom- 
atic English ; his translation, made in 
exile and in constant peril of martyr- 
dom, has colored all subsequent Eng- 
lish versions; many of our choicest 
renderings are due to Tindale, as 
‘the Captain of our salvation,’’ ‘f meet 
for the inheritance of the saints in 
light,” “turned to flight the armies of 
the aliens.” Tuindale’s correct schol- 
arship gave ‘‘love”’ in the 13th chapter 
of First Corinthians, thus anticipating 
the Revised Version, later translators 
generally substituting ‘charity,’ a 
much weaker and less correct render- 
ing. Not only asafearless Reformer, 
but as a man of learning and a prince 
among Bible translators, Tindale de- 
serves the respect and gratitude of all 
English speaking peoples. 
Near the end of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, in 1477, the year in which 
Tindale was born, Caxton brought 
the printing-press to England and set 
it up in Westminster. It was a rude 
affair, but it soon became an engine 
of mighty power. It contained the 
germs of wonderful advance in learn- 
UNITED SHOE MACHINERY CO.’S NEW PLANT AT BEVERLY. 
The accompanying picture shows the 
extensive layout of the United Shoe 
Machinery company’s plant, fast near- 
ing completion at Ryal Side, Beverly. 
Work was started more than a year 
ago, and the buildings will proba- 
bly be ready for use by early spring. 
The city of Beverly is making exten- 
sive improvements in this vicinity, 
new streets being built, sewers laid, 
etc. It is to the completion of the 
plant Beverly looks for its big “boom.” 
Factory A, on the right, is 522 feet 
long by 62 feet wide; factory B, to 
the left, has the same dimensions ; 
factory C, next to the left, is 280 feet 
long by 62 feet wide, while factory E, 
the foundry, on the extreme left, is 
222 feet long by 109 feet wide. In 
the rear of the foundry is factory F, 
the power house, with a tall iron 
chimney. The buildings are of con- 
crete and are thoroughly modern. 
The above picture is used through 
courtesy of the Citizen Stamp com- 
pany of Beverly, which has used the 
cut on a postal card printed by them. 
