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ing poets.

has had an extraordinary influence on all poetical natures. Cowley (1618-1667) declared that the read- Its influence ing of the Faery Queen, a copy of which he on succeedfound lying about in his mother's room, "made him irrecoverably a poet". It had a like effect on Keats. Milton, who calls him " our sage and serious poet", Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth, who writes in the Prelude of

Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace,

all own a deep debt to Spenser. Rightly, then, did Charles Lamb call him "the poet's poet ".

The best one-volume edition of Spenser is the Globe Edition (Macmillan). Excellent small editions, with notes, of Books I. and II. of the Faery Queen are published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford. For biography and criticism, Church's Life (English Men of Letters series), and Lowell's Essay in Among My Books (2nd series), are recommended.

CHAPTER VII.

ELIZABETHAN PROSE.

I. Richard Hooker.

In Hooker the Reformation and the stir of Elizabethan times produced a great prose writer, the first who possessed a really fine English style. He was able to Hooker's imtouch questions of theology with the master portance in English hand that made them plain to all, he under- literature. stood the form of church government that best suited the genius of the English nation, and was able to give his ideas the literary form and charm that make his work immortal. Hooker's biography has been delightfully told by Izaak Walton in his famous Lives, and although some fiction is doubtless mixed with the facts, Walton gives us a very interesting picture of the man.

Hooker was born at Heavitree, a suburb of Exeter, He was educated at the Exeter Grammar School, and in 1568 entered Corpus Christi

about 1554.

His birth, education,

and employ. College, Oxford. In 1581 Hooker

ments.

was

ordained priest, and in the same year preached for the first time at St. Paul's Cross. By the advice of his London landlady he married her daughter, and left the university in 1584, for the country living of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire. Here his friends and

former pupils visited him, and

found him with a book in his hand (it was the Odes of Horace), he being then, like humble and innocent Abel, tending his small allotment of sheep in a common field, which he told his pupils he was forced to do then, for that his servant was gone home to dine, and assist his wife to do some necessary household business. But when his servant returned and released him, then his two pupils attended him unto his house, where their best entertainment was his quiet company, which was presently denied them, for Richard was called to rock the cradle; and the rest of their welcome was so like this, that they stayed but till next morning.

From such a condition of life Hooker was drawn the next year to become Master of the Temple, London. Travers, the afternoon preacher, was a rigid supporter of the Calvinistic doctrine, while Hooker, who preached of mornings, upheld the Church as established by Elizabeth. Each answered the other from the pulpit, and thus arose a controversy in sermons, yet carried on by both sides with rare dignity.

His

Out of that controversy came Hooker's decision to write in eight books an inquiry into the laws concerning the government of the Church of England. "Ecclesiasti He set to work on his famous book, the Laws cal Polity". of Ecclesiastical Polity. Feeling that he could work better in the country than in London, he wrote to the archbishop asking to be moved to a country living.

1 Ecclesiastical polity=church government.

When I lost the freedom of my cell (he said), which was my college, yet I found some degree of it in my quiet country parsonage: but I am weary of the noise and opposition of this place; and, indeed, God and nature did not intend me for contentions, but for study and quietness.

He continues that, having begun his treatise on the right government of the Church, he will be unable to perfect it unless he can live

where I may study, and pray for God's blessing on my endeavours, and keep myself in peace and privacy, and behold God's blessings spring out of my mother earth, and eat my own bread without opposition.

The archbishop granted his request, and in 1591 Hooker became rector of Boscombe, near Salisbury. Here he finished four books of his great work, and they were published in 1594. The following year he removed to the living of Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury.

Walton draws an interesting picture of him as a country clergyman, and describes him as

an obscure, harmless man; a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown, or canonical coat; of a mean stature and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul; his body worn out, not with age, but with study and holy mortifications.

The fifth book appeared in 1597, but Hooker died before the remaining three books could be published. His death took place in 1600, and he was His death. buried in the chancel of Bishopsbourne

church. A monument with a bust was erected to his memory in 1635 by Sir William Cowper, who wrote an epitaph in verse, and was the first to associate the epithet "judicious" with Hooker.

The seventh and eighth books of the Ecclesiastical Polity were printed in 1647 from Hooker's rough manuscript notes; the sixth book seems to have been lost, and what is printed as the sixth book is scarcely genuine.

Hooker himself explains the spirit and plan of his

work in a

The subject

of the first book of his work-laws in general.

preface, followed by a summary of the things "handled in the books". The first book, which treats of laws in general, has perhaps the greatest literary interest. It deals with (1) the Law of God; (2) the Law of Nature; and (3) the Law of Scripture.

In regard to the Law of God, Hooker concludes that the Eternal Law is above all created intelligence, perfect, unchangeable, consistent with God's freedom.

This eternal law includes the law of natural agents, the law of angels, and the law of men. It is education and instruction that make man capable of law. He is bound by two kinds of law: by the law of nature, which binds him absolutely as he is a man; and by politic law, which binds men as members of society. Hooker states very well the reasons why men must live in societies, and how that method of living makes government a necessity. He

says,

forasmuch as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things needful for such a life as our nature doth desire, a life fit for the dignity of man; therefore to supply those defects and imperfections which are in us living singly and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship with others. This was the cause of men's uniting themselves at the first in politic societies; which societies could not be without government, nor government without a distinct kind of law.

He goes on to show that men cannot be expected to live happily, and obedient to the law, unless they have at least bare food and raiment, and in this Hooker, like More, anticipates the argument of many of the thinkers and reformers of our own day.

For this cause (says Hooker) first God assigned Adam maintenance of life, and then appointed him a law to observe. For this cause, after men began to grow to a number, the first thing we read they gave themselves unto was the tilling of the earth and the feeding of cattle. Having by this means whereon to live, the principal actions of their life afterward are noted by the exercise of their religion. True it is, that the kingdom of God must be the first

thing in our purposes and desires. But inasmuch as righteous life presupposeth life; inasmuch as to live virtuously it is impossible except we live; therefore the first impediment which naturally we endeavour to remove is penury and want of things without which we cannot live.

Here we have eminent good sense expressed in simple yet eloquent language. His main contention is that everything, even God himself, is subject to law.

Hooker was perhaps the first English writer who showed close acquaintance with the spirit and thought of the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. At times Hooker's

indeed his sentences read like a translation style. from the Greek. Hallam praises highly the stateliness and grace of Hooker's style, and doubts if "any later writer has more admirably displayed the capacities of our language". The book was admired by Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., and at a later period Swift praised its naturalness.

II. Lyly and the Romance-Writers.

of Eliza-
modern

bethan to

literature.

It is a remarkable fact that the origins of much of our modern literature may be traced to Elizabethan days. We have always recognized our indebtedness The relations to that period for the beginnings of modern tragedy and comedy, and indeed for a drama that later developments have been unable tɔ surpass, as well as for the sonnet, for blank verse, and for the short lyric or song in varied metres. Hooker began our theological literature, and Bacon the literature of science and philosophy. The writing of history in the more modern sense of the term began in the work of Camden and Stow, Hall, Holinshed, and Raleigh. But it is only recently that we have come to see in the Elizabethan romances the elements of the modern novel, as it was written two centuries later by Richardson and his

successors.

England owes to Italy more than the sonnet and blank

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