with him Camden, who at Christchurch had Philip Sidney for a friend and fellow-student. Camden supplicated for his B.A. degree in June, 1570, and again in March, 1573, when he was admitted, but he seems not to have completed by determination. In 1588, however, when he applied for his M.A., Camden said that he had spent sixteen years in study since he had taken the degree of Bachelor. But his supplication was then granted on conditions that he had not leisure to fulfil, and he was not allowed the degree of Master of Arts till 1613, when, on the occasion of a visit of his to Oxford, it was offered to him and declined by him as then useless. In 1571, at the age of twenty, Camden left Oxford, and for the next four or five years his zeal for the study of antiquities caused him to travel about, like Leland, and see with his own eyes a large part of England. He said afterwards of himself that even as a schoolboy he could not see anything old without paying particular attention to it. At Oxford he had given all his spare time to such studies of his choice, and when he was made schoolmaster, all his holidays were spent in visiting old camps and castles. Camden was helped, in his poverty, with books and money by two friendly doctors of divinity, Gabriel and his nephew Godfrey Goodman. Dr. Gabriel Goodman, who had been chaplain. to Sir William Cecil, and remained his intimate friend, while holding much other preferment became Dean of Westminster in April, 1561. It was through Dean Goodman's influence that William Camden was appointed, in 1575, second master of Westminster School. The head master was Edward Grant, who had been appointed three years earlier after two years' service as assistant. Grant was known as a good Latin poet, and wrote occasional verses in Greek, Latin, and English. In 1575 he published a Greek grammar for the use of Westminster School, which Camden used afterwards, as Grant's successor, in a popular abridg ment of his own, "Institutio Græcæ Grammatices," first published in 1597. Edward Grant was a friend of Roger Ascham's, and in 1576 published a collection of Ascham's Latin letters, with a Latin oration of his own on Ascham's life and death, all dedicated to the queen. Grant held the office of head master at Westminster School for twenty years with Camden next in authority, and when he resigned Camden succeeded to his office, in February, 1593. Dr. Grant then retired to his rectory of East Barnet, and died in 1601, having in the interval been presented by Queen Elizabeth to the rectory of Toppesfield, in Essex. When William Camden was made second master of Westminster School he was becoming known more and more widely for his diligent research into local details Camden's "Britan nia." of the past history of England. In 1577, Abraham Ortelius, the great geographer, who was called the Ptolemy of his time, then a man of fifty, came to England from his home at Antwerp, where he was born, and, struck by Camden's genius that way, urged him to work systematically with a view to the production of an antiquarian topography of Britain, his "Britannia." In 1578 Camden spent a holiday in Norfolk and Suffolk for exploration of the country of the Iceni. In 1581, when the eloquent and learned Barnabé Brisson, high in favour with Henri III., came on a mission to England, he chose William Camden for a special friend. Camden's work, in drawing from the study of topography a necessary light on history, was, for an Englishman and for the early history of England, specially laborious. Research of this kind first became active in Italy, where aids abounded in old Latin histories and in the obvious significance of names. Of Britain the ancient records were fewer, and less easy of access. Camden's first search was for manuscripts of the Itinerary of the Roman Empire by the old geographer Antoninus Augustus, which may have been composed about the year 320; also for the survey of the world as known in the second century by the geographer Claudius Ptolemæus, which included a description of the coasts of Britain and the names of native British tribes; and for the account of Britain contained in the Notitia utriusque Imperii, which was compiled near the time when the Roman occupation closed. As Camden proceeded with his study, he found that, for the right interpretation of local names to guide him in research, he must know something of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon. Full use had to be made, also, of our own early historians. When he heard from foreign correspondents of Itinerary tables marking the routes of Roman armies towards the close of the fourth century-tables that had been given by Conrad Celtes to the learned jurisconsult Conrad Peutinger, of Augsburg, who died in 1547-Camden took pains also to procure copies of them so far as they concerned Britain. This Itinerary became known as "Peutinger's Table" after it had been printed at Venice by the Italian-bred Mark Welser (Velser), of Augsburg, in 1591. The first edition of Camden's " Britannia," written in Latin, was published in 1586, with a dedication to Lord Burghley dated on the second of May, the birthday on which Camden came to mid-life by completion of his thirtyfifth year. The success of the book was very great. In London it reached a third edition, enlarged with much new matter, in 1590, while another edition was in the same year printed at Frankfort. Among the recommendatory verses in Greek and Latin that preceded Camden's “Britannia" were some cordial Latin lines by Dr. Edward Grant, his chief at Westminster. Grant prophesied his comrade's future fame. Camden's "Britannia," after showing the place in the ocean and the general form of this happiest of lands—“ nor less happy now under Elizabeth "-treats of its first inhabitants, its name of Britain, the Romans in Britain, Armorican or Celtic Britain, the Picts, the Scots, the Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Then Camden tells of the various subdivisions of the land, of the orders of rank among its people from the sovereign to the poor day-labourer, and of its tribunals. After this he proceeds-associating tribes of the past with description of the shires that occupy the ground they once inhabited-to describe the several parts of Britain in this order. First the country of the old Damnonii, Cornwall and Devon; then, in succession, the Durotriges (Dorset); the Belga (Somerset, Wilts, Hants); the Attrebatii (Berks); the Regni (Surrey, Sussex); Cantium (Kent); the Dobuni (Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire); the Cattieuchlani (Buckinghamshire, Beds, and Herts); the Trinobantes (Middlesex and Essex); the Iceni (Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire); the Coritani (Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Lincolnshire, Notts, and Derbyshire); Cornavii (the shires of Warwick, Worcester and Stafford, Shropshire, Cheshire); the Silures (Herefordshire, Radnorshire, Brecknockshire, Monmouthshire, Glamorganshire); the Dimetæ (shires of Carmarthen, Pembroke, and Cardigan); the Ordovices (shires of Montgomery, Merioneth, Caernarvon, Denbigh, and Flint); the Brigantes (Yorkshire, Richmondshire, the Bishopric of Durham, Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland); followed by an account of the Picts' Wall. Then come the Ottadini (Northumberland), and there follows next a short description of Scotland. After this comes an account, with a separate title-page, of Ireland and the isles adjacent to Britain. So Camden traversed all the land, associating a description of his country as it was in his own time with many memories attested by the ruins that remained, and the material witnesses that had been dug out of the soil. In 1586, when the first edition of his "Britannia " appeared, William Camden had among the boys under him at Westminster School one named Ben Jonson, who was about thirteen years old, and for whom Camden himself had obtained admission, because he knew the boy and had good hope of him. Shakespeare, in 1586, was twenty-two years old, and, as before said, we may take this year, or 1587, for the year of his first turning to the stage. William verse. "Albion's England." England was never dearer to her sons than in these days when she was drawing to the front place in the story of the world. In the same year, 1586, William Warner, born in London in the year of Elizabeth's accession, a poetical attorney, celebrated "Albion's England" in thirteen books of fourteen-syllabled rhyming His poem was of Albion's England, because it did not, like Albion, include Scotland. It was an easy, lively, homely history of England, from the Deluge down to Warner's own time, with a religious close; homely in use of simple idiomatic English, full of incidents and stories, often rudely told, and often with a force or delicacy of touch that came of the terse directness with which natural feeling was expressed. Warner's poem had for a time great popularity. He was not a great poet, but the times were stirring, and they drew ten thousand lines of lively verse upon his country, even out of an attorney. In the eleventh and twelfth books of "Albion's England" William Warner interwove an imaginary love story of Sir John Mandeville, the traveller, and a Lady Eleanor, cousin to King Edward III., with verse describing some of the bold voyagings under Elizabeth to Muscovy and other distant lands. When his Mandeville has set out on his travels, after receiving from fair Eleanor a riddle and a ring, sings Warner- "Now let us say the Lands, the Seas, the people, and their Lore The Knight did see, whom, touching which, not storie shall we more: But to our English Voyages, euen in our times, let's frame |