Yet interlace we shall among, the love of her and him: Meanwhile about the world our Muse is strippéd now to swim." Richard Hakluyt. But, above all, it was an old Westminster boy, a clergyman, who "stripped to swim " to all the shores that had been touched by English adventurers. Hakluyt laboured to gather their most fruitful stories from their pens or lips, contenting their countrymen with tales from over sea, and shaping for all time a record to which Englishmen might look back with thanks to God for their forefathers and the high example they had left. Richard Hakluyt was born at Eyton, Herefordshire, in 1553. He was educated at Westminster School and Christchurch, Oxford, and delighted always in tales of far countries and adventure by sea. At school and at college his chief interest was in the history of discovery. He fastened upon all printed or written accounts of discovery that he could find, whether, as he said, "in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portugal, French, or English languages." Hakluyt took his B.A. in 1574, his M.A. in January, 1577, entered the Church, went to Paris in 1584 as chaplain to the English ambassador, and was made Prebendary of Bristol. In 1582, when he was twenty-nine years old, he issued his first publication, "Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America, and the Lands adjacent unto the same, made first of all by our Englishmen, and afterward by the Frenchmen and Bretons : and certain Notes of Advertisements for Observations, necessarie for such as shall hereafter make the like attempt." In Paris he wrote, in 1584, “ A particular Discourse concerning Western Discoveries," which remained unprinted until it was published in 1877 by the Maine Historical Society. Hakluyt also translated books of travel from the Spanish, but his great work was that of which the forerunner first appeared in folio in 1589, "The Principal Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation made by N-VOL. IX. 66 Sea or over land to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth at any time within the compass of these 1500 years." This folio, dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham, was expanded into the three volumes published in the years 1598-1600, which formed afterwards the great edition of Hakluyt's voyages. Philip But the eyes of many Puritans were not so much upon the glories of England as upon the Church that was to be more widely parted from all sympathy with Rome, upon the social life that was to be parted from its vices and its follies. Philip Stubbes was a Puritan gentleman of St. Mary-at-Hill, London, in September, 1586, the month of his marriage with Katherine Emmes of the same parish. His young wife died after childbirth in December, 1590, and Stubbes in the next year published "A Christall glasse for christian women Conteyning an excellent discourse of the godly life and christian death of mistres Katherine Stubbes." Philip Stubbes published some other Puritan pamphlets, including "The Rosary of Christian Prayers," in 1583; but his main work, published in 1583-the First Part licensed on the first of March, the Second Part on the seventh of November-was "The Anatomie of Abuses: conteyning a Discoverie or Briefe Summarie of such Notable Vices and Imperfections as now raigne in many Christian Countreyes of the World: but especialie in a very famous Ilande called Ailgna Together with most fearful Examples of God's Judgementes executed vpon the wicked for the same as well in Ailgna of late, as in other places elsewhere.” Ailgna, of course, is Anglia. The book is in dialogue between Philoponus and Spudeus. Ailgna, says Stubbes, is a famous and pleasant land, with a great and heroic people, but they abound in abuses, chiefly those of pride-pride of heart, of mouth, of apparel. In pride of apparel they pane, cut, and drape out with costly ornaments the richest material, and spread out ruffs with supportasses-wires covered with gold or silk-and starch. Philip Stubbes denounced starch as "the devil's liquor," and told of a fair gentlewoman of Eprautna (Antwerp) upon whom a judgment had fallen for her vanity in starched ruffs, even so lately as the twenty-second of May, 1582. She was dressing to attend a wedding, and falling in a passion with the starching of her ruffs, said what caused a handsome gentleman to come into the room, who set them up for her to perfection, charmed her, and strangled her. When she was being taken out for burial, the coffin was so heavy that four strong men could not lift it. It was opened. The body was gone, but a lean and deformed black cat was sitting in the coffin, "a setting of great ruffs and frizzling of hair, to the great fear and wonder of all the beholders.” CHAPTER VI. COURT PLAYS: JOHN LYLY AND GEORGE PEELE. John Lyly's JOHN LYLY, after the publication of his "Euphues in England," was an entertainer of the Court with comedies gracefully built on mythological subjects, and distinguished by the fact that all of them, except the first, were written in prose. Though their wit was laboured, it was true wit from one who had a poet's mind, and who might have written as the smooth blank verse of his first play and occasional songs in other plays of his show-very good verse if he had cared to do so. Notwithstanding any strain of wit that place and time required of him, and the predominance of fancy over fact in the material of which he wove his stories, Lyly had also a dramatic sense of dialogue, and his Court plays must have satisfied the minds as well as ears of courtiers to whose aste they were adapted. Lyly's "Campaspe" was, perhaps, acted at Court in the end of the year 1581, and it had been preceded by "The Woman in the Moon," of which the prologue says— "Remember all is but a poet's dream, The first he had in Phoebus' holy bower, This play, therefore, Lyly may have written in 1580, if not earlier, though it was not published until 1597, as "The Woman in the Moone. As it was presented before her Highnesse. By John Lyllie, Maister "The Woman in the Moon." of Artes. Imprinted at London for William Jones, and are to be sold at the signe of the Gun, neere Holburn Conduict." Before the is a new form of old jest upon the mutability of woman. scene of a pictured firmament, with orbits of the seven planets, and the workshop of Nature with a curtain drawn before it, Nature descends to an ideal land -a Utopia where, as she says, "Where my chief works do flourish in their prime And wanton in their first simplicity." Concord and Discord wait on her, "For Nature works her will from contraries." The shepherds of Utopia, clad in skins, have not yet been furnished with a female for their mate, like other creatures in earth, air, and sea. They petition Nature, and the curtain being drawn from before Nature's shop, discloses various images. Among them is the clothed and, at present, lifeless image of a Woman. Nature breathes into it the fire from heaven, shapes humours of the body from the elements, and the embrace of Concord joins the spirit with the flesh. The fair body, "Nature's glory and delight, Compact of every heavenly excellence," is endowed with the best qualities of all the planets, and is called Pandora, because there have been lavished on her all high gifts. Then the Seven Planets meet and complain of the Woman's usurpation of their powers. They resolve to spite Nature by taking it in turn "to show our emperie And bend our forces gainst this earthly star." My turn is first, says Saturn. He marks his term of ascendancy by |