"Euphues;" Bacon, aged eighteen, thrown on his own resources by his father's death, is beginning study of law as the profession by which he must live; and Shakespeare, aged fifteen, is eldest of a family of young children in a household that begins to feel the pinch of poverty.

Execution of Mary

Scots.

On the twenty-seventh of June, 1582, Francis Bacon was admitted an utter barrister, and about this time, aged twenty-one, sketched briefly in a Latin tract called Temporis Partus Maximus ("The Greatest Birth of Time ") the first notion of his philosophy. In November, 1584, Bacon took his seat in the House of Commons as member for Melcombe Regis, in Dorsetshire. In the next Parliament, which met in October, 1586, he sat for Taunton, and was one of those who presented a petition for the speedy execution of Mary Queen of Scots. This petition followed upon the public dis- Queen of covery of Anthony Babington's conspiracy in August, 1586, and his execution on the twentieth of September. Young Babington came of age, and inherited large estates, at the time of the execution of Edmund Campion, in 1582. He became the active spirit of a secret society for bringing about an insurrection of Roman Catholics in England, which was to begin with the assassination of Elizabeth and her chief counsellors, and the liberation of Mary Queen of Scots. With the secret plot there went, from the first, secret betrayal. Sir Francis Walsingham allowed it to go on, watching carefully. promised support after the assassination. on the twelfth of July, 1586, a long letter to Mary Queen of Scots, detailing his plans, to which she replied five days later, thinking well of them and desiring more details. That letter was no forgery of Walsingham's. Babington himself, before his execution, disclosed the cipher used in it. Account of the plot sent to Philip of Spain by the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Bernardino de Mendoza, is in the

The King of Spain
Babington wrote,

archives of Simancas, with many notes upon it in the handwriting of Philip. Queen Mary was then in charge of Sir Amyas Paulet, the chief under whom Bacon had served in Paris. Sir Amyas had succeeded Sir Ralph Sadler in his charge of Mary at Tutbury Castle in March, 1585, with charge afterwards at Chartley and at Fotheringay. He was a Puritan, with strong personal dislike of Mary, and strict in his dealings with her, though his household accounts show abundance of material supplies. The custody of Queen Mary was stricter after her complicity in Babington's conspiracy was known, and a letter from Elizabeth to Sir Amyas Paulet, thanking him "for his most troublesome duty so well discharged," bids him "let the wicked murderess know how her vile deserts compel these orders." Her guards had orders to shoot her if she was found attempting to escape.

Babington's conspiracy was fatal to Mary Queen of Scots. She was brought to trial in September, 1586, and sentenced on the twenty-fifth of October. Her death-warrant was not signed by Elizabeth until the first of February, 1587, and she was executed on the eighth.

Defeat
of the
Spanish
Armada.

Elizabeth sought peace, but the Pope was bent on war. Sixtus V. made over England to King Philip II. of Spain. He had only to take possession—that was all. The Invincible Armada was prepared. The Marquis of Santa Cruz as admiral by sea, the Duke of Parma, general of the invading land forces, were to direct the conquest. At the end of July, 1588, the Armada was first seen from the Lizard, advancing in form of a crescent, seven miles from point to point. Lord Howard of Effingham, a loyal Roman Catholic--and the main body of the English Roman Catholics was loyal-had command of the fleet of English vessels, only thirty of them ships of the line. But the English ships were manned by nine thousand seamen who all knew their work. Drake and

Frobisher were among their leaders. The small, wellhandled vessels danced behind the great galleons of the Spaniards, pouring broadsides into them and escaping the return shot readily. When the Spaniards put into Calais harbour, where they had hoped to ship the forces of the Prince of Parma, fire-ships followed them. When, to escape this danger, they put to sea again, their great galleons were again shattered by the English broadsides. Many ships and four thousand men were lost, in six hours of such fighting. Other ships were drifting upon sand-banks on the coast of Holland, and on both sides the supply of gunpowder was failing. The shattered force of Spain then sought to escape by sailing round the Orkneys, where storms drove vessel after vessel on the cruel shore. Fifty-four ships were all that found their way back home, with distressed crews, who spread terrible tales of English seamen and of English seas. Queen Elizabeth, like Shakespeare's Henry V., gave God the glory, and inscribed on the medal that commemorated the defeat of the Armada, Deus flavit, et dissipati sunt.

Shakespeare, not yet twenty-five years old, had been a year or two in London when the queen, with her seacaptains about her, went in state to Saint Paul's, on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of November, to join the worship through which in all churches of England there were then offered "public and general thanks unto God, with all devotion and inward affection of heart and humbleness."

Bacon in

1589.

For provision against future dangers from the King of Spain, a new Parliament was summoned, which first met on the fourth of February, 1589. Bacon sat in it as member for Liverpool, active in public affairs, and wrote, to be read privately by those who might use influence for peace, a wise paper of his own called "An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England."* Its topic was the Marprelate

* It was not printed until 1640, when the controversy was again in a

Controversy, presently to be described, and it contained the germ of his essay "Of Unity in Religion." In October, 1589, there was given to Bacon the reversion of the office of Clerk of the Council in the Star Chamber, with £1,600 or £2,000 a year, and the further advantage that its work was done by deputy. But for this he had twenty years to wait. The holder of it lived till 1608. If such an office had fallen to him early in life, Bacon might possibly have given up his career as a lawyer, and devoted himself wholly to the working out of his philosophy.

All was not strife. The year of the Spanish Armada was, in France, the year of the second edition of Montaigne's Essays, with addition of thirteen new essays forming the third book, four years before their author's death. In England Robert Greene was producing novels still, in 1588 and 1589. The son of Mary Queen of Scots, James VI. of Scotland, produced in the Armada year "Ane Fruitful Meditation on Revelations xx. 7-10, and had already produced, in 1585, at the age of nineteen, "The Essayes of an Apprentice in the Divine Art of Poesie." *

Puttenham's
"Art of
English
Poesie."

22

Another Elizabethan book upon the art of verse was by George Puttenham-"The Art of English Poesie, in Three Books; the first of Poets and Poesye, the second of Proportion, and the third of Ornamente "-written about 1585, and published in the spring of 1589. The author, who cited a dozen other works of his own which are lost, was born about 1530, had been a scholar at Oxford, had delighted in verse and written it, had seen the Courts of France, Spain, Italy, and the Empire, and was skilled in French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as in Greek and Latin. There was no author's name

white heat. Then it appeared as a separate pamphlet. Dr. Rawley included it in 1657 in the "Resuscitatio," and it was printed again as a separate pamphlet in 1663.

*"E. W." ix. 183, 184.

on the title-page of his book; but as early as 1605 it was said to be by George Puttenham, one of the queen's gentlemen pensioners. The book is a systematic little treatise of some extent, dealing with the origin and nature of poetry ; its several forms, as satire, comedy, tragedy, etc.; its several metres and proportions, including the various ways of writing verse in shapes, as the lozenge, or rhombus; the fuzie spindle, or rhomboides; the triangle, or tricquet; the square; the pillar, pilaster, or cylinder; taper, or piramis; rondel, or sphere; egg, or figure oval; with many of these reversed and combined-a fashion then coming into use from Italy and France.* Puttenham says that an Eastern traveller whom he met in Italy told him that this fashion was brought from the Courts of the great princes of China and Tartary. Puttenham's argument concerning metre includes, of course, some reference to the question of Latin quantity applied to English verse. The last book discusses the language of the poet; tropes and figures of speech, with examples; fitness of manner, and the art that conceals art. Among illustrations of poetical ornament is a poem by Queen Elizabeth herself,† written when the presence of Mary Queen of Scots in England was breeding faction; and the Queen of England, "nothing ignorant in those secret favours, though she had long, with great wisdom and pacience, dissembled it, writeth this ditty most sweet and sententious, not hiding from all such aspiring minds the daunger of their ambition and disloyaltie."

Thomas
Nash.

Another active writer was Thomas Nash. He was born in November, 1567, the son of a preacher at Lowestoft, William Nash, by his second wife Margaret, and third of the six children by that marriage, who were named Nathaniel, Israel, Thomas, Martha, Martha, and Rebecca. Nathaniel and the two Marthas died in infancy. Thomas Nash matriculated in October, *E. W." ix. 164, 165. "E. W." ix. 89, 90,