drive all before him, and root out the very name of a Puritan from under heaven. Nash's pamphlets are much better than "Pap with an Hatchet." They are not coarse. There is good wit in them, and many a point neatly put. well applied, including knowledge of the Bible. Nash uses honest argument from his own point of view in form of raillery, and if he does once or twice glance at the gallows -as one wishes he did not-he is, at least, not stupidly brutal in his way of doing so. Yet there is cruelty in the light touch of the wit that inserted such a clause as this in the last will of old Martin Marprelate; for two of the three men named were in the power of their enemies, and not long afterwards were really hanged "Item, I bequeath to Grenewood, Browne, and Barrow, my good friends, my porrock of ground, lying on the North side of London, and abutting vppon three high waies, where vpon standeth a Cottage, built triangle wise, with the appurtenances, onelie for the terme of their three liues; reseruing the reuersion thereof to my two sonnes, and the heires of their bodies as before, and for want thereof, to my heires at large of the familie of Martinists for euer.' On the other hand, it is to be noted that in " Pasquil's Returne" Nash thinks to depreciate Martin by comparing him to Savonarola. Francis Bacon was twenty-nine years old when, in his paper on these controversies of the Church, he reasoned Francis on the Con- Church. against contention about ceremonies and things indifferent, strife in a spirit opposite to that of St. James's admonition, "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath." Bacon thought men over-ready to say of their own private opinions, "Not I, but the Lord,” where Paul said "I, and not the Lord," or "according to my counsel"; he desired, therefore, as to the Church controversies, to point out "what it is on either part that keepeth the wound green, and formalizeth both sides to a further opposition, and worketh an indisposition in men's minds to be reunited." 'And, first of all,” he said, "it is more than time that there were an end and surcease made of this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage." Bitter and earnest writing came, he said, of an enthusiasm not to be hastily condemned; but to leave all reverent and religious compassion towards evils, to intermix Scripture and scurrility sometimes in one sentence, was far from the manner of a Christian. It was an evil, too, "that there is not an indifferent hand carried towards these pamphlets as they deserve. For the one sort flieth in the dark, the other is uttered openly. And we see it ever falleth out that the forbidden writing is thought to be certain sparks of a truth that fly up in the faces of those that seek to choke and tread it out; whereas a book authorised is thought to be but the language of the time." Bacon thought that, except Bishop Cooper's, the pamphlets were equally bad on both sides. As to the occasion of the controversies, if any bishops be as all are said to be, let them amend; men might abate some of their vanities of controversial zeal, think less of measuring the value of religion by its distance from the error last condemned as heresy, and care less about introducing new forms from abroad. Bacon, whose mother sympathised with the Nonconformists, avowed in this paper his own adherence to the established system in the Church, but he desired to urge on both parties moderation, a spirit of concession in discussing externals, and a better sense of Christian brotherhood; for "the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God," "A contentious retaining of custom," he urged, "is a turbulent thing, as well as innovation.” He agreed "that a character of love is more proper for debates of this nature than that of zeal," and trusted that what he said should "find a correspondence in their minds which are not embarked in partiality, and which love the whole better than a part.” The Spirit of the Time. In August, 1589, the rule of the house of Valois came to an end in France by the assassination of Henry III. The king in the preceding December had by assassination got rid of his powerful opponents, the Duke of Guise, head of the Catholic League, and the Duke's brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine. The League was therefore in open revolt against him; the Sorbonne released Frenchmen from their oath of allegiance to him; the Pope excommunicated him; and he was driven into alliance with Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots for the recovery of his capital. At the beginning of these days Catherine de' Medici died. While the King of France and the King of Navarre, whom the League wished to exclude from the succession, were besieging Paris, Henry III. was stabbed by an enthusiastic young Dominican. Before he died he acknowledged the King of Navarre his successor. Henry IV. thus became King of France, with a promise to maintain the Catholic faith and the property and rights of the Church. Many of his Huguenot followers fell from him, because they looked on this as an engagement to protect idolatry. But the League opposed him. Queen Elizabeth sent succour of men, and £22,000 in money. In September Henry IV. repulsed the Leaguers at Arques. At the end of October he carried the suburbs of Paris. He then retired on Tours, making that his capital. On the fourteenth of March, 1590, he obtained a signal victory over the Leaguers and the Spanish auxiliaries at the battle of Ivry, in which "the divine Bartas" fought. Against England, Spain was yet gathering force. He would persevere, Philip said, even if he sold the silver candlesticks on his table. But England had risen to the occasion. The golden time of Athens was the time when the soul of the people was stirred nobly in contest for liberty against the power of the Persians. The Netherlands were so much the better for their life-struggle on behalf of all that men should hold most dear, that while the southern unemancipated provinces were declining, the Dutch were adding to the streets of their old towns, new towns were erected by the industries that flocked in, and in the year 1586-7 eight hundred ships entered their ports. So England, trained for generations in the path of duty, faced the great peril of these days, held in the world of thought the ground which she had thus far conquered, and, gathering all her energies, went strongly forward. CHAPTER IX. The Faerie Queene. OF SPENSER AND RALEIGH FROM 1590 UNTIL 1596. Spenser leaves Dublin. EDMUND SPENSER, while busy in Dublin with official work as Clerk of Decrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery-being, like Chaucer, in the service of the Government-employed himself also, in the service of God, upon the shaping of his poem of "The Faerie Queene." He was still unmarried. He had a sister, Sarah, who seems to have kept house for him before her marriage with a Lancashire man, settled in Ireland. On the twenty-second of June, 1588, Spenser resigned his office of Clerk in the Irish Chancery. His six years' lease of the forfeited house of Lord Baltinglas in Dublin, granted in 1582, expired in 1588, and Spenser then left Dublin to establish himself in a new home, with new duties, in the county of Cork, where he had become an undertaker for the settlement of some of the six hundred thousand acres of land forfeited by the Desmonds and their adherents. Spenser undertook for 3,028 acres, with the Castle of Kilcolman as a residence attached to them. Spenser bought his title from a first purchaser named Reade, and the undertaking of those who obtained such Settlement at "seignories was to develope their resources by the industry of "well-affected Englishmen planted upon them in a certain proportion of men to acres, Kilcolman. |