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of voyagers by whom a north-west passage to Cathay and India had been attempted. By this route only, he argued, we could share the wealth derived by Spain and Portugal from traffic with the East; be unmolested by them in our course; and undersell them in their markets, besides finding new sources of wealth, and founding colonies for the relief of overcrowded England. This treatise revived interest in the subject. It passed from hand to hand in MS., and was printed in 1576, the year in which Martin Frobisher started, on board "The Gabriel," of twenty-five tons' burthen, upon the first of his three voyages in search of a north-west passage.

In 1588 Thomas Hariot, who had been of the unfortunate colony under Ralph Lane sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh to settle upon Roanoke Island, published "A Briefe and True Report of The New Found Land of Virginia," etc., in which he described the cultivation by the natives of the herb which they called "appowoc;" but the Spaniards, "tabacco." "They use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of claie into their stomacke and heade,' " with wonderfully good results. "We ourselves," Hariot added, "during the time we were there, vsed to suck it after their maner, as also since our returne, and have found manie rare and wonderful experiments of the vertues thereof; of which the relation would require a volume by itselfe: the vse of it by so manie of late, men and women of great calling as else, and some learned phisitions also, is sufficient witnes."

The narratives of our adventurous seafarers were in those days treasured for posterity by Richard Hakluyt, who 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. He 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, Hakluyt issued his first publication, "Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery 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 Observa

tions, necessary for such as shall hereafter make the like attempt." Hakluyt also translated books of travel from the Spanish; but his great work was that which first appeared in folio in 1589,-"The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation."

CHAPTER III.

SECOND HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: POETRY AND THE DRAMA.

1. Poetical Miscellanies.-2. Devotional Poetry; Parker; Sternhold and Hopkins. -3. Thomas Tusser. -4. Thomas Sackville.-5. "A Mirror for Magistrates." -6. Nicholas Grimald.-7. Thomas Churchyard.-8. George Turbervile. — 9. George Gascoigne. 10. Gabriel Harvey.-11. Edmund Spenser. — 12. Fulke Greville.-13. George Whetstone.-14. Thomas Watson.-15. William Warner.-16. Henry Constable and Robert Southwell.-17. Sir John Davies. -18. First English Tragedy. -19. Translations of Latin Tragedies. — 20. Development of the Drama in England; Richard Edwards; Actors and Theatres.-21. Thomas Lodge.-22. Anthony Munday. - 23. The Writers of Plays. -24. George Peele.-25. John Lyly.-26. Robert Greene.-27. Henry Chettle.-28. Thomas Kyd.-29. Thomas Nash,―30. Christopher Marlowe.

1. THE sweet spirit of song rises in the early years of Elizabeth's reign like the first chirping of the birds after a thunder-storm. "Tottel's Miscellany," issued in June, 1557, as "Songes and Sonnettes, written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward, late Earl of Surrey, and other," was as a brake from which there rose, immediately before her rule began, a pleasant carolling. Among the smaller song-birds there were two with a sustained rich note, for in this miscellany were the first printed collections of the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. This is our earliest poetical miscellany, if we leave out of account the fact that pieces by several writers had been included, in 1532, in the first collected edition of Chaucer's works. Tottel's first edition contained two hundred and seventy-one poems, the second contained two hundred and eighty; but thirty poems which appeared in the first edition were omitted in the second which appeared a few weeks later, so that between the two there were three hundred and ten poems in all. In 1559 there was a third edition of "The Miscellany;" in 1565, the year after Shakespeare's birth, a fourth; the eighth, and last of the Elizabethan

time, in 1587. During the reign of Elizabeth other books of the same kind appeared: "The Paradise of Dainty Devices," collected by Richard Edwards, of her Majesty's Chapel, then dead, for a printer named Disle, and published in 1576; "A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions," edited by Thomas Proctor, in 1578, with help from Owen Rawdon; "A Handefull of Pleasant Delites," by Clement Robinson and divers other, in 1584; "The Phoenix Nest," edited by R. S., of the Inner Temple, gentleman, in 1593; "England's Helicon," edited by John Bodenham, in 1600; and "A Poetical Rhapsody," edited by Francis Davison, in 1602. The most popular of these was "The Paradise of Dainty

Devices."

2. In 1560, was published an English version of the Psalms, made, during his exile under the reign of Queen Mary, by Matthew Parker, whom Queen Elizabeth, at her accession, appointed to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Parker translated the Psalms into English verse, for comfort to himself like that of David, for whom in a time of trouble, as Parker says in his metrical preface,

"With golden stringes such harmonie

His harpe so sweete did wrest,

That he reliev'd his phrenesie

When wicked sprites possest."

But the most celebrated English version of the Psalms was that entitled "The Whole Booke of Psalmes collected into English metre by T. Sternhold, J. Hopkins, and others, conferred with the Ebrue, with Apt Notes to sing them withall." This appeared in 1562, and was then attached for the first time to the Book of Common Prayer. Among the "apt tunes" is that to which the 100th Psalm was sung, now known as "The Old Hundredth." It had been one of the tunes made by Goudimel and Le Jeune for the French version of the Psalms by Clement Marot. Thomas Sternhold, who died in 1549, had published one year before his death "Certayne Psalms," only nineteen in number. He was born in Hampshire, and, after education at Oxford, became groom of the robes to Henry VIII., who liked him well enough to bequeath him a hundred

marks. He desired to do with his psalms in England what had been done in France by Marot, thinking thereby that the courtiers would sing them instead of their sonnets, but did not, only some few excepted," whose religion we respect more than their taste. In the year in which Sternhold died, there appeared, with a dedication to Edward VI., a new edition of “All such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternhold, late grome of the Kinges Majestyes robes, did in his lyfe time drawe into Englysshe metre." This contained thirty-seven Psalms by Sternhold, and seven by John Hopkins, a Suffolk clergyman and schoolmaster, who joined in his labor. To an edition of 1551, Hopkins added seven more psalms of his own. Hopkins and others then worked on with the desire to produce a complete version of the Psalms of David into a form suited for congregational singing. This was at last accomplished, as above mentioned, in 1562.

3. As poetry in this time had its side looking toward religion, so it had its side looking toward trade, manual toil, and the material well-being of England. The most conspicuous example of this is Thomas Tusser. He was born about 1515, at Rivenhall, in Essex, was first a chorister at St. Paul's, and then was placed at Eton under Udall, of whom he says:

"From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,

To learn straightways the Latin phrase,
Where fifty-three stripes given to me

At once I had.

For fault but small, or none at all,

It came to pass thus beat I was:

See, Udall, see, the mercy of thee
To me, poor lad."

Tusser went from Eton to Cambridge, was fourteen years at court under the patronage of Lord Paget, then took a farm in Suffolk, and rhymed about farming. He first broke out in 1557 with his "Hundred Good Points;" but his crop of rhyming maxims had increased five-fold by the year 1573, when Richard Tottel published Tusser's "Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry," giving the round of the year's husbandry month by month, in a book of ninety-eight pages, six and a half quatrains to a page. Tusser's strength may have been in high

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