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tentious extracts from ancient moral philosophers, etc., called "Politeuphuia, or Wit's Commonwealth." It was designed chiefly for the benefit of young scholars, was popular, and often afterwards reprinted. In the same year, 1598, Francis Meres, M.A., published "Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury, being the Second Part of Wit's Commonwealth," 12mo, of 174 leaves, Euphuistic, as its title indicates, and also designed for instruction of the young. This book contained a brief comparison of English poets with Greeks, Latins, and Italians; and is especially remembered for its allusion to Shakespeare, showing the exalted opinion of him as a poet and dramatist, held by his immediate associates: "As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his 'Venus and Adonis,' his Lucrece,' his sugred 'Sonnets' among his private friends, etc. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. . . As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue, if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speake English."

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6. In the year 1661 appeared an interesting "Life of Wolsey," by George Cavendish, who had entered Wolsey's service as a gentleman usher about the year 1519, had been faithfully attached to him during the last ten years of his life, and had spoken with the king immediately after Wolsey's death. He was invited into Henry's service; but presently retired to his own little estate in Suffolk, with the wages due from the cardinal, a small gratuity, and six of the cardinal's best carthorses to convey his furniture. His book, which was written about the year 1554, was used as a source of information by the chroniclers whom Shakespeare read.

Richard Grafton, who completed Hall's Chronicle, produced in 1563 "An Abridgement;" and in 1565 "A Manual of the Chronicles of England," from the Creation to the date of publication; and in 1568 and 1569, in two folios, "A Chronicle at large and meere History of the Affayres of Englande and Kinges of the same."

John Stow, born in Cornhill about 1525, was a tailor's son, and for a few years himself a tailor. But the life of the time stirred in him an enthusiasm for the study of English history and antiquities. He produced, in 1561, "A Summary of English Chronicles," and gave time and labor in travel about the country to produce for posterity a larger record; but he would have given up the delight and chief use of his life, to go back to tailoring for need of bread, if he had not been encouraged by occasional help from Archbishop Parker. His History first appeared in 1580, a quarto of more than twelve hundred pages, as "Annales, or a Generale Chronicle of England from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ, 1580." He still worked at history, and published in 1598, when more than seventy years old, the first edition of his "Survey of London "

a book of great value. But he had lost his best friends, and at the end of Elizabeth's reign he was distressed by poverty.

Ralph Holinshed had produced, with help of John Hooker, Richard Stanihurst, Boteville, Harrison, and others, his Chronicle in 1577, when Shakespeare was thirteen years old. Prefixed to it was a "Description of Britaine," valuable as an account of the condition of the country at that time. It was in two folio volumes, with many woodcuts. The second edition, which contained some passages that displeased the queen and required cancelling, appeared in 1586 and 1587, when Shakespeare's age was about twenty-three. It was chiefly in Hall and Holinshed that Shakespeare read the history of England. Of Holinshed himself little more is known than that he came of a respectable family at Bosley, in Cheshire, and that he was, in the latter part of his life, steward to a Thomas Burdet, of Bromcote, Warwickshire.

7. Voyages of exploration and discovery, which had increased rapidly in England since the days of the Cabots, began to make for themselves a rich department in English literature.

In 1574 George Gascoigne obtained from Sir Humphrey Gilbert his "Discourse to prove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East Indies." He first sought to prove that America was an island; and then brought together the reports

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

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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

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