into
bodily shapes of _ideas_, typical and emblematic, the shadows which
haunt the conscience and the mind.

1. A First Sketch of English Literature. By Henry Morley.

2. English Writers. By the same. Vol. iii. From Chaucer to Dunbar.

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3. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1594-1579. Clarendon Press
Series.

4. Morte Darthur. Globe Edition.

5. Child's English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols.

6. Hale's edition of Spenser. Globe.

7. "A Royal Poet." Irving's Sketch-Book.

[1] Woods.

[2] Bright.

[3] High.

[4] Fiddler.

[5] Trisyllable--like _creature_, _neighebour_, etc, in Chaucer.

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CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.

1564-1616.

The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of
Spenser's _Shepheard's Calendar_, in 1579, and closed with the printing
of Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, in 1671. Within this period of little
less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and
there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative
literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who
was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to
witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the
persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the
dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not
improperly be called the Elisabethan. In strictness the Elisabethan
age ended with the queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the
succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked
the diction of their forerunners; and "the spacious times of great
Elisabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the
Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness {77} in the
intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance,
and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with
the queen's seal.

Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name
of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and
of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a
rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for
in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden
queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis,
great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and
even Shakspere, the m