Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities.

2. Thackeray. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes, The
Four Georges.

3. George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill on the Floss, Silas
Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch.

4. Macaulay. Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome.

5. Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, Essays on History,
Signs of the Times, Characteristics, Burns, Scott, Voltaire, and Goethe.

6. The Works of Alfred Tennyson (6 vols.). London: Strahan & Co., 1872.

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7. Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. (2 vols.)
London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1880.

8. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets.

9. Henry Morley's English Literature in the Reign of Victoria.
(Tauchnitz Series.)

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CHAPTER IX.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN.

BY JOHN FLETCHER HURST.

Miracle plays, rude dramatic representations of the chief events in
Scripture history, were used for popular instruction before the invention
of printing. In England they began as early as the twelfth century.
Moral plays, or moralities, were of the same origin, though dating from
the fifteenth century. These were somewhat more refined than the miracle
plays, and usually set forth the excellence of the virtues, such as
truth, mercy, and the like. Both miracle and moral plays were under the
conduct of the clergy.

John Bale (1495-1563) was Bishop of Ossory, and wrote much for popular
reform. He was the author of nineteen miracle plays. Lord Edward
Herbert, of Cherbury (1581-1648), wrote a deistical work, _De Religione
Gentilium_, the first of that school of writers which later appeared in
Bolingbroke. John Spotiswood (1565-1639), Archbishop of St. Andrews and
afterward Chancellor of Scotland, wrote a voluminous _History of the
Church of Scotland_. George Sandys (1577-1643), {300} distinguished also
as one of the earliest literary characters in America, wrote metrical
versions of several of the poetical books of the Bible, and also a
tragedy called _Christ's Passion_.

John Knox (1505-1572), the great Scotch reformer and polemic, while more
prominent as the preacher and spokesman of the Scotch Reformation, wrote
_First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women_
(1558), and the _Historie of the Reformation of Religion within the
Realme of Scotland_, published after his death. John Jewel (1522-1571)
wrote in Latin his _Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae_. William Whi