; the violent shifting of
feelings from faith to passionate rejection, from reverence to scorn and
a hate which could not be satisfied. They had seen the strangest turns
of fortune, the most wonderful elevations to power, the most terrible
visitations of disgrace. They had seen the mightiest ruined, the
brightest and most admired brought down to shame and death, men struck
down with all the forms of law, whom the age honoured as its noblest
ornaments. They had seen the flames of martyr or heretic, heads which
had worn a crown laid one after another on the block, controversies, not
merely between rivals for power, but between the deepest principles and
the most rooted creeds, settled on the scaffold. Such a time of
surprise,--of hope and anxiety, of horror and anguish to-day, of relief
and exultation to-morrow,--had hardly been to England as the first half
of the sixteenth century. All that could stir men's souls, all that
could inflame their hearts, or that could wring them, had happened.

And yet, compared with previous centuries, and with what was going on
abroad, the time now was a time of peace, and men lived securely. Wealth
was increasing. The Wars of the Roses had left the crown powerful to
enforce order, and protect industry and trade. The nation was beginning
to grow rich. When the day's work was done, men's leisure was not
disturbed by the events of neighbouring war. They had time to open
their imaginations to the great spectacle which had been unrolled before
them, to reflect upon it, to put into shape their thoughts about it. The
intellectual movement of the time had reached England, and its strong
impulse to mental efforts in new and untried directions was acting
powerfully upon Englishmen. But though there was order and present peace
at home, there was much to keep men's minds on the stretch. There was
quite enough danger and uncertainty to wind up their feelings to a high
pitch. But danger was not so pressing as to prevent them from giving
full place to the impressions of the strange and eventful scene round
them, with its grandeur, its sadness, its promises. In such a state of
things there is everything to tempt poetry. There are its materials and
its stimulus, and there is the leisure to use its materials.

But the poet had not yet been found; and everything connected with
poetry was in the disorder of ignorance and uncertainty. Between the
counsels of a pedantic scholarship, and the rude and hesitating