ate of things and
people--to a rougher, coarser time. Their towers and walls, where the
jackdaws build in the ivy; their moats, where the hoary carp bask and
fatten; their drawbridges and heavy doors and loopholed windows,--these
all tell of the unrest, the semi-war-like state of feudal days, when
each great seigneur was a petty king in his own county, with his private
as well as public feuds, and his little army of men-at-arms ready to do
his bidding, to sally forth and fight for the king or to defend his own
walls against some more powerful neighbor.

The great houses of the eighteenth century have a different character
again, with their Italian facades and trim terraced gardens, where the
wits and beauties of dull Queen Anne's time amused themselves after
their somewhat rude fashion. They speak of a solid luxury in keeping
with the heavy features and ponderous minds of the worthies of those
days.

But the Elizabethan, or even early Jacobean, house tells us of England
in her golden age. The walls of red brick, gray with lichens; the rows
of wide stone-mullioned windows and hanging oriels; the delicate,
fanciful chimneys rising in great clusters above the pointed gables; the
broad stone steps leading up to the hospitable door; the smooth green
terraces and bowling-lawns, walled in, it is true, but closed with gates
of curiously-wrought ironwork meant more for ornament than for
defence,--all these serve to recall the days when learning and wealth
joined hands with the Maiden Queen to raise England from the depths into
which she had sunk--the days of "the worthies whom Elizabeth, without
distinction of rank or age, gathered round her in the ever-glorious wars
of her great reign."

It was then that Burleigh and Walsingham talked statecraft; that Raleigh
and Drake, Frobisher and Grenville, sailed the seas and beat the Spanish
Armada; that the "sea-dogs" brought the treasures of the New World to
the feet of the queen, and filled men's minds with dreams of El Dorados
where gold and jewels were as common as the sand on the seashore. It was
then that English literature, all but dead during the storm of the
Reformation, began to revive. And then it was that a galaxy of poets
arose such as the world had never seen before; that Sidney wrote his
_Arcadia_, Spenser his _Faerie Queene_; that Christopher Marlowe,
Beaumont and Fletcher and merrie Ben Jonson founded the English drama;
and that Shakespeare, poet of poets, overshadowe