nd the
Angevin made French the language of court and market. In the time of
Chaucer English poets still wrote much in French, and even English
labourers lilted French songs over their work; and I cannot read any
Elizabethan poem or romance without feeling the pressure of habits of
emotion, and of an order of life which were conscious, for all their
Latin gaiety, of a quarrel to the death with that new Anglo-Saxon nation
that was arising amid Puritan sermons and Mar-Prelate pamphlets. This
nation had driven out the language of its conquerors, and now it was to
overthrow their beautiful haughty imagination and their manners, full of
abandon and wilfulness, and to set in their stead earnestness and logic
and the timidity and reserve of a counting-house. It had been coming for
a long while, for it had made the Lollards; and when Anglo-French
Chaucer was at Westminster its poet, Langland, sang the office at St.
Paul's. Shakespeare, with his delight in great persons, with his
indifference to the State, with his scorn of the crowd, with his feudal
passion, was of the old nation, and Spenser, though a joyless
earnestness had cast shadows upon him, and darkened his intellect wholly
at times, was of the old nation too. His _Faerie Queene_ was written in
Merry England, but when Bunyan wrote in prison the other great English
allegory, Modern England had been born. Bunyan's men would do right that
they might come some day to the Delectable Mountain, and not at all that
they might live happily in a world whose beauty was but an entanglement
about their feet. Religion had denied the sacredness of an earth that
commerce was about to corrupt and ravish, but when Spenser lived the
earth had still its sheltering sacredness. His religion, where the
paganism that is natural to proud and happy people had been strengthened
by the platonism of the Renaissance, cherished the beauty of the soul
and the beauty of the body with, as it seemed, an equal affection. He
would have had men live well, not merely that they might win eternal
happiness but that they might live splendidly among men and be
celebrated in many songs. How could one live well if one had not the joy
of the Creator and of the Giver of gifts? He says in his _Hymn to
Beauty_ that a beautiful soul, unless for some stubbornness in the
ground, makes for itself a beautiful body, and he even denies that
beautiful persons ever lived who had not souls as beautiful. They may
have been tempted