We see Raleigh the Captain of her Guard-the valiant knight, the scholar, the ready poet-but readiest of all to bring his fine figure and his stately gallantries to her court: We see Sir Francis Drake, with his full beard and bullet-head all browned with his long voyages, from which he has come laden with ingots of Spanish gold -swinging with his sailor-gait into her august presence: We catch sight of Lord Burleigh, feeble now with the weight of years, leading up that young nephew of his - Francis Bacon, that he may kiss the Queen's hand and do service for favors which shall make him in time Lord Chancellor of England. Perhaps the rash, headstrong Oxford may be in presence, whose poor wife was once the affianced of Sidney: And the elegant Lord Buckhurst, decorous with the white hair of age, who, in his younger days, when plain Thomas Sackville, had contributed the best parts to the Mirror for Magistrates: Richard Hooker, too, may come up from the "peace and privacy" of his country parsonage - in his sombre clerical dress, bent with study, but in the prime of his age and power, with the calm. face and the severe

be there

philosophy with which he has confronted a termagant of a wife and the beginnings of Dissent. And, if not in this presence, yet somewhere in London might have been found, in that day, a young man, not much past twenty-just up from Stratford-upon-Avon - to take his part in playing at the Globe Theatre; yet not wholly like other players. Even now, while all these worthies are gathering about the august Queen in her brilliant halls at Greenwich or at Hampton Court, this young Stratford man may be seated upon the steps of Old St. Paul's with his chin upon his hand-looking out on the multitudinous human tide, which even then swept down Ludgate Hill, and meditating the speeches of those shadowy courtiers of hisonly creatures of his day-dreams; yet they are to carry his messages of wisdom into all lands and languages.

But I must shut the books where I see these figures come and go.

CHAPTER VII.

S we open our budget to-day, we are still under kingship of the great Queen Bess, in whose presence we saw the portentous Lord Burleigh, whose nod has passed into history; we saw, too, in our swift way, the wise, the judicious, the simple-minded, the mismarried Richard Hooker. We called Spenser before us, and had a taste of those ever-sweet poems of his ever sweet, though ever so long. Then his friend Philip Sidney flashed across our view, the over-fine gentleman, yet full of nobility and courage, who wrote a long book, Arcadia, so bright with yellow splendor as to tire one; and still so full of high thinking as to warrant his fame and to lend a halo to his brave and tragic death. You may remember, too, that I made short mention of a certain John Lyly, who was about the same age with Spenser, and who, with

his pretty euphuisms came to cut a larger figure in the days of Elizabeth than many stronger men did.

John Lyly.

I recur to him now and tell you more of him, because he did in his time set a sort of fashion in letters. He was an Oxford man,* born down in Kent, and at twenty-five, or thereabout, made his fame by a book, which grew out of suggestions (not only of name but largely of intent and purpose) in the Schoolmaster of Roger Ascham; and thus it happens over and over in the fields of literature, that a plodding man will drop from his store a nugget, over which some fellow of lively parts will stumble into renown.

The book I refer to was called Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, which came into such extraordinary favor that he wrote shortly after another, called Euphues and his England. And the fashion that he set, was a fashion of affectations. - of prettinesses of speech-of piling words on words, daintier and daintier- antithesis upon antithesis, with flavors of wide reading thrown in, and spangled

* John Lyly, b. 1554; d. 1606.

with classic terms and far-fetched similes

so that

ladies ambitious of literary fame larded their talk with these fine euphuisms of Mr. Lyly. Something of a coxcomb I think we must reckon him; we might almost say an Oscar Wilde of lettersposing as finely and as capable of drawing female shoals in his wake. His strain for verbal felicities, always noticeable, comparing with good, simple, downright English, as a dancing-master's mincing step, compares with the assured, steady tread of a go-ahead pedestrian, who thinks nothing of attitudes. Scott, you will remember, sought to caricature the Euphuist, in a somewhat exaggerated way, in Sir Piercie Shafton, who figures in his story of the Monastery; he himself, however, in the later annotations of his novel, confesses his failure, and admitted the justice of the criticism which declared Sir Piercie a bore. Shakespeare, also, at a time not far removed from Lyly's conquest, perhaps intended a slap at the euphuistic craze,* in the pedant Schoolmaster's talk of "Love's Labor's Lost."

*The style of Lyly has been traced by Dr. Landmann, an ingenious German critic, to the influence of Don Antonio de Guevara, a Spanish author, who wrote El Libro Aureo de