would have lifted her pupils' thoughts into a high range of endeavor; she would have made an atmosphere of intellectual ambition about her; she would have struck fire from flinty souls; and so she did in her court: She inspired work-inspired imagination; may we not say that she inspired genius. That auburn hair of hers (I suppose we should have called it red, if her name had been Abigail) made an aureole, around which wit coruscated by a kind of electric affinity. It was counted worth toil to have the honor of laying a poem at her gracious feet, who was so royally a Queen-whose life, and power, and will and culture, made up a quadrature of poems. Burleigh and Others. And who was there of literary significance about Elizabeth in those early days of her reign? Roger Ascham was still doling out his sagacious talk, and his good precepts; but he was not a force — only what we might call a good creature. There was Sackville (afterward the elegant Earl of Dorset); * *Thomas Sackville, b. 1527; d. 1608, was author of portion of Mirror for Magistrates; also associated with Thomas Norton, in production of the Tragedy of Gorboduc. he was in his prime then, and had very likely written his portion of the Mirror for Magistrates a fairish poetic history of great unfortunate people completed afterward by other poets, but hardly read nowadays. Old Tusser,* too the farmer-poet-lived in these times; an Essex man, of about the same age as Ascham, but who probably never came nearer to the court than to sing in the choir of old St. Paul's. He had University experience, which, if it did not help his farming, on the banks of the Stour, did, doubtless, enable him to equip his somewhat prosy poems with such classic authentication and such directness and simplicities as gave to his Pointes of Husbandrie very great vogue. Many rhyming saws about farming, still current among old-fashioned country-folk, trace back to Master Tusser, who lived and farmed successively (tradition says not very successfully) at Ipswich, Dereham, and Norwich. His will, however, published in these later times, shows him to have been a man of considerable means. Then there was Holinshed, † who, though the * Thomas Tusser, b. about 1527; d. 1580. Raphael Holinshed, d. about 1580. First edition of his Chronicle was published in 1577. date of his birth is uncertain, must have been of fair working age now-a homely, honest, simplehearted chronicler (somewhat thievish, as all the old chroniclers were) but whose name is specially worth keeping in mind, because he in all probability - supplied Shakespeare's principal historic reading, and furnished the crude material, afterward beaten out into those plaques of gold, which we call Shakespeare's Historic Plays. Therefore, we must always, I think, treat Holinshed with respect. Next, there was the great Lord Burleigh,* the chief minister and adviser of the Queen whom she set great store by the only man she allowed to sit in her presence; and indeed he was something heavy, both in mind and in person; but far-sighted, honest, keen, cautious, timid-making his nod count more than most men's words, and in great exigencies standing up for the right, even against the caprices of the sovereign. Whoever goes to Stamford in England should not fail to run out a mile away only to the princely place called Burleigh House (now the property of the Marquis of Exeter) : *William Cecil, b. 1520; d. 1598. Biography by Nares, 1828-31. - which was the home of this minister of Elizabeth's — built out of his savings, and equipped now with such paintings, such gardens, such magnificent avenues of oak, such great sweeps of velvet lawn, such herds of loitering deer as make it one of the show-places of England. Well this sober-sided, cautious Burleigh (you will get a short, but good glimpse of him in Scott's tragic tale of Kenilworth) wrote a book a sort of earlier Chesterfield's Letters, made up of advices for his son Robert Cecil, who was cousin, and in early life, rival of the great Francis Bacon. I will take out a tid-bit from this book, that you may see how this famous Lord Burleigh talked to his son: "When it shall please God to bring thee to man's estate" -he says- (6 - use great Providence, and circumspection in choosing thy wife: For from thence will spring all thy future good and evil. And it is an action of life-like unto a stratagem of War, wherein a man can err but once. If thy estate be good, match near home and at leisure: if weak far off, and quickly. Inquire diligently of her disposition, and how her parents have been inclined in their youth. Choose not a base, and uncomely creature, altogether for Wealth; for it will cause contempt in others, and loathing in thee: Neither make choice of a fool, for she will be thy continual disgrace, and it will irk thee to hear her talk." A Group of Great Names. But the greater names which went to illustrate with their splendor the times of Elizabeth, only began to come to people's knowledge after she had been upon the throne some twenty years. ness Spenser was a boy of five, when she came to power: John Lilly, the author of Euphues which has given us the word euphuistic, and which provoked abundant caricatures, of more or less fairwas born the same year with Spenser; Sir Philip Sidney a year later; Sir Walter Raleigh a year earlier (1553); Richard Hooker, the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity, in 1554; Lord Bacon in 1561; Shakespeare in 1564. These are great names to stand so thickly strewed over ten or twelve years of time. I do not name them, because I lay great stress on special dates: For my own part, I find them hard things to keep in mind --except I group them thus and I think a man or woman can work and worry at worthier particularities than these. But when Elizabeth had been twenty years a Queen, and was in the prime of her womanly powers-six years after the slaughter of |