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A new generation arises, with clearer sight, with fuller experience, sometimes with nobler aims; and 'The old order changeth, giveth place to the new, And God fulfils himself in many ways. The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon. There was no more life left in it; and God had something better in store for England. Raleigh's ideal was a noble one: but God's was nobler far.
As we think of the sixteenth century, behind Henry VIII's breach with Rome, behind Edward VI's prayer-books, waits the figure of Pole, steadfast, biding his time; coming to salute Mary with the words of the angel to the Virgin; coming, as he hoped, to set things right for ever. And behind Pole are the Elizabethan settlement and the Puritans; ineradicable from our consciousness.
But if the outside was like a barn, the inside was like a beautiful mediæval interior by Cattermole an interior abounding in rich and costly detail; in heavy crimson draperies, precious old Italian cabinets, damascened armor, carved chairs with upright backs and twisted legs, old paintings in massive Florentine frames, and strange quaint pieces of Elizabethan furniture, like buffets, with open shelves full of rare and artistic things bronzes, ivory carvings, unwieldy Majolica jars, and lovely goblets of antique Venetian glass laced with spiral ornaments of blue and crimson and that dark emerald green of which the secret is now lost for ever.
We did not go in. . . . Turning to the right, we walked onward two or three miles, passing the Botanic Garden, and thence along by suburban villas, Belgrave terraces, and other such prettinesses in the modern Gothic or Elizabethan style, with fancifully ornamented flower-plats before them; thence by hedgerows and fields, and through two or three villages, with here and there an old plaster and timber-built thatched house, among a street full of modern brick-fronts, the alehouse, or rural inn, being generally the most ancient house in the village.
The Religio Medici, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die in." Urn Burial, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a prose poet of the "inevitable hour":
Moll Flanders in some respects the greatest of all his books has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in scenery and properties it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a bed to furnish it. Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond even making his personages soliloquise in this after a fashion and it plays a very important part in "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high as dialogue.
During this confinement he composed his History of the World, which he brought down to 130 B.C. It is one of the finest specimens of Elizabethan prose, reflective in matter and dignified and grave in style. Released in 1615 he set out on his last voyage, again to Guiana, which, like the former, proved a failure, and in which he lost his eldest s.
As for his plots, Shakespeare constantly draws them either from authentic history, or from the old ballads and traditions which served as history to the Elizabethan public, and which even now no scientific historian would dismiss as absolutely untrue.
Among the books, for example, was a fine copy of Homer, with the arms of a well-known English college stamped on the binding, and near by was the faded photograph of a beautiful old Elizabethan house, with mouldering garden walls, and a moat brimming with water-lilies surrounding it.
Vague the Elizabethan critics undeniably are; they tend to lose themselves either in far-fetched analogies or in generalities that have but a slight bearing upon the distinctive problems of literary appreciation. When not vague, they are apt to fritter their strength on technical details which, important to them, have long lost their significance for the student of literature.
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