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As an Elizabethan he would have been a great dramatist; under Queen Anne a great essayist. But whatever medium he worked in, he must equally have thrown the image of a great brain and a great soul. We have left our eighteenth-century novelists Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett safely behind us, with all their solidity and their audacity, their sincerity, and their coarseness of fibre.
The potato was introduced into the British Isles by Sir WALTER RALEIGH, a truculent Elizabethan imperialist of the worst type, transplanted into Ireland by the English garrison, and fostered by them for the impoverishment of the Irish physique.
The great eating up of the Irish land, the throttling of the natural wealth of that country, began with the ill work done in the Elizabethan age. Yet, the full mischief did not appear until Sir George's own early days, when the Irish people were leaving their native land in ship-loads.
Before the florid Italian monument that recorded all that was known of the short life of the Elizabethan adventurer she paused long, looking with quickening heart-beat at the graceful kneeling figure whose face and form were those of the man she loved.
Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and she frightened Love out of her sight in a ballet. Those occupations are gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away. She was something less than mortal. But she who was more than mortal was mortal too. This was no lady of the unanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these exquisite little talents.
In this way visitors could make their advent known without violent exertion, the mermaid lost no visible whit of her Elizabethan virginity, and the spirit of Shakespeare wandering in his garden would not notice any anachronism. He could not in fact, for there was none to notice.
That is the reason why the development of that age comes to us as a Literature. That is why it is on the surface of it Elizabethan.
I was told that the place was still owned by the descendants of the pious John Coxwell who built the manor house and commemorated it by the quaint inscription over the porch in 1590. Doubtless the architecture of all our Elizabethan manor houses in the shape of a letter E owes its origin to the first letter in the name of that great queen.
They had nothing to do with the pre-war, dilettante past, the sophisticated gaiety of the young century. Their childhood had been lived during the great war, and they had emerged from it hot with elemental things, discussing life, lust, love, politics and social reform, with cool candour, intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan directness.
Milton is the poet of steadfast will and purpose, who moves like a god amid the fears and hopes and changing impulses of the world, regarding them as trivial and momentary things that can never swerve a great soul from its course. It is well to have some such comparison in mind while studying the literature of the Elizabethan and the Puritan Age.
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