ational
misery and poverty, not times of insecurity and fear, not times of weak
convictions and cynicism, that produce a wealth of either great poets or
great art. There is not one distinguished literary or artistic period
of any country at which the national spirit was not full of the
animation, enterprise, and confidence of a general well-being, or at
which it was not possessed by high ideas and strong aims or strong
convictions. I am speaking in broad summary. Whatever qualifications may
be made for unique phenomena, this statement in the main is true. At
such periods the mental vitality of a community is high; the air is
charged with intellectual and artistic electricity, and great talents
everywhere become the receivers and gathering-points of those electric
currents. Hence poets, artists, and other creators appear simultaneously
in clusters; production is abundant both in matter and in kind. At such
times there is nothing withdrawn or particularly refined about the
creations which pour forth. There is no room for the dilettante or
_petit maitre_, and not much for the professional critic; it is the age
of strong men; writing, painting, sculpture are full of vigour,
inspiration, earnestness.

It was so at Athens in that glorious age of Pericles and the succeeding
generation, the age of the great tragedians, of Thucydides, of
Aristophanes and of Phidias. It was so--though with men of less
original genius--in the Augustan Rome of Virgil, Horace and Livy. It was
so in the rich and ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci,
Raphael, Michel Angelo, and Titian flourished in the same space of
thirty years. It was so in the France of Louis Quatorze, when Corneille,
Racine, Moliere, Pascal, and numbers of others of hardly smaller note,
were writing side by side. And it was so in the times of great
Elizabeth. According to Emerson there is a mental zymosis or contagion
prevailing in society at such epochs. Some one has said that "No member
of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the
orators whom Lord North did not see or who did not see Lord North." If
so, the cause will be found to lie in the encouragement which noble
oratory then received, whereas at a later day it has "fallen into
abatement and low price."

The age of Elizabeth was one of material prosperity and comfort. It was,
in the main, well with men's bodies and well with their minds. They
possessed not only the leisure, not only the