means, but also the
disposition to enjoy. It is not for the artist in any field to scorn the
material prosperity of the community in which he works. After all, as
history will show, it is that prosperity which makes him possible.
"Plain living and high thinking" is good for himself; it is good for a
nation; but plain living does not mean poverty, squalor or starvation,
while high thinking cannot be done without leisure and resource. You
cannot build glorious Gothic cathedrals or order sublime Madonnas out of
nothing.

Elizabethan England lived in comfort. It lived also in the security of
at least internal peace. The Civil Wars, which had unsettled men of all
ranks and distracted their thoughts and energies, were over. Those
thoughts and energies now sought another outlet. On the whole it was
also an age of tolerance. England had not entered upon its phase of
Puritan bigotry, nor on its licentious Anti-Puritan vengeance. Religion
was in less degree a battle-ground. There were, of course, hostilities
of Protestants, Catholics, and Brownists, but the two hundred and odd
sects of the twentieth century were still far off, and men's time and
intellectual energies--of which there is but a limited amount--were not
wasted in futile discussion of sectarian minutiae.

At ease in mind, body and estate, it was natural that the age should be
one of frank enjoyment--enjoyment of all that gladdens mind or eye or
ear, enjoyment of rich clothes, fine houses, shows, pageantries, music,
song, stories, and plays. In the revels which Scott in his _Kenilworth_
makes Leicester prepare for the reception of Elizabeth, he is drawing
upon his study of the times. Above all entertainments the play was the
thing, and whether performed before the mixed auditory of the new
theatres of Shoreditch or on the Southwark side, or before the Benchers
of the Inns of Court, or before the Queen's Majesty herself, the drama
received a welcome compared with which its appreciation in our midst is
as cold as it is stinted.

And yet all this might have produced in literature and art nothing but
pomp and show, or amusement more or less vulgar. In the theatre it might
have ended in farce or melodrama. But happily, along with prosperity and
the feeling for enjoyment, conditions were at work which made for the
keenest activity of mind and every form of intellectual expansion. It
would be to enlarge upon a trite theme indeed, if one dwelt upon the
enterprise and discov