ery of bold spirits like Francis Drake, and upon
the eager curiosity, the ready imagination, the universal
open-mindedness, which ran through the nation, as new worlds were opened
or looked for in the western or southern seas.

More important, all-important in truth, was the avid mastery of new
knowledge which had followed the Renaissance and the invention of
printing. The ancient writers of Greece and Rome were all recovered, and
were being greedily absorbed. Old thoughts, ideas, fancies,
knowledge--long buried and shamefully forgotten--had become new again.
The curiosity which followed the voyages of Drake or Raleigh to America,
followed also the explorations of the scholar in the ever-opening seas
of ancient literature. The age became one of wide and plenteous reading.
Moreover men read then, as they ought to read, for the matter. They tore
the heart out of books, from Homer to Seneca; they were greedy for the
substance, the thoughts, the imaginations, the fancies. If they could
not read the originals, they insisted on the translations. Nor did they
stay at the classics. They devoured books in Italian and French. Never
has England been so cosmopolitan, at least so European, in its
absorption of ideas and knowledge. It is only since the icebound
Puritan days that England has become insular, self-contained, in part
hugely conceited, and in part absurdly diffident, concerning itself. The
best work of Byron and Shelley aimed at breaking down this attitude, and
if we are again growing out of our insularity--which is open to much
doubt--it is in no small measure due to writers of their kind.

I do not offer all these commonplaces as information. I offer them
simply as reminders, and as a necessary introduction to the remark which
I have next to make--that the enlightenment, the education, above all
the spirit, derived from this wealth of reading were precisely that sort
of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid
poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the
narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still
less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs
of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is
inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading
should run to social and economic questions, to applied sciences, to the
investigation of germs and gases, political problems, electric forces,
an