c to a newness
of life. That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation
then heaved throughout, went through every man and woman,
and tried what manner of spirits they were of. What a preparation
was this for that period of our literature in which man,
the great actor of the drama of life, was about to appear on the stage!
It was to be expected that the drama should then start into life,
and that human character should speak from the stage
with a depth of life never known before; but who could have
imagined Shakespeare?"

And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser's verse!
His noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect,
has since been used by some of the greatest poets of the literature,
Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others;
but none of them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music
out of it which Spenser drew.

Professor Goldwin Smith well remarks, in his article
on Mark Pattison's Milton, "The great growths of poetry have coincided
with the great bursts of national life, and the great bursts
of national life have hitherto been generally periods
of controversy and struggle. Art itself, in its highest forms,
has been the expression of faith. We have now people who profess
to cultivate art for its own sake; but they have hardly produced
anything which the world accepts as great, though they have supplied
some subjects for `Punch'."

Spenser who, of all the great English poets, is regarded
by some critics as the most remote from real life,
and the least reflecting his age, is, nevertheless, filled with
the spirit of his age--its chivalric, romantic, patriotic, moral,
and religious spirit. When he began to write, the nation had
just passed through the fiery furnace of a religious persecution,
and was rejoicing in its deliverance from the papistical rule of Mary.
The devotion to the new queen with which it was inspired was grateful,
generous, enthusiastic, and even romantic. This devotion
Spenser's great poem everywhere reflects, and it has been
justly pronounced to be the best exponent of the subtleties
of that Calvinism which was the aristocratic form of Protestantism
at that time in both France and England.

The renewed spiritual life which set in so strongly with Spenser,
reached its springtide in Shakespeare. It was the secret
of that sense of moral proportion which pervades his plays.
Moral proportion cannot be secured through th