n. One loses, in fact, that power to distinguish the important from
the trivial which is one of the functions of a sound literary taste.
Now, a study of the minor writing of the past is, of course, well worth
a reader's pains. Pamphlets, chronicle histories, text-books and the
like have an historical importance; they give us glimpses of the manners
and habits and modes of thought of the day. They tell us more about the
outward show of life than do the greater books. If you are interested in
social history, they are the very thing. But the student of literature
ought to beware of them, nor ought he to touch them till he is familiar
with the big and lasting things. A man does not possess English
literature if he knows what Dekker tells of the seven deadly sins of
London and does not know the _Fairy Queen_. Though the wide and curious
interest of the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and
illumined the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of
approach is the method of their predecessors--to keep hold on common
sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong end
of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening time, to
know the best--the "classic"--and study it before the minor things.

In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first time, with cheapened
printing, the common vehicle of amusement and information, and the books
that remain to us cover many departments of writing. There are the
historians who set down for us for the first time what they knew of the
earlier history of England. There are the writers, like Harrison and
Stubbs, who described the England of their own day, and there are many
authors, mainly anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of
the discoverers in the Western Seas. There are the novelists who
translated stories mainly from Italian sources. But of authors as
conscious of a literary intention as the poets were, there are only two,
Sidney and Lyly, and of authors who, though their first aim was hardly
an artistic one, achieved an artistic result, only Hooker and the
translators of the Bible. The Authorized Version of the Bible belongs
strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to that of James, and we
shall have to look at it when we come to discuss the seventeenth
century. Hooker, in his book on Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour to
set forth the grounds of orthodox Anglicanism) employed a generous,
flowing, melodious style