he English arms on the
continent by the side of Henry IV, was also related to her though more
distantly: besides this, she wished to repay him for the good
treatment she had formerly received in her distress from his
grandfather.

How predominantly the personal element once more manifests itself in
this administration! As the Queen's own interest is also that of all,
those who belong to her family or have won her favour and done her
essential service, are the chiefs of the State and the leaders in war.
The royal patronage extended this influence over the Church and the
universities. But we find it no less in all other branches. Sir Thomas
Gresham, the Queen's agent in money-matters, was the founder of the
Exchange of London, to which she at his request gave the name of the
Royal Exchange.

In literature also we see the traces of her taste and her influence.
Owing to the tone of good society the classics were studied by every
one. The higher education was directed to them, as indeed the Queen
herself found in them refreshment and food for the mind: many
classical authors were translated, and the forms of the old poets
revived or imitated. The Italians and Spaniards, who had led the way
in similar attempts, further awoke the emulation of the English. In
Edmund Spenser, in whom the spirit of the age shows itself most
vividly, we constantly meet with imitations of the Latin or Italian
poets, which here and there aspire to be paraphrastic translations,
and may be inferior to his originals, even to the modern ones, in
delicacy of drawing, since he purposely selected their most successful
passages: yet how thoroughly different a spirit do his works breathe
in their total effect! What in the Italians is a play of fancy is in
him a deep moral earnestness. The English nation has an inestimable
possession in these works of a moral and religious grandeur, and a
simple view of nature, which happily expressed in single stanzas stamp
themselves on every man's memory. Spenser has assigned to allegory, as
a style, a larger sphere than perhaps belongs to it, and one allegory
is always interweaving itself with another; the heroes whom he takes
from the old romances become to him representatives of the different
virtues, but he possesses such an original power of vivid
representation that even in this form he gains the reader's interest.
But, if we ask what is the main thing which he celebrates, we find
that it is precisely the course o