Novelists.]

But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was first developed in a
school of Italian imitators which appeared in Elizabeth's later years.
The origin of English fiction is to be found in the tales and romances
with which Greene and Nash crowded the market, models for which they
found in the Italian novels. The brief form of these novelettes soon led
to the appearance of the "pamphlet"; and a new world of readers was seen
in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels that passed
under this name were issued, and the greediness with which they were
devoured. It was the boast of Greene that in the eight years before his
death he had produced forty pamphlets. "In a night or a day would he
have yarked up a pamphlet, as well as in seven years, and glad was that
printer that might be blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his
wit." Modern eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the books of
Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the
Puritans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly
off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his
facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning
of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street,
and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. The
abundance indeed of printers and of printed books at the close of the
Queen's reign shows that the world of readers and writers had widened
far beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers with which it
began.

[Sidenote: Influence of the age.]

But to the national and local influences which were telling on English
literature was added that of the restlessness and curiosity which
characterized the age. At the moment which we have reached the sphere of
human interest was widened as it has never been widened before or since
by the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the
later years of the sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus
were brought home to the general intelligence of mankind by Kepler and
Galileo, or that the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil
which the greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus.
Hardly inferior to these revelations as a source of intellectual impulse
was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of the
world were brought face to face with one another through the uni