e, quickened the temper of the wealthier nobles.
"Home-keeping youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the time, "have
ever homely wits"; and a tour over the Continent became part of the
education of a gentleman. Fairfax's version of Tasso, Harrington's
version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence which the literature of
Italy, the land to which travel led most frequently, exerted on English
minds. The classical writers told upon England at large when they were
popularized by a crowd of translations. Chapman's noble version of Homer
stands high above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians
of the ancient world were turned into English before the close of the
sixteenth century.

[Sidenote: Historic Literature.]

It is characteristic of England that the first kind of literature to
rise from its long death was the literature of history. But the form in
which it rose marked the difference between the world in which it had
perished and that in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the
world had been without a past, save the shadowy and unknown past of
early Rome; and annalist and chronicler told the story of the years
which went before as a preface to their tale of the present without a
sense of any difference between them. But the religious, social, and
political change which passed over England under the New Monarchy broke
the continuity of its life; and the depth of the rift between the two
ages is seen by the way in which History passes on its revival under
Elizabeth from the mediaeval form of pure narrative to its modern form of
an investigation and reconstruction of the past. The new interest which
attached to the bygone world led to the collection of its annals, their
reprinting and embodiment in an English shape. It was his desire to give
the Elizabethan Church a basis in the past, as much as any pure zeal
for letters, which induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way in the
first of these labours. The collection of historical manuscripts which,
following in the track of Leland, he rescued from the wreck of the
monastic libraries created a school of antiquarian imitators, whose
research and industry have preserved for us almost every work of
permanent historical value which existed before the Dissolution of the
Monasteries. To his publication of some of our earlier chronicles we owe
the series of similar publications which bear the name of Camden,
Twysden, and Gale. But as a branch of literat