t_. Of books which were not so much
literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the
_Chronicle of England_, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580. This was
Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced
Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in
his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely
Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from
the French version of Jacques Amyot.

Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most
important was Richard Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the first four
books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of
law, and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of
the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had
yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous,
stately, and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an
English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers,
such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the _Ecclesiastical Polity_
been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, years earlier, it would
doubtless have been written in Latin.

The life of Francis Bacon, "the father of inductive philosophy," as he
has been called--better, the founder of inductive logic--belongs to
English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to
the history of English philosophy. But his volume of _Essays_ was a
contribution to general literature. In their completed form they belong
to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and
contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of
pregnant maxims--the text for an essay--than that developed treatment of
a subject which we now understand by the word essay. They were, said
their author, "as grains of salt, that will rather give you an appetite
than offend you with satiety." They were the first essays, so called, in
the language. "The word," said Bacon, "is late, but the thing is
ancient." The word he took from the French _essais_ of Montaigne, the
first two books of which had been published in 1592. Bacon testified
that his essays were the most popular of his writings because they "came
home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate title explains their
character: _Counsels Civil and Moral_, that is, pieces of advice
touching the conduct of life, "of a nature