at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to witness the
establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of
Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above
given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be
called the Elizabethan. In strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the
queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited
much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their
forerunners; and "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" have been, by
courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a
certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a
largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which
stamp them all alike with the queen's seal.

Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of
the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of
the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a
rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in
the literature of her time. But in Elizabethan poetry the maiden queen
is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen
of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and even
Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in _Henry
VIII._, and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory
introduced into _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

That very time I saw--but thou could'st not--
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on
In maiden meditation, fancy free--

an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for Elizabeth's hand.

The praises of the queen, which sound through all the poetry of her
time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not
merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never
before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and
bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the
gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's
feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself wi