sorts being possessed with a hearty, honest
English enthusiasm and national pride. And this passion was
inextricably bound up with traditions of the past and with the ancient
currents of the national life. Therewithal this deep, settled
reverence for what was then "Old England," while it naturally drew
into the mind the treasured riches of many foregoing ages, was at the
same time strangely combined with a very bold and daring spirit of
progress and improvement. Men seem indeed to have been all the more
open to healthy innovation for being thus firmly rooted in the ground
of prescription. The public mind received what was new the more freely
because it loved the old. So that hope and anticipation walked with
the bolder pace, inasmuch as memory and retrospection were still their
cherished companions. In a word, men's tenacity of the past gave them
the larger and brighter vision of the future. Because they had no
mind to forsake the law of their fathers, or to follow the leading of
"sages undevoutly free," therefore they were able to legislate the
better for their children, and felt the less of danger in true freedom
of thought.

[9] Page 120 of this volume.

It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that those two passions thus
coexisting should somehow work together, and at least endeavour to
produce a joint result. And so it was in fact. Historical plays, or
things purporting to be such, were highly popular: the public taste
evidently favoured, not to say demanded them; and some of
Shakespeare's earliest essays were undoubtedly in that line. There are
many clear evidences to this point. For instance, Thomas Nash, in his
_Pierce Penniless_, 1592, speaks of certain plays "wherein our
forefathers' valiant acts, that have been long buried in rusty brass
and worm-eaten books, are revived, and they themselves raised from the
grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honours in open
presence." And again: "How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the
terror of the French, to think that, after he had lain two hundred
years in the tomb, he should triumph again on the stage; and have his
bones new-embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at
least,--at several times,--who, in the tragedian that represents his
person, behold him fresh-bleeding!" From these passages it is clear
that historical plays on English subjects were strong in the public
interest and patronage. And I have no doubt that the second passage
quot