ct being to give, not a series of
interesting essays on detached points, but a conspectus of the actual
literary progress and accomplishment of the century, from 1557 to 1660.
Such essays exist already in great numbers, though some no doubt are yet to
write. The extraordinary influence of Plato, or at least of a more or less
indistinctly understood Platonism, on many of the finer minds of the
earlier and middle period, is a very interesting point, and it has been
plausibly connected with the fact that Giordano Bruno was for some years a
resident in England, and was acquainted with the Greville-Sidney circle at
the very time that that circle was almost the cradle of the new English
literature. The stimulus given not merely by the popular fancy for rough
dramatic entertainments, but by the taste of courts and rich nobles for
masques--a taste which favoured the composition of such exquisite
literature as Ben Jonson's and Milton's masterpieces--is another side
subject of the same kind. I do not know that, much as has been written on
the Reformation, the direct influence of the form which the Reformation
took in England on the growth of English literature has ever been estimated
and summarised fully and yet briefly, so as to show the contrast between
the distinctly anti-literary character of most of the foreign Protestant
and the English Puritan movement on the one side, and the literary
tendencies of Anglicanism on the other. The origins of Euphuism and of that
later form of preciousness which is sometimes called Gongorism and
sometimes Marinism have been much discussed, but the last word has
certainly not been said on them. For these things, however (which are
merely quoted as examples of a very numerous class), there could be found
no place here without excluding other things more centrally necessary to
the unfolding of the history. And therefore I may leave what I have written
with a short final indication of what seems to me the distinguishing mark
of Elizabethan literature. That mark is not merely the presence of
individual works of the greatest excellence, but the diffusion throughout
the whole work of the time of a _vivida vis_, of flashes of beauty in prose
and verse, which hardly any other period can show. Let us open one of the
songbooks of the time, Dowland's _Second Book of Airs_, published in the
central year of our period, 1600, and reprinted by Mr Arber. Here almost at
random we hit upon this snatch--

"Co