y Sir Thomas Gresham, in that very year 1566, gave English
trade an impetus of which we in England and America are reaping the
benefits. English ships under such men as Drake and Frobisher, Sir
Richard Grenville and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, were sailing the seas,
fighting the Spaniards, and bringing home the wealth of every country in
the known globe to the port of London. A few years later, Drake in his
little vessel with eighty men would sail through the straits of
Magellan, and load his bark with gold-dust and silver ingots, with
pearls, diamonds and emeralds, the spoils of the "great galleon that
sailed once a year from Lima to Cadiz," and Raleigh would name Virginia
after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.

But something more precious than commerce, or mere tangible wealth, was
reviving in England. The prosperity of Elizabeth's reign was signalized
by an outburst of literature such as the world has seldom seen. In 1566
Edmund Spenser was fourteen; Sir Philip Sidney was twelve; and William
Shakespeare was a little two-year-old lad playing about his father's
black and white half-timbered house in sunny Stratford-on-Avon. What
need to go further? Those three names alone are enough, to say nothing
of the host of other writers--Bacon and Fulke Grenville with the
philosophers and the essayists, Hakluyt and his library of voyages and
travels, Michael Drayton and the patriotic poets. These were some of the
men who as statesmen, soldiers, discoverers, poets, have made the
Elizabethan age the synonym for all that is most splendid, most
brilliant at home and abroad.

Nine years after the queen's letter from Oxford, Elizabeth Hobby, who
had meanwhile married Lord Russell, took refuge at Westminster from the
plague which was then prevalent in London--that is to say in what we now
call the city, where all the grand folks of those days lived.

Having obtained so much favor from Dr. Goodman, Dean of
Westminster, as to have her lodgings within the late
dissolved Abbey,

her little daughter was born in the precincts on October 22, 1575. Lord
Russell wrote to announce the fact to his brother-in-law Lord Burleigh.
He was sorely disappointed at the child being a girl. "I could have
wished with all my heart to have had a boy:" but as that could not be
he would like a wise man "rejoice in having a girl." Then he goes on to
ask Lord Burleigh to pray the queen to be the baby's godmother. The
queen willingly granted the request; for