parents of the novelty of electric cars, telephones, wireless, and automobiles, and by their grandparents of a time without railways or telegraphs, so Shakespeare's daughter may have heard her father tell of the many changes which had taken place during his life. Fashions in dress changed even oftener than they do now and went to extravagant extremes. Men often wore fortunes upon their backs and surpassed the women in gay colors, costly jewels, and absurd figures. Business was growing, and great fortunes were being amassed partly by daring trading, but more often through monopolies granted by the government. Knowledge was increasing rapidly as travelers brought back tales of new lands, or students discovered something unknown of past times! What seemed a dangerous change to many was the growth of luxury. Coaches came into use in the cities and caused as much discussion as automobiles did a few years ago. Dwellings were better built, with glass windows; and the nobles built great country homes. Forks were brought from Italy and tobacco from America. Religion had experienced a revolution; the Church of England was established, but discussion of religious topics was rife, and the extreme Protestants became known as Puritans. They were especially hostile to certain ceremonies and to the authority of the bishops. Reading and education were growing, and were no longer confined to a small class. In the upper ranks a bright girl might study Latin and Greek and become better educated in books than her brother. Rural England went on about as before, but all was stir and movement in the growing seaports, and especially in London. It was a city of not much over one hundred thousand inhabitants, but in commerce, wealth, and in the activity and independence of its citizens, it had become one of the great cities of the world.

All the changes which we have noted in the preceding chapter as taking place in the fifteenth century and contributing to the Renaissance of Europe made themselves fully manifest in the England of Elizabeth. And in England as elsewhere the

FROM VISCHER'S VIEW OF LONDON, 1616, SHOWING ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL AND TWO PLAYHOUSES CN THE BANKSIDE

(Copied from Shakespeare's England, published by the Oxford Press.)

greatest of these was the growth of humanism, of an interest in human affairs. Instead of an island shut off on one side of the world, England found herself in the center of the universe, and connected by commerce, by war, by discovery, by books, and by ideas with men of every continent. This lifting of the horizon of the intellect and the imagination was not confined to queen, or ministers, or travelers. The son of a shoemaker, Kit Marlowe, the son of a bricklayer, Ben Jonson, the son of a country storekeeper, Will Shakespeare, were among those who felt this impulse calling them to a study of books, to the animated life of London, and finally to the imaginative 'expression of the greatness and variety of human nature.

THE LITERATURE OF TRANSLATION

North's Plutarch. When, under the conciliating rule of Elizabeth, the passions of the Reformation began to cool and Englishmen turned again to the things of this world, there developed a great appetite for entertaining literature. The changes in the language in the previous century had been such as to make the writings of the age of Chaucer somewhat oldfashioned, and the preoccupation of more recent authors with religious topics had prevented the production of any large amount of contemporary secular literature. Printing had brought books within the reach of a much larger number of people than had formerly been able to own manuscripts, and more and more people were learning to read. The publishers of the second part of the sixteenth century, to supply the growing demand, turned to the literature of other times and countries, and translations were produced in vast numbers. Most of the Latin classics and many of the Greek appeared in an English dress, as an example of which may be mentioned Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives. This great collection of classical biographies is still a delight to read in its rich and ample sentences, whose occasional quaintness of

phrase seldom creates obscurity; and it has the further title to fame that it supplied to Shakespeare the material for Julius Cæsar and his other Roman plays.

Besides the classics, the translators of the time drew on the literature of Italy, France, and Spain. It is impossible to describe the variety of material thus brought within the knowledge of the Elizabethan Englishman. Books of devotion and treatises on horsemanship, manuals of conduct and manuals of cookery, poems, dramas, and criticism - all seemed to find a public. Most voluminous of all was the supply of fiction. The Italians especially had produced in the two previous centuries a vast quantity of stories, chiefly in the form of the short narratives called "novelle," such as compose the famous Decameron of Boccaccio; and these were turned into English by the hundred, supplying amusement for the reader, models for imitation by native story-writers, and plots for dramatists. Painter's Palace of Pleasure is a typical example of the English imitation of the Italian collections, a compilation of a hundred stories from ancient and modern sources. Thus all the world was being drawn on to nourish the English imagination and to broaden the outlook and enlarge the information of both authors and public, so preparing the way for the great writers who were to come.

Translations of the Bible. We have seen that in the age of Chaucer the reforming movement started by Wyclif produced the first complete translation of the Bible. The same result accompanied the Reformation itself. William Tyndale, in 1525, published his translation of the New Testament. The Old Testament was later added, and throughout the century a number of other versions were issued. Some, like the Geneva Bible, were colored by the opinions of the more extreme Protestants; others, like the Douay and Rheims versions, were translated for the use of the Catholics. Finally, in 1611, a body of English divines produced the great Authorized Version, sometimes called "King James's," which we read to-day.

Though this great monument of English prose is the result of many revisions by various hands, the quality of its style is due more to Tyndale than to any other man. A few verses from his New Testament will show how, in spite of modifications of the language, the general effect is very similar to that which we find in the Bible we know.

Ye are the salt of the erthe, but ah! yf the salte be once unsavery, what can be salted there with? it is thence forthe good for nothynge, but to be cast out at the dores, and that men treade it under fete. Ye are the light of the worlde. A cite that is sett on an hill cannot be hyd, nether do men light a candle and put it under a busshell, but on a candelstycke, and it lighteth all those which are in the housse. Se that youre light so schyne before men, that they maye se youre good werkes, and gloryfie your Father, which is in heven.1

Matthew, V.

Not only does the English Bible stand in the front rank of English prose writing, notable alike for its simplicity and dignity, its beauty and its strength, but it has been beyond comparison the greatest single influence on the prose style of the last three hundred years.

THE ELIZABETHAN NOVEL

Lyly and Euphuism. Not all Elizabethan fiction was translation. In 1578 a sensation was produced in courtly circles by the publication of a curious book by John Lyly, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, followed two years later by Euphues and his England. Though containing slight love stories, these books seem to our taste very thin in plot, and indeed their purpose was less that of entertaining by a well built narrative, than of laying down in their long-drawn-out conversations and letters the precepts to be followed by a well-bred young gentleman. Thus they resembled the "books of conduct" we have spoken of in the Middle Ages, only their ideal is that of the Renaissance. But Lyly has gained immortality by the style rather than by

1 Compare Wyclif's translation of the same passage or page 42.

H