acy felt, as well as acknowledged, throughout England. As long as two hundred years after that time the county of each member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue; but then the speech of the cultivated people of Middlesex and its vicinity had become for all England the undisputed standard. Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire, might have produced Shakespeare's mind; but had he lived in any one of those counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality from London, and written for his rural neighbors instead of the audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear, and the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony roughness of his rustic phraseology. His language would have been a dialect which must needs have been translated to be understood by modern English ears, with the loss of that heavy discount which is always paid at the desk of the broker in literary exchange. For us of after days, and so for the perpetuity and diffusion of Shakespeare's fame, he appeared at a most propitious period of the history of our race, not only as to its language, but as to its political and social condition. As to language, there was then a freedom from critical and scholastic restraint which has never since existed, united to a copiousness of vocabulary, which, except in the direction of philosophy and

science, has not been materially enlarged. The English language, even the English of London, although Chaucer and Spenser had used it, was regarded then in England itself as unfit for the use of scholars. English literature held no admitted place in the realm of letters; and the English people were of small consideration in Europe. Andrew Borde, a physician of Henry the Eighth's time, in his Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, says: "The speche of Englande is a base speche to other noble speches, as Italion, Castylion, & Frenche; howbeit the speche of Englande of late dayes is amended." And Lilly, Shakespeare's contemporary, makes his Euphues, in describing England, speak of "the English tongue, which is, as I have heard, almost barbarous."

We are accustomed to think of London as the capital of a great kindred empire, which is in letters as well as in arms and commerce one of the five or six great powers of the civilized world. We measure its importance by the fact of its being the time-honored literary metropolis of the great kingdom and the great republic whose tongue it speaks. But at the time of Shakespeare's arrival there, although that time was the glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth, London was only the chief city of the southern part of a little island which then contained the whole English race, a race which had not yet taken its

appointed place among the nations.

In

Haughty Spain, splendid in the spoil of the Indies, France, chivalric and courtly, and Italy, rich in art, in literature, and learning, looked down upon us as rude islanders who spoke an uncouth tongue, -a people not much to be regarded, but not to be interfered with or offended, because, as Euphues says, English folk "are impatient in their anger of any equall; readie to revenge an injurie, but never wont to proffer any; they never fight without provoking, and once provoked they never cease." It would seem that in some respects at least the traits of race have not changed during three centuries, on either side of the water. deed, as a people it was not until the beginning of Elizabeth's reign that we attained to the full maturity of our English-hood. The great civil wars, which involved three generations, though lasting but thirty years, and which ended by placing the Tudors on the throne, were not only the expiring throes of feudalism, they were the pangs of a new birth, and that birth was the English nation. Until after the reign of Henry the Seventh the people of England, although politically bound together, were as little penetrated by that unity of feeling and character which we call the genius of a nation as could possibly be in a community mainly of one origin, which had lived for nearly a thousand years in one small country, isolated from other peoples by the sea, and for six cen

turies under one government. Yet up to that period the habits and tone of thought, even among the governing and cultivated classes, those which held most frequent communication with each other and felt most the influence of the court, were so unlike, for instance in Northumberland, Kent, and Cornwall, that they might have served to distinguish alien and hostile populations. But during the long and tranquil reigns of the first Tudor and of his immediate successor the English people became knit together through peaceful intercourse, and by assimilation of thought and manners among the superior classes. And even among the yeomanry and peasantry the Wars of the Roses, by disturbing the inertness and local isolation of people otherwise tied to the soil on which they lived, and ignorant of their own countrymen beyond their own narrow neighborhood, by sending them in large bodies through the land, thus mingling their blood and measurably assimilating their dialects by attrition, did much to establish the condition of a true nationality.

The nation whose various elements were thus upheaved by the ploughshare, and intermingled by the harrow of war, lay fallow under the genial skies of the long succeeding days of peace, gaining strength and unity for the new growth which was to enrich it for the first time throughout its borders with an indigenous and common harvest. To this

people thus made approximately homogeneous, the Reformation came and completed the enfranchisement which the destruction of feudalism had but partly accomplished. The English character did not completely attain its ideal type until after it had freed itself from the fetters of feudality and cast off the yoke of Rome. During the century which succeeded the latter event it seems to have been more purely and absolutely, and at the same time unconsciously and generously, English, than the influences of party politics, the entangling interests of an extended empire, and the artificial preservation of a dead form of society, have permitted it to be since that period. Then from this people, thus interfused, thus tried and purified, thus invigorated by repose, in the first flush and strength of its perfected and awakened nature, there sprang an array of men glorious in arts and arms, in learning and in literature, in commerce and in statesmanship. The rich intellectual product of the Elizabethan era was like nothing that the world has seen, except the outburst of genius in Greece after the Persian war, which produced Pericles, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, and Phidias. It was this period, celebrated under the name of the princess whose reign filled the greater part of it, and which extended from about 1575 to 1625, which produced the men who changed the position of the English people before the world; and chief