to the gratitude of the Scotch the value of which cannot be disputed: he founded a system of free public schools in his native land three centuries before one was established in England. The result can best be stated in the words of Macaulay: "An improvement such as the world has never seen took place in the moral and religious character of the people. Soon, in spite of the rigor of the climate, in spite of the sterility of the earth, Scotland became a country which had no reason to envy the fairest portions of the globe. Wherever the Scotchman went—and there were few parts of the world to which he did not go-he carried his superiority with him."

In his educational work Knox was powerfully assisted by George Buchanan (1506-1582), who was at once a great poet and a great teacher. His life was consecrated to the study of the classical writers and their interpretation. His most famous work was a translation into Latin of the Psalms, which, until recent years, was read in every Scotch school where Latin was taught. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who despised most Scotchmen, was an enthusiastic admirer of Buchanan. When somebody asked him what he would have said of Buchanan if he had been an Englishman, Johnson replied: "I should not have said of Buchanan, had he been an Englishman, what I will now say of him as a Scotchman, that he was the only man of genius his country ever produced."

A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines written in iambic pentameters and divided into two stanzas, one of eight and one of six lines. In the following sonnet Wordsworth at once shows its form, tells its history, and explains its power:

"Scorn not the Sonnet: Critic, you have frowned
Mindless of its just honors; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camoëns soothed an exile's grief.
The sonnet glittered, a gay myrtle leaf,
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp

It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faeryland

To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains-alas, too few!"

When the Renascence turned the attention of cultured Englishrnen to Italy, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) discovered the sonnets of Petrarch and introduced the form into English literature. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516-1547), likewise a child of the Renascence, made an even more important contribution to English literature, by importing iambic pentameter blank verse, the measure in which are written Shakespeare's plays, Milton's "Paradise Lost," Wordsworth's "Excursion," and Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." Nor does their interest end here. In Wyatt we find what has been called the personal note, a characteristic hitherto absent from English poetry. Surrey translated Virgil, was arrested for eating meat in Lent and breaking windows with a cross-bow, was a soldier and a lover, and was beheaded because Henry VIII feared that he might aspire to the throne. Their joint work formed a sort of handbook for the poets who followed.

Those poets were so numerous and so excellent that the England of Elizabeth has been likened to a nest of singing birds. Only a few can be mentioned here. Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) planned the " Mirror for Magistrates," a huge work in which are depicted the follies and mistakes of past as a warning to future rulers; and wrote "The Induction," or preface, which challenges comparison with Virgil's picture of Tartarus and Dante's " Inferno." Thomas Tusser (1524-1580) wrote on agriculture. In his poem on the " Properties of Wind," he says:

'Except wind stands as never it stood
It is an ill wind turns none to good."

In the Farmer's "Daily Diet":

"At Christmas play and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year."

In "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry ":

"Such master, such man;

Who goeth a borrowing

Goeth a sorrowing;

"Tis merry in hall

When beards wag all."

"Naught venture, naught have."

Sir Edward Dyer (1545-1607) wrote "My Mind to me a Kingdom Is," a magnificent didactic poem. John Lyly's lyric, beginning

is one of the most attractive in the language. "Content," "Sephestia's Song to her Child," and the "Shepherd's Wife's Song," by Robert Green (1560-1592) are filled with sweetness and light. Christopher Marlowe's (1564-1593) "Hero and Leander " in melody is a not unworthy predecessor of Keats's " Endymion,” and his “ Passionate Shepherd to his Love" is a perfect lyric. The latter was answered by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) in "The Nymph's Reply," which is quite its equal. Sir Walter's other poems-" The Silent Lover," "The Lie," "The Sonnet to Spenser," and the lines he wrote the night before his execution are classics. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) is the author of a number of the best sonnets in the English language. All of these poets, however, sink into insignificance when compared with Edmund Spenser. Spenser, indeed, is so important that he must have a chapter to himself.

The English prose of this period was also rich and varied. It owes its inspiration partly to the Renascence, partly to the Reformation, and partly to the new spirit of English nationality; and comprises literary criticism, history, fiction, and theology.

The first faint beginnings of English literary criticisms are discoverable in those passages of the "Canterbury Tales" in which the pilgrims object to the "Rime of Sir Thopas" and the "Monk's Tale." In his prefaces Caxton in an uncritical but sensible fashion added something to the beginning thus made. Roger Ascham, Sir John Cheke, and Thomas Wilson in the early part of Elizabeth's reign went further still. Of these men Ascham was the most noteworthy, the chief idea for which he stood being the use of plain English, a sound morality in art, and the imitation of the writers of antiquity. In 1597 Stephen Gosson, who had been converted to puritanism in religion, published under the title of the "School of Abuse " an attack on poetry, which was answered by Sir Philip Sidney in his " Apologie

for Poetrie or "Defence of Poesie," in which he defends poetry in general, pays tribute to the old English ballads, and, like Ascham, recommends the imitation of the classical poets and playwrights.

The history of the period is a kind of cross between real history and journalism, the chief desire of the writers, like the chief desire of the modern reporter, being to find and tell good stories. Among them the most important were Camden, whose "Britannia" is a priceless mine of antiquarian lore; Holinshed, whose chronicles furnished Shakespeare with the plots of his historical plays; Harrison, who thought the English were being corrupted by luxury; Stow, who lamented deforestation and high prices; and Sir John Hayward, who aimed to be the Tacitus of England with such success that Queen Elizabeth kept him several years in jail. When she asked Francis Bacon if he could find any passages in Hayward's book which savored of treason, he replied, " For treason surely I find none, but for felony very many." And when the queen asked him wherein, he told her that the author had stolen most of his sentences from Cornelius Tacitus.

The Reformation, as was natural, produced much theological writing. Of this the most exciting is found in John Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," published 1559. This work, which abounds in blood and fire, though it is as big as an encyclopædia, was as popular as a dime novel. Scarcely less delectable are a series of pamphlets by an unknown Puritan who called himself Martin Marprelate, which appeared 1583–1589 as a part of the battle waged by the Presbyterians in their efforts to get control of the English church. The pamphlets themselves are so clever that they have found a permanent place in literature, while the story of the way in which their writer was tracked from place to place by the agents of his exasperated foes until his presses were destroyed and he himself put to silence reads like a chapter of Sherlock Holmes. Before this end was achieved, several men were arrested, and one was hanged, though it is probable that he was not the real culprit. The style of the Marprelate pamphlets has been aptly compared to that of a monologue artist in a vaudeville show. Perhaps the smartest of them is the one directed against Bishop Cooper. Its title, " Hay any work for Cooper," is the

cry of the coopers who went from house to house soliciting employment; and its atmosphere, as somebody says, is thick with tubs, barrels, and hoops. Richard Hooker (1553-1600) in 1594 published the first four volumes and in 1597 the fifth of a work of an entirely different character, entitled "Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," which is at once a defence of the established church of England and a noble plea for religious freedom, charity, and reason.

The most original prose of this period, however, is found in the field of fiction. It was in the latter half of the sixteenth century that the word "novel " first appeared in the English language and that the first crude examples of this type of literature were written. In 1578 John Lyly published " Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit,” and in 1580 "Euphues and his England." In the former Euphues, a young Athenian, appears in Naples; forms a friendship with Philautus; falls in love with Philautus's betrothed, Lucilla; and is jilted by her. In the latter, Euphues and Philautus go to England, where Philautus falls in love, is jilted, and consoles himself by falling in love again, this time successfully, whereupon Euphues praises England and leaves it. Lyly intended to write a moral treatise but accidentally invented the novel. His style, which has been called a "cunning courtship of fair words," is dainty and artificial, but it pleased his contemporaries, and Shakespeare did him the honor of imitating it in some passages and of ridiculing it in others. Lyly was particularly popular with the ladies; indeed, he himself says "Euphues' would rather lie shut in a ladye's casket than open in a Scholler's studie." He really did a good deal to improve the variety and smoothness of English prose.

In 1590, four years after its author was killed in battle at Zutphen, Holland, there appeared "Arcadia'," a romance by Sir Philip Sidney, which has been called “The Faerie Queene " in prose, being full of fierce wars and faithful loves. Sidney was regarded by his contemporaries as the flower of chivalry; Spenser called him "that most heroick spirit, the heaven's pride, the glory of our days "; and to writers of a later day he has been a refinement upon nobility, the perfect model of a gentleman, Mæcenas and Marcellus united. In the "Arcadia " these qualities are reflected and it is therefore