various metres, upon the death of Sir Thomas Wyat the elder, which evince no common elegance and mastery over the language. More's "Utopia," published in 1516, was composed in Latin, but has been translated by Burnet and others.

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Utopia, according to its Greek derivation (où, not; τóños, place) means the "Land of Nowhere." The manners and customs of the Utopians are described to More and his friend Tonstall, while on a mission in Flanders, by an ancient mariner," named Raphael Hythlodaye, who has visited their island. The work is a satire on existing society. Every important political or social regulation in Utopia is the reverse of what was then to be found in Europe. The condition of the ideal commonwealth rebukes the ambition of kings, the worldliness of priests, and the selfish greed of private persons. The Utopians detest war, and will only take up arms on a plain call of honor or justice. Instead of burning and torturing men for their religion, they tolerate all forms of belief or no-belief, only refusing to those who deny Divine Providence, and the soul's immortality, the right to hold public offices or trusts. They have no money, but the wants of all are fully supplied by the perfect mechanism of their free government; equality prevails among them, and is highly prized; idlers are driven out of the commonwealth; and the lands belonging to each city, incapable of appropriation to private owners, are tilled by all its citizens in succession.

More's English writings are, "A History of the Life and Reign of Edward V.,"1 written about 1513, a collection of letters, and several controversial tracts in reply to Tyndale and other English reformers.

The regular series of English prose chronicles commences in this period. The earliest is "The Chronicle of England," by John Capgrave, who dedicated the work to Edward IV. It opens with the creation of the world, and comes down to 1416. It appeared about the year 1463, but was never printed till it came out in the Rolls Series. Robert Fabyan was an alderman and sheriff of London in the reign of Henry VII.; his "Concordance of Storyes," giving the history of England from the

1 See p. 487.

fabulous Brutus to the year 1485, was published after the author's death in 1516. Successive subsequent editions of this work continued the history to 1559. Edward Hall, an under-sheriff of London, wrote in 1542 a chronicle entitled, "The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York," bringing the narrative down to 1532. Richard Grafton, himself the author of two independent chronicles in the reign of Elizabeth, printed in 1548 a new edition of Hall, with a continuation to the end of Henry's reign. A curious biographical work, "Illustrium Majoris Britanniæ Scriptorum Summarium," was written by John Bale, a reformer, afterwards Bishop of Ossory, in 1548. The accuracy of this writer may be judged of by the fact, that, in the article on Chaucer, he fixes the date of the poet's death in 1450, and in the list of his works includes "The Falls of Princes" (which was by Lydgate), and omits "The Canterbury Tales."

Not much of the theological writing of the period possessed more than a passing value. Portions of it are indirectly interesting, as illustrating manners and customs, or as tinged with the peculiar humor of the writer. The sermons of Bishop Latimer, one of the leading reformers, who was burnt at the stake under Mary, possess this twofold attraction. Thus, in preaching against covetousness, he complains of the great rise in rents and in the price of provisions that had taken place in his time; winding up his recital of grievances with the singular climax, "I think, verily, that, if it thus continue, we shall at length be constrained to pay for a pig a pound." The strange humor of the man breaks out in odd similes, in unexpected applications of homely proverbs, in illustrations of the great by the little, and the little by the great. Cranmer's works have but small literary value, though most important

especially the Letters-from the historical point of view. John Bale already mentioned, Becon, Ridley, Hooper, and Tyndale, all composed theological tracts, chiefly controversial. More, Bishop Fisher, and Pole were the leading writers on the Roman Catholic side. More's English works were printed in a black-letter folio volume, in the year 1557. All except the first two "A Life of Picus of Mirandula," and the unfinished "History of Edward V." (or of Richard III., as it is called in this edition), which has been already mentioned are either of a devotional character, or treat of the chief points of religious controversy which were then under debate. His last work (1534), a "Treatise on the Passion," remains unfinished; and the editor has appended in a colophon these touching words : "Sir Thomas More wrote no more of this woorke; for when he had written this farre, he was in prison kept so streyght, that all his bokes and penne and ynke and paper was taken from hym, and sone after was he putte to death."

The close of the period was adorned by the scholarship and refined good sense of Roger Ascham. A native of Yorkshire, he was sent at an early age to Cambridge, and, during a lengthened residence there, diligently promoted the study of the new learning. In 1544 he wrote and dedicated to Henry VIII. his “Toxophilus," a treatise on Archery, in which, for military and other reasons, he deprecates the growing disuse of that noble art. His exertions were vain: we hear, indeed, of the bow as still a formidable weapon at the battle of Pinkie in 1547; but from that date it disappears from our military history. In 1550 Ascham went to Germany as secretary to Sir Richard Morrisine, who was then proceeding as ambassador to the Imperial Court; and in 1553, while at Brussels, he wrote, in the

form of a letter to a friend in England, a curious unfinished tract, in which the character and career of Maurice of Saxony, whose successful enterprise he had witnessed, and of two or three other German princes, are described with much acuteness.

In 1553 he was appointed Latin secretary to Edward VI., and retained the office (the same that Milton held under Cromwell) during the reign of Mary. On the accession of Elizabeth he received the additional appointment of reader in the learned languages to the queen. Elizabeth used to take lessons from him at a stated hour each day. In 1563 he wrote his "Schoolmaster," a treatise on education. This work was never finished, and was printed by his widow in 1571. The sense and acuteness of many of his pedagogic suggestions have been much dwelt upon by Johnson. An excellent biography of Ascham may be found in Hartley Coleridge's "Northern Worthies."

CHAPTER III.

ELIZABETHAN PERIOD.

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1558-1625.

THIS is the golden or Augustan age of English literature. After its brilliant opening under Chaucer, a period of poverty and feebleness had continued for more than a hundred and fifty years. Servile in thought and stiff in expression, it remained unvivified by genius even during the first half of the reign of Elizabeth; and Italy with her Ariosto and Tasso, France with her Marot and Rabelais, Portugal with her Camoens, and even Spain with her Ercilla, appeared to have outstripped England in the race of fame. Hence Sir Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesie," written shortly before his death in 1586, after awarding a certain meed of praise to Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser (whose first work had but lately appeared), does not "remember to have seen many more [English poets] that have poetical sinews in them." But after the year 1580 a change became apparent. England's Helicon," a poetical miscellany (comprising fugitive pieces composed between 1580 and 1600) to which Sidney, Raleigh, Lodge, and Marlowe contributed, is full of genuine and native beauties. Spenser published the first three books of "The Fairie Queen" in 1590; Shakspeare began to write for the stage about the year 1586; and the "Essays" of Francis Bacon were first published in 1597; Raleigh