Elizabethans

“ The gravest speech, the lightest and sweetest, find their best vehicle in our unrhymed pentameter; again, a poetic drama contains songs and other interludes which exercise the lyrical gift so captivating in the works, for example, of our English playwrights: the Elizabethans having been lions in their heroics, eagles in their wisdom, and skylarks in their rare madrigals and part-songs. Tragedy and comedy alike are unlimited with respect to contrasts of incident and utterance, light and shadow of experience ”

“ We must confine ourselves to tracing the process by which, from tragi-comedy and its unreal world of romance, there emerged tragedy portraying the deepest passions of the human heart, and comedy reflecting the manners of actual life. In this connection the names of first importance are Jean de Mairet, and the great Corneille himself. Rotrou is intrinsically, doubtless, a worthier second to Corneille than Mairet, but Rotrou's genius was romantic. No one followed his Spanish masters with more gusto, or recalls some of the Elizabethans more vividly. ”

“ But her reign was disastrous, and the nation hailed with enthusiasm the Accession of Elizabeth. accession of Elizabeth, on the 17th of November, 1558. With her reign commences a new epoch, even in the history of Europe. Who does not talk of the Elizabethan era, when Protestantism was established in England, when illustrious poets and philosophers adorned the literature of the country, when commerce and arts received a great impulse, when the colonies in North America were settled, and when a constellation of great statesmen raised England to a pitch of glory not before attained? ”

“ The Elizabethan era is justly regarded as the brightest in English history; not for the number of its great men, or the magnificence of its great enterprises, or the triumphs of its great discoveries and inventions, but because there were then born the great ideas which constitute the strength and beauty of our proud civilization, and because then the grandest questions which pertain to religion, government, literature, and social life were first agitated, with the freshness and earnestness of a revolutionary age. The men of that period were a constellation of original thinkers. ”

“ There was no promise of happiness for England in the accession of a prince or princess of this house to its throne.
But the Stuarts came—and the troubles of England began in real [Pg 53] earnest. Elizabeth's reign had been, as it then seemed to all Englishmen, and as in very many respects it was, the golden age of Britain. Never had art, and literature, and material prosperity, risen to so high a level. The world seemed opening to a new and glorious life, like a rose bursting into bloom. ”

“ Yet with all this fine but rude material for future greatness, it was nevertheless a glaring fact that the condition of England on the accession of Elizabeth was most discouraging,--a poor and scattered agricultural nation, without a navy of any size, without a regular army, with factions in every quarter, with struggling and contending religious parties, with a jealous parliament of unenlightened country squires; yet a nation seriously threatened by the most powerful monarchies of the Continent, who detested the doctrines which were then taking root in the land. ”

“ The struggle between Crown and Parliament, the new industrial and agricultural methods, the workers’ demands for higher pay, the new rural and urban poor, the growth of the Empire, the deteriorating relations with the American colonies, the increasing influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment, the popularity of democratic ideas, the Wilkes controversy, the growth of Methodism, the growth of the novel, the interest in the gothic and the picturesque and in chinoiserie, sentimentality, enthusiasm—all these activities made England a highly volatile country. ”

“ Hundreds of years ago, in the ancient boroughs of England, a genius for self-government began to display itself, and it is that to which the greatness of our empire is mainly to be attributed. We not only got the noblest of all Imperial gifts—self-government—but we got more than that. Great Britain gave us another noble Imperial gift—the magnificent continent we possess, with all its resources and all its wealth. ”

“ What was wanting in discipline would have been to some extent made up by the spontaneous cohesion of a force organised under its natural leaders, the nobles and gentry of each locality, not a few of whom had seen service abroad. But, after all, the greatest element of strength was the free spirit of the people. England was, and had long been, a nation of freemen. There were a few peers, and a great many knights and gentlemen. But there was no noble caste, as on the Continent, separated by an impassable barrier of birth and privilege from the mass of the people. ”

“ If Elizabeth had married, as her people often implored her to do, and if her progeny had sat upon the throne and continued the sway of the Tudors, half a century of turmoil and bloodshed, under the essentially foreign rule of the Stuarts, might have been spared to England. The Revolution doubtless would never have taken place. The material and intellectual advance of England and all Britain would have been steady and sure upon the splendid foundation of the Elizabethan structure. ”

“ It was by these great men that Elizabeth was ruled,--so far as she was ruled at all,--not by favorites, like her successors, James and Charles. The favorites at the court of Elizabeth were rarely trusted with great powers unless they were men of signal abilities, and regarded as such by the nation itself. ”

“ The brutish self-will of Henry, the savage bloodthirstiness of Mary, the proud supremacy of Elizabeth, the chivalry of Charles, the republicanism of Cromwell, the languid decline of the Stuarts, the energy of William, and the law-loving quietude of the Brunswicks, all bore the impress of the same principle.
During the last three hundred years, the world had been singularly active, and England perhaps its most active portion; but what relics of its political questions are left to posterity? The passions and the power of the great parties even of the last century have sunk into their graves. ”

“ We have stood in the very heart of a republic, and fearlessly issued our weekly sheet, expressing our fervent admiration of the limited monarchy of Great Britain, though surrounded by Democratic Whigs, Democratic Republicans, Irish Repealers, slave-holders, and every class which breathes the most inveterate hostility to British institutions. ”

“ So national are our institutions, so completely have they arisen from the temper and adapted themselves to the character of the people, that when for a season they were apparently annihilated, the people of England voluntarily returned to them, and established them with renewed strength and renovated vigour.
The constitution of England is again threatened, and at a moment when the nation is more prosperous, more free, and more famous than at any period of its momentous and memorable career. ”

“ In England the state takes charge of the education of another class, the nobility and gentry; that is, of young men of ancient and historical families, the nobility, and young men of fortune, the gentry. England is an oligarchical state; her government an aristocracy, the government of all by a few, the nobility and gentry, for the sake of a few, and in the name of a king. There the foundation of power is wealth and birth from a noble family. The union of both takes place in a wealthy noble. There, nobility is the blossom of the state ”

“ And that work was surely an expansion, an expansion of England. We come once more to our paradox; may it not be that England herself may be expanded by the very cutting short of her dominion? Again, what is England? Do we mean by it simply the dominions of the Crown of England—or rather the dominion of a Crown of whose kingdom the British England is but a part? Or do we mean by it the land of the English folk, wherever they may dwell? ”

“ After the Empire had come into existence, the point of view shifted somewhat, and, theoretically, the question became one of what advantage a policy might prove to the Empire as a whole, although, as its greatest aggregation of wealth and population, the source of protection, the seat of power, the centre of all exchanges, in a word, the heart of empire, the local interests of England would still outweigh those of any of the dependencies. ”

“ They contented themselves with making the most of oppressive English legislation, to stimulate the people to discontent and rebellion. Ambition was hidden under the burden of taxation which was to make them slaves. Although among the leaders there was great veneration for English tradition and law, the love they professed for England was rather an ideal sentiment than an actual feeling, except among aristocrats and men of rank. ”

“ Then followed for England changeful times. After Protestant Edward came for a tragic few days Lady Jane. Then followed the short, sad reign of Catholic Mary, who, dying, left the throne free for her brilliant sister Elizabeth. Those years, from the death of King Henry VIII to the end of the first twenty years of Elizabeth's reign, were years of action rather than of production. They were years of struggle, during which England was swayed to and fro in the fight of religions. ”

“ The working out of the idea of democracy in a country like England which still retained its monarchical form and much of its aristocratic flavor, was a theme on which he dwelt with particular pleasure. Back somewhere in the line of descent his paternal ancestors had been of English blood, and he was proud of the heroism, the spirit and the energy which had made Great Britain one of the mighty nations of the earth. ”

“ In some reigns, the kingdom is in the most terrible confusion, in others it appears mean and corrupt; in Charles II.'s time, what a figure we make with French measures and French mistresses! But when our times are written, England will recover its glory; such conquests abroad, such prosperity at home, such prudence in council, such vigor in execution, so many men clothed in scarlet, so many fine tents, so many cannon that do not so much as roar, such easy taxes, such flourishing trade! ”

“ As I have the means, however, of feeling the pulse of the colonists in this most feverish region, I consider it to be always my duty to furnish you with as faithful a record as possible of our diagnostics. And, after all, may I not with all submission ask, Is not the question at issue a most momentous one? What is it indeed but this: Is the Queen of England to be the Sovereign of an Empire, growing, expanding, strengthening itself from age to age, striking its roots deep into fresh earth and drawing new supplies of vitality from virgin soils? ”

“ Wisdom and good feeling made Elizabeth’s crown, in fact, what laws and compacts have made her successors’,—a constitutional sovereign’s. She ascertained the sentiments of her people almost without the intervention of Parliament, and was more a carrier-through of the national will than the originator of absolute decrees. The moral battles of a nation in pursuit of some momentous object like religious or political freedom bring forth great future crops, as fields are enriched on which mighty armies have been engaged. The fertilizing influence extends in every direction, far and near. ”

“ No sooner was a settled monarchy established, and the country relieved from the dreaded dangers of a second civil war, than literature revived, and resumed the flourishing aspect, though not the sound and vigorous condition, to which, in the days of Elizabeth, it had happily attained. ”

“ To have given a savage continent an image of the British Constitution is, indeed, the greatest glory of the British crown, "a greater than any other nation ever acquired;" and from the consequences of the genius of Henry, Duke of Viseo, did the British American empire arise, an empire which, unless retarded by the illiberal and inhuman spirit of religious fanaticism, will in a few centuries, perhaps, be the glory of the world. ”

“ Let us endeavour now to sum up the results produced by the long and important reign of Elizabeth upon the relations between Church and State in England then and since her time. In so doing we must be careful to include in our record not only the effects produced, but also the means, and the power, and the authorities, by which they were brought about. No ruler of England has ever, since Elizabeth's day had opportunities similar to hers. At no time since has an equal amount of power rested in the hands of a single individual. ”

“ Our young Republic had barely established her independence, and shaken off the lingering grasp of Great Britain from the forts and towns bordering on the Great Lakes; had only just begun to feel the young giant's blood in her veins, and to trust her own strength when measured with that of an older and adroit foe—when the nineteenth century dawned, in which so much has already been accomplished, though its seventh decade is but just completed. ”

“ In the great Elizabethan age, when the English nation was finally hammered out, in the great eighteenth century when the British Empire was being built up everywhere, where in all these times, where was this symbolic stoical Englishman who dresses in drab and black and represses his feelings? ”

“ So ignorant are some of his countrymen of the real truth as regards the citizens of Great Britain, that a friend of mine was asked by a well-educated and otherwise intelligent son of the Republic, "Is it really true that all the land in England belongs to the Queen?"
While on the subject of liberty, it is well to observe one or two curious ways in which it may be said to be controlled in America. If any gentleman wished to set up a marked livery for his servants, he could not do so without being the subject of animadversions in the rowdy Press, styling him a would-be aristocrat. ”