"Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution-- Wait with impatient readiness to seize my Soul in a moment. Damn'd below Judas; more abhorr'd than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy Master! Twice betray'd, Jesus me, the last delinquent Deems the profanest. Man disavows, and Deity disowns me, Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore, Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against one. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers, Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I'm call'd, if vanquish'd! to receive a sentence Worse than Abiram's. Him, the vindictive rod of angry Justice, Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb, am Buried above ground." Cowper was born a little more than a hundred years after the death of Shakespeare, and about seventy after that of Cromwell. In Shakespeare's time it is certain that Puritanism had made little way in England, or there would have been far more reference to it than is suggested in his works. He mirrored the spirit of his age and country, and it mattered little whether he placed the scenes of his plays in an Italian city or "on the coast of Bohemia," the life depicted in them is that of England and the spirit embodied that of the robust Elizabethan age. Such reform as had taken place in the Church was little calculated to affect the character or temperament of the people, and although it is quite within ordinary knowledge that there were a considerable number of people already who had accepted the extreme doctrines that were later to so terribly transform the national character, they had then no more influence in the country than the Spiritualists have to-day, in the twentieth century. Once, however, they had taken root they spread with appalling rapidity, until by Cowper's time they had gained an ascendency over the minds of the people that the verses just quoted do but fairly indicate. It was in the reign of James I. that Puritanism began to assert itself in a manner that at all foreshadowed what was to come, and it is a gratifying thought that Shakespeare did not live to see the England, that he had loved and so glorified by his genius, bend under the burden of the foreign intrusion that was to completely alter the aspects of her life as he had known them. A vital aid doubtless accrued to the movement through the constant influx of Calvinist refugees from the North of Europe, mainly Scandinavians, who were warmly welcomed and aided by Anne of Denmark, wife of the King.