I talk thus much--and may talk more--about the personality of Queen Elizabeth, because she must be counted--in a certain not very remote sense--one of the forces that went to endow what is called the English Literature of her day--so instructed was she; so full of talent; so keen-sighted; so exact--a most extraordinary woman. We must not think her greatness was factitious, and attributable to her only because she was a queen. There could be no greater mistake. She would have been great if she had been a shoemaker’s daughter; I do not mean that she would have rode a white horse at Tilbury, and made the nations shake: but she would have bound more shoes, and bound them better, and looked sharper after the affairs of her household than any cobbler’s wife in the land. Elizabeth would have made a wonderful post-mistress--a splendid head of a school--with perhaps a little too large use of the ferule: and she would have had her favorites, and shown it; but she would have lifted her pupils’ thoughts into a high range of endeavor; she would have made an atmosphere of intellectual ambition about her; she would have struck fire from flinty souls; and so she did in her court: She inspired work--inspired imagination; may we not say that she inspired genius. That auburn hair of hers (I suppose we should have called it red, if her name had been Abigail) made an aureole, around which wit coruscated by a kind of electric affinity. It was counted worth toil to have the honor of laying a poem at her gracious feet, who was so royally a Queen--whose life, and power, and will and culture, made up a quadrature of poems. _Burleigh and Others._ And who was there of literary significance about Elizabeth in those early days of her reign? Roger Ascham was still doling out his sagacious talk, and his good precepts; but he was not a force--only what we might call a good creature. There was Sackville[87] (afterward the elegant Earl of Dorset); he was in his prime then, and had very likely written his portion of the _Mirror for Magistrates_--a fairish poetic history of great unfortunate people--completed afterward by other poets, but hardly read nowadays. Old Tusser,[88] too--the farmer-poet--lived in these times; an Essex man, of about the same age as Ascham, but who probably never came nearer to the court than to sing in the choir of old St. Paul’s. He had University experience, which, if it did not help his farming, on the banks of the Stour, did, doubtless, enable him to equip his somewhat prosy poems with such classic authentication and such directness and simplicities as gave to his _Pointes of Husbandrie_ very great vogue. Many rhyming saws about farming, still current among old-fashioned country-folk, trace back to Master Tusser, who lived and farmed successively (tradition says not very successfully) at Ipswich, Dereham, and Norwich. His will, however, published in these later times, shows him to have been a man of considerable means.