In the early days of her reign the Genevan Bible, always a popular one in England, was completed, and printed mostly in Geneva; but a privilege for printing it in England was assigned to John Bodley--that John Bodley whose more eminent son, Sir Thomas, afterward founded and endowed the well-known Bodleian Library at Oxford. In the early part of Elizabeth’s reign appeared, too, the so-called Bishops’ Bible (now a rare book), under charge of Archbishop Parker, fifteen dignitaries of the Church being joined with him in its supervision. There were engravings on copper and wood--of Elizabeth, on the title-page--of the gay Earl of Leicester at the head of the Book of Joshua, and of old, nodding Lord Burleigh in the Book of Psalms. But the Bishops’ Bible was never so popular as the Geneva one. During the reign of Elizabeth there were no less than one hundred and thirty distinct issues of Bibles and Testaments, an average of three a year. It may interest our special parish to know further that the first American (English) Bible was printed at Philadelphia, by a Scotchman named Aitkin, in the year 1782; but the first Bible printed in America was in the German language, issued by Christopher Sauer, at Germantown, in 1743. But I will not encroach any further upon biblical teachings: we will come back to our secular poets, and to that bravest and finest figure of them all, who was born upon the Avon. _Shakespeare._ I have tried--I will confess it now--to pique the reader’s curiosity, by giving him stolen glimpses from time to time of the great dramatist, and by putting off, in chapter after chapter, any full or detailed mention of him, or of his work. Indeed, when I first entered upon these talks respecting English worthies--whether places, or writers, or sovereigns--I said to myself--when we come up with that famous Shakespeare, whom all the world knows so well, and about whom so much has been said and written--we will make our obeisance, lift our hat, and pass on to the lesser men beyond. So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying--standing all athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chronicles--this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great castle--brimful of life--with which the lesser poets of the age contrast like so many outlying towers, that we can walk all round about, and