Some of the great lights we have seen in the intellectual firmament of England have set. Burleigh is gone; Hooker is gone, in the prime of his years; Spenser gone, Marlowe gone, Sidney gone. But enough are left at the opening of the century and at the advent of James (1603) to keep the great trail of Elizabethan literary splendors all aglow. George Chapman (of the Homer) is alive and active; and so are Raleigh, and Francis Bacon, and Heywood, and Dekker, and Lodge. Shakespeare is at his best, and is acting in his own plays at the newly built Globe Theatre. Michael Drayton is in full vigor, plotting and working at the tremendous poem from which we culled--in advance--a pageful of old English posies. Ben Jonson, too, is all himself, whom we found a giant and a swaggerer, yet a man of great learning and capable of the delicious bits of poesy which I cited. You will further remember how we set right the story of poor Amy Robsart--told of the great Queen’s vanities--of her visitings--of her days of illness--and of the death of the last sovereign of the name of Tudor. _The Stuart Line._ Henceforth, for much time to come, we shall meet--when we encounter British royalty at all--with men of the house of Stuart. But how comes about this shifting of the thrones from the family of Tudor to the family of Stuart? I explained in a recent chapter how the name of Tudor became connected with the crown, by the marriage of a Welsh knight--Owen Tudor--with Katharine, widow of Henry V. Now let us trace, if we can, this name of Stuart. Henry VII. was a Tudor, and so was Henry VIII.; so were his three children who succeeded him--Edward, the bigot Mary, and Elizabeth; no one of these, however, left direct heirs; but Henry VIII. had a sister, Margaret, who married James IV. of Scotland. This James was a lineal descendant of a daughter of Robert Bruce, who had married Walter Stuart, the chief of a powerful Scotch family. That James I. of whom I have spoken, who was a delicate poet, and so long a prisoner in Windsor Tower, was great-grandson of this Stuart-daughter of Robert Bruce. And from him--that is from James I.--was directly descended James IV., who married the sister of Henry VIII. James IV. had a son, succeeding him, called James V. who by a French marriage, became the father of that Frenchy queen, poor Marie of Scotland, who suffered at Fotheringay, and who had married her cousin, Henry Darnley (he also having Stuart blood), by whom she had a son, James Stuart--being James VI. of Scotland and James I. of England, who now succeeds Elizabeth.