4. To sum up, the Age of Elizabeth was a time of intellectual liberty, of growing intelligence and comfort among all classes, of unbounded patriotism, and of peace at home and abroad. For a parallel we must go back to the Age of Pericles in Athens, or of Augustus in Rome, or go forward a little to the magnificent court of Louis XIV, when Corneille, Racine, and Molière brought the drama in France to the point where Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson had left it in England half a century earlier. Such an age of great thought and great action, appealing to the eyes as well as to the imagination and intellect, finds but one adequate literary expression; neither poetry nor the story can express the whole man,--his thought, feeling, action, and the resulting character; hence in the Age of Elizabeth literature turned instinctively to the drama and brought it rapidly to the highest stage of its development. II. THE NON-DRAMATIC POETS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE EDMUND SPENSER (1552-1599) _(Cuddie)_ "Piers, I have pipéd erst so long with pain That all mine oaten reeds been rent and wore, And my poor Muse hath spent her sparéd store, Yet little good hath got, and much less gain. Such pleasaunce makes the grasshopper so poor, And ligge so layd[115] when winter doth her strain. The dapper ditties that I wont devise, To feed youth's fancy, and the flocking fry Delghten much--what I the bet forthy? They han the pleasure, I a slender prize: I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly: What good thereof to Cuddie can arise? (_Piers_) Cuddie, the praise is better than the price, The glory eke much greater than the gain:..." _Shepherd's Calendar_, October In these words, with their sorrowful suggestion of Deor, Spenser reveals his own heart, unconsciously perhaps, as no biographer could possibly do. His life and work seem to center about three great influences, summed up in three names: Cambridge, where he grew acquainted with the classics and the Italian poets; London, where he experienced the glamour and the disappointment of court life; and Ireland, which steeped him in the beauty and imagery of old Celtic poetry and first gave him leisure to write his masterpiece.