In the matter of fiction alone they were already rich. There were knightly books: the _Morte d'Arthur_, the _Seven Champions_, _Amadis of Gaul_, _Godfrey of Bouillon_, _Palmerin of England_, and many more. There were story-books, as the _Seven Wise Masters_, the _Gesta Romanorum_, the _Amorous Fiammetta_, the jest books of Skogin, Tarleton, Hobson, Skelton, Peele, and others. There was the famous _Euphues_, Sidney's _Arcadia_, all the pastoral romances, and the "picaresque" novels of Nash and Dekker. Then there were the historians and chroniclers, as Stow, Camden, Speed, Holinshed; the essayists, as Sir Thomas Browne, Ascham, Bacon; the theologians, of whom there were hundreds; the satirists, as Bishop Hall and Marston; the writers of what we should call light literature--Greene, Nash, Peele, and Dekker. And there were translations, as from the Italian, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Biondello, Tasso, and others; from the French, Froissart, Montaigne, Plutarch (Amyot), the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ (in the _Hundred Merry Tales_), and the stories of the _Forest_ and the _Palace of Pleasure_. And there were all the dramatists. Never before or since has the country been better supplied with new literature and good books. Remember, again, everything was new. All the books were new; the printing-press was new; you could almost count the volumes that had been issued. It was reckoned a great thing for Dr. Dee to have three thousand printed books. Every scholar found a classic which had not been translated, and took him in hand. Every traveller brought home some modern writer, chiefly Italian, previously unknown. Every sailor brought home the record of a voyage to unknown seas and to unknown shores. It was a time when the world had become suddenly conscious of a vast, an inconceivable widening, the results of which could not yet be foretold. But the knowledge filled men with such hopes as had never before been experienced. Scholars and poets, merchants and sailors, rovers and adventurers, all alike were moved by the passion and ecstasy of the time. Strange time! Wonderful time! We who read the history of that time too often confine our attention to the political history. We are able, with the help of Froude, quite clearly to understand the perplexities and troubles of the Maiden Queen; we see her, in her anxiety, playing off Spaniard against Frenchman, to avoid destruction should they act together. But the people know and suspect none of these things. State affairs are too high for them. They only see the brightness of the sky and the promise of the day; they only feel the quickening influence of the spring; their blood is fired; they have got new hopes, a new faith, new openings, new learning. And they bear themselves accordingly. That is to say, with extravagances innumerable, with confidence and courage lofty, unexampled. Why, it fires the blood of this degenerate time only to think of the mighty enlargement of that time. When one considers when