Little has been said, so far, concerning the connection of London with literature. The history of literature belongs to the nation, not to London. Yet London could even before the Elizabethan age boast of Chaucer, Gower, Skelton, Lydgate, all of whom, at some time in their lives, resided in London. And what a list, what a splendid list, is presented of the London poets in the reign of Gloriana! This list alone, without counting the poets who went before or the poets who came after, is sufficient in itself to place England in the forefront of modern literature. Consider some of the names. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, Peele, Marston, Sackvile, Sylvester, Spenser, Raleigh—one could go on till the page became a catalogue. I have counted two hundred and forty Elizabethan poets whose names, with many of their works, have survived to the present day. In the same proportion we, who can hardly number sixty poets, ought to have now 5000. But in that time expression assumed the form of poetry first and the drama afterwards; men who had a thing to say, or a theory to state, said it in poetry, just as a man who had a tale to tell presented it in the form of a drama. Not that poetry or the drama were the only things. The Elizabethan age was rich in every form and branch of literature; it had books of chivalry, as _The Seven Champions_; story books, as _The Gesta Romanorum_; jest books, as Skogan’s, Tarleton’s, Skelton’s, Peele’s; pastoral romances, as _The Arcadia_; “picaresque” novels, as those of Nash and Dekker; histories, as those of Holinshed, Stow, Grafton; essays, as those of Bacon, Ascham, Sir Thomas Browne; satires, as those of Hall and Marston; translations from the French and the Italian. Not even in these days is there a better, larger, fresher supply of new literature. It was above all fresh; everything was new; people did not look backwards in literature; they lived in the present; at no other time in the history of the world was the present more delightful; more full of hope, more full of joy, more full of daring. There was a new religion, not yet crystallised into Puritanism: a religion in which every man, for the first time after more than a thousand years, stood up before his Maker without an interposing priest; there was a new learning, full of wonder and of delight; there were new arts; there was a new world, a larger world, full of mysteries and monsters and undiscovered marvels; there was a new pride sprung up among the people; new adventures were possible; there were new roads to riches; England held a nobler place among the nations; everything seemed possible; the wildest extravagance was permitted in talk, in song, in the drama, in enterprise. Companies could be formed to go anywhere, and to do everything. Countries there were everywhere to be conquered, or, at least, to trade with; no longer did ocean set bounds, no longer did continents stretch forth forbidding