How old was England in the age of Elizabeth? How are we to estimate the answer? Are we to date her birth in the period of the savage Britons, the Roman conquest, the Saxon or Norman conquests, or when? Are we to calculate her age by some stage of culture attained, by some infusion of new racial blood, by the formation of a unified language, government, or sense of nationality? How old England was in 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne is as insoluble as “How old is Ann?” Yet if certain manifestations of culture go with certain national ages, it ought to be easy to date a nation in such a marked phase as the days of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Byrd, and the whole galaxy of stars of the first magnitude. Nor was the spiritual heaven[Pg 245] of that time dotted only with such. One writer tells us that “the young gentleman of Sidney’s day was as deft at turning a sonnet as his present-day successor at stopping an approach to the green.” Another says that music and song “were not the affair solely of intellectual circles but the creation and inheritance of the whole people.” Poetry, music, drama, philosophy, architecture—all the arts, as well as the energy of practical life—were at full flood. The very first foundation stones were being laid in the building of the British Empire which was to continue to rise and grow until it covers a quarter of the globe. We often hear the period spoken of as gloriously young. Was England young or old? If she was young then, was she a baby when the work of building cathedrals was in full swing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? If she was old and mature in 1600 was she doddering in old age when another great outburst of art and thought came in the years of Victoria? In one sense we may date the birth of England in the age of Elizabeth. It was then that the seed was planted of the great empire that was to be. Of practical activity there was enough, it would seem to absorb the whole energies of any people: wars by sea and land; business being pushed into new quarters of the world in every direction; new commodities being found, new methods of doing business being developed, new trade routes being opened up; attempts at colonizing North and South America; a rebuilding of a large part of the domestic architecture of the whole nation to meet altered conditions of life—all these and other aspects of feverish business activity were evident on every hand. Was it youth, maturity, or old age?