But something more precious than commerce, or mere tangible wealth, was reviving in England. The prosperity of Elizabeth's reign was signalized by an outburst of literature such as the world has seldom seen. In 1566 Edmund Spenser was fourteen; Sir Philip Sidney was twelve; and William Shakespeare was a little two-year-old lad playing about his father's black and white half-timbered house in sunny Stratford-on-Avon. What need to go further? Those three names alone are enough, to say nothing of the host of other writers--Bacon and Fulke Grenville with the philosophers and the essayists, Hakluyt and his library of voyages and travels, Michael Drayton and the patriotic poets. These were some of the men who as statesmen, soldiers, discoverers, poets, have made the Elizabethan age the synonym for all that is most splendid, most brilliant at home and abroad. Nine years after the queen's letter from Oxford, Elizabeth Hobby, who had meanwhile married Lord Russell, took refuge at Westminster from the plague which was then prevalent in London--that is to say in what we now call the city, where all the grand folks of those days lived. Having obtained so much favor from Dr. Goodman, Dean of Westminster, as to have her lodgings within the late dissolved Abbey, her little daughter was born in the precincts on October 22, 1575. Lord Russell wrote to announce the fact to his brother-in-law Lord Burleigh. He was sorely disappointed at the child being a girl. "I could have wished with all my heart to have had a boy:" but as that could not be he would like a wise man "rejoice in having a girl." Then he goes on to ask Lord Burleigh to pray the queen to be the baby's godmother. The queen willingly granted the request; for her old admiration for Lady Russell had by no means abated. Being at Windsor she sent Lady Warwick as her deputy, "attended by Mr. Wingfield, the queen's gentleman usher, to direct all things in the same cathedral." Mr. Wingfield caused "a traverse of crimson taffeta"--a kind of enclosure or regal pew if there be such a thing--to be set on the right side of the altar, near the steps within the chancel; and in the traverse a carpet, a chair and cushions of state. This was for the deputy, Lady Warwick, who, as she represented the queen, was treated as if she were royal. Then a great basin was set up in the middle, near to the high table, a yard high, upon a small frame for the purpose covered with white linen, and the basin set thereon with water and flowers about the brim. [Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH.--_From painting in the English National Portrait Gallery._]