By about the year 1550—that is to say, just in time for Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and their kindred—it had become usual for the Universities and the better schools in England to teach the elements of Greek; and there were not wanting ardent students, in those pre-examination days, to prosecute the study for themselves, and to find more than ample reward in the rich intellectual resources which lay revealed before them. We have now reached the Elizabethan age of English literature. It is in this age that there came such an outburst of splendid creation in every form as the world has seen but once or twice. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Hooker, Raleigh—drama, novel, lyrics, narrative poetry, essay-writing, philosophy, history—all these made new and magnificent efforts. And why? Not merely because at this epoch was born a genius like Shakespeare’s, or a lofty intellect like Bacon’s. The genius must have his opportunity; the intellect must have its materials. It was because the world was electrified with a current of new thoughts and new ideas, pervading and furnishing every mind. The “revival of learning” was something more than that name alone implies. It was also a renaissance, a “new birth,” both of intellect and art. The spirit of Greece had breathed life into the dry bones of the valley of the West-European mind. The writers of the Elizabethan age flung themselves about in the gardens and orchards of Greek literature with all the impatient appetite and reckless gaiety of schoolboys on holiday. They tore at the plots of Greek epics, plays, and histories; they plucked the similes and metaphors of Greece to “stick them in their hats,” so to speak; so great was their joy in the strange fresh atmosphere of this luxuriant newly-opened paradise. Their scholarly knowledge of Greek as a language was too slight, their perspective of Greek life and thought too distorted, for them to catch the artistic style and spirit while they were catching the matter and the substance. Amazingly rich as Spenser is in imagery and melody, exhaustless as Shakespeare is in ideas, boundless as he is in capacity of seeing and feeling, no one will call either Spenser or Shakespeare a flawless artist, or say that either is free from extravagance or unevenness. In short, no one will concede to them the Greek spirit, which tempers imagination with self-restraint and unfailing sanity. The wide free range of mind they have; the tactful sense of proportion and seasonableness they too often lack. The influence of Greece, beneficent and large as it is, remains yet incomplete.