With that simple background let our minds move down the course of literary history. Style, language, material--we will easily think how much of each the Bible has given to all our great writers if their names are only mentioned. There are four groups of these writers. 1. The Jacobean, who wrote when and just after our version was made. 2. The Georgian, who graced the reigns of the kings whose name the period bears. 3. The Victorian. 4. The American. There is an attractive fifth group comprising our present-day workers in the realm of pure literature, but we must omit them and give our attention to names that are starred. It is familiar that in the time of Elizabeth, "England became a nest of singing birds." In the fifty years after the first English theater was erected, the middle of Elizabeth's reign, fifty dramatic poets appeared, many of the first order. Some were distinctly irreligious, as were many of the people whose lives they touched. Such men as Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, Webster, Beaumont, and Fletcher stand like a chorus around Shakespeare and Ben Jonson as leaders. As Taine puts it: "They sing the same piece together, and at times the chorus is equal to the solo; but only at times."[1] Cultured people to-day know the names of most of these writers, but not much else, and it does not heavily serve our argument to say that they felt the Puritan influence; but they all did feel it either directly or by reaction. [1] History of English Literature, chap. iii. Edmund Spenser and his friend, Sir Philip Sidney, had closed their work before the King James version appeared, yet the Faerie Queene in its religious theory is Puritan to the core, and Sidney is best remembered by his paraphrases of Scripture. The influence of both was even greater in the Jacobean than in their own period.