The reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James, which cover the period of the Later Renaissance in England, were times of poetry and not of prose. It is true that much prose was written, that some of it is admirable, and that more is interesting. It is also true that some of the greatest masters of English prose were alive, and were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon, belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very great name among prose-writers, that of Hooker; while before him and around him there are many whose work was meritorious, or interesting, or curious--anything, in fact, but great--and of not a few of them it has to be said that in the long-run they were not profitable. The difficulty of marshalling these men of letters in an orderly way is not small. The chronological arrangement, besides being ill-adapted to contemporaries, does not show their real relations to one another, or their place in English literature. The division by subject is utterly mechanical, when very different matter was handled in the same style and often by the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he was writing _Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem_, or _Have with you to Saffron Walden_, or _The Unfortunate Traveller_. We shall be better able to make a survey of this side of the literature of the Later Renaissance in England if we class its prose-writers by their spirit and their style, and treat their dates and their matter (which, however, are not to be dismissed as of no importance) as subordinate. [SN: _Two schools of writers._]