The machinery that was necessarily put in operation for the purpose of conducting successfully, under those conditions, any honourable or decent enterprise, presupposes a forethought and skill, a faculty for dramatic arrangement and successful plotting in historic materials, happily so remote from anything which the exigencies of our time have ever suggested to us, that we are not in a position to read at a glance the history of such an age; the history which lies on the surface of such an age when such men--men who are men--are at work in it. These are the _Elizabethan_ men that we have to interpret here, because, though they rest from their labours, their works do follow them--the Elizabethan _Men_ of _Letters_; and we must know what that title means before we can read them or their works, before we can '_untie_ their _spell_.' CHAPTER II. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, AND THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. 'The times, in many cases, give great light to _true_ interpretations.' _Advancement of Learning_. 'On fair ground I could beat forty of them.' 'I could myself Take up a brace of the best of them, yea _the two tribunes_.' 'But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic, And _manhood_ is called _foolery_ when it stands Against a falling fabric.'--_Coriolanus_. The fact that the immemorial liberties of the English PEOPLE, and that idea of human government and society which they brought with them to this island, had been a second time violently overborne and suppressed by a military chieftainship,--one for which the unorganised popular resistance was no match,--that the English People had been a second time 'conquered'--for that is the word which the Elizabethan historian suggests--less than a hundred years before the beginning of the Elizabethan Age, is a fact in history which the great Elizabethan philosopher has contrived to send down to us, along with his philosophical works, as the key to the reading of them. It is a fact with which we are all now more or less familiar, but it is one which the Elizabethan Poet and Philosopher became acquainted with under circumstances calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the sensibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and expositions of it which our time can furnish us.