These were men in whom the genius of the North in its happiest union of developments, under its choicest and most favourable conditions of culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, unbroken, northern vigour, was at last subjected to the stimulus and provocation which the ancient learning brings with it to the northern mind--to the now unimaginable stimulus which, the revival of the ancient art and learning brought with it to the mind of Europe in that age,--already secure, in its own indigenous development, already advancing to its own great maturity under the scholastic culture--the meagre Scholastic, and the rich Romantic culture--of the Mediaeval Era. The Elizabethan Men of Letters are men who found in those new and dazzling stores of art and literature which the movements of their age brought in all their freshly restored perfection to them, only the summons to their own slumbering intellectual activities,--fed with fires that old Eastern and Southern civilizations never knew, nurtured in the depths of a nature whose depths the northern antiquity had made; they were men who found in the learning of the South and the East--in the art and speculation that had satisfied the classic antiquity--only the definition of their own nobler want. The first result of the revival of the ancient learning in this island was, a report of its 'defects.' The first result of that revival here was a map--a universal map of the learning and the arts which the conditions of man's life require--a new map or globe of learning on which lands and worlds, undreamed of by the ancients, are traced. 'A map or globe' on which 'the principal and supreme sciences,' the sciences that are _essential_ to the human kind, are put down among 'the parts that lie fresh and waste, and not converted by the industry of man.' The first result of the revival of learning here was 'a plot' for the supply of these deficiencies.