It is not too much to say, that the works of Raleigh and Bacon, and others whose connection with it is not necessary to specify just here, are written throughout in the language of this school. 'Our glorious Willy'--(it is the gentleman who wrote the 'Faery Queene' who claims him, and his glories, as 'ours'),--'our glorious Willy' was born in it, and knew no other speech. It was that 'Round Table' at which Sir Philip Sydney presided then, that his lurking meanings, his unspeakable audacities first 'set in a roar.' It was there, in the keen encounters of those flashing 'wit combats,' that the weapons of great genius grew so fine. It was there, where the young wits and scholars, fresh from their continental tours, full of the gallant young England of their day,--the Mercutios, the Benedicts, the Birons, the Longuevilles, came together fresh from the Court of Navarre, and smelling of the lore of their foreign 'Academe,' or hot from the battles of continental freedom,--it was _there_, in those _réunions_, that our Poet caught those gracious airs of his--those delicate, thick-flowering refinements--those fine impalpable points of courtly breeding--those aristocratic notions that haunt him everywhere. It was there that he picked up his various knowledge of men and manners, his acquaintance with foreign life, his bits of travelled wit, that flash through all. It was there that he heard the clash of arms, and the ocean-storm. And it was there that he learned 'his old ward.' It was there, in the social collisions of that gay young time, with its bold over-flowing humours, that would not be shut in, that he first armed himself with those quips and puns, and lurking conceits, that crowd his earlier style so thickly,--those double, and triple, and quadruple meanings, that stud so closely the lines of his dialogue in the plays which are clearly dated from that era,--the natural artifices of a time like that, when all those new volumes of utterance which the lips were ready to issue, were forbidden on pain of death to be 'extended,' must needs 'be crushed together, infolded within themselves.'