To expand in epic faculties in the region where his soul is naturally borne, he requires an ideal stage, situated beyond the bounds of reality, in a world which could never be. His most genuine sentiments are fairy-like. Magic is the mould of his mind. He carries everything that he looks upon into an enchanted land. Only the world of chivalry could have furnished materials for so elevated a fancy. It is the beauty in the poet's heart which his whole works try to express, a noble yet laughing beauty, English in sentiment, Italian in externals, chivalric in subject, representing a unique epoch, the appearance of Paganism in a Christian race, and the worship of form by an imagination of the North. Among the prose writers of the Pagan renaissance, two may be singled out as characteristic, namely, Robert Burton--an ecclesiastic and university recluse who dabbled in all the sciences, was gifted with enthusiasm and spasmodically gay, but as a rule sad and morose, and according to circumstances a poet, an eccentric, a humorist, a madman, or a Puritan--and Francis Bacon, the most comprehensive, sensible, originative mind of the age; a great and luminous intellect. After more than two centuries it is still to Bacon that we go to discover the theory of what we are attempting and doing. _The Theatre_ The theatre was a special product of the English Renaissance. If ever there was a living and natural work, it is here. There were already seven theatres in Shakespeare's time, so great and universal was the taste for representations. The inborn instincts of the people had not been tamed, nor muzzled, nor diminished. We hear from the stage as from the history of the times, the fierce murmur of all the passions. Not one of them was lacking. The poets who established the drama, carried in themselves the sentiments which the drama represents. Greene, Marlowe, and the rest, were ill-regulated, passionate, outrageously vehement and audacious. The drama is found in Marlowe as the plant in the seed, and Marlowe was a primitive man, the slave of his passions, the sport of his dreams. Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, Webster, Massinger, Ford, appear close upon each other, a new and favoured generation, flourishing in the soil fertilised by the efforts of the generation which preceded them. The characters they produced were such as either excite terror by their violence, or pity by their grace. Passion ravages all around when their tragic figures are on the stage; and contrasted with them is a troop of sweet and timid figures, tender before everything, and the most loveworthy it has been given to man to depict. The men are warlike, imperious, unpolished; the women have sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection--a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially. With these women love becomes almost a holy thing. They aim not at pleasure but at devotion. When a new civilisation brings a new art to light there are