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SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 451 SPENSER 460 THE FAERY QUEEN 475 ALLEGORY 487 THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY 502 THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 514 SHAKESPEARE 529 THE “HUMOURS” OF JONSON 578 DRAYTON 584 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF RAWLEIGH 590 THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHER, DR. DEE 617 THE ROSACRUSIAN FLUDD 642 BACON 650 THE FIRST FOUNDER OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY 661 EARLY WRITERS, THEIR DREAD OF THE PRESS,—THE TRANSITION TO AUTHORS BY PROFESSION 670 THE AGE OF DOCTRINES 681 PAMPHLETS 685 THE OCEANA OF HARRINGTON 692 THE AUTHOR OF “THE GROUNDS AND REASONS OF MONARCHY” 709 COMMONWEALTH 712 THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE 714 DIFFICULTIES OF THE PUBLISHERS OF CONTEMPORARY MEMOIRS 724 THE WAR AGAINST BOOKS 738

 

AMENITIES OF LITERATURE.

THE DRUIDICAL INSTITUTION.

England, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly productions in every class of learning and every province of genius, so late as within the last three centuries was herself destitute of a national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself amid the revolving ages of time is but of yesterday.

How “that was performed in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,”1 becomes a tale in the history of the human mind.

In the history of an insular race and in a site so peculiar as our own, a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek for our Aborigines? A Welsh triad, and a Welsh is presumed to be a British, has commemorated an epoch when these mighty realms were a region of impenetrable forests and impassable morasses, and their sole tenants were wolves, bears, and beavers, and wild cattle. Who were the first human beings in this lone world?

Every people have had a fabulous age. Priests and poets invented, and traditionists expatiated; we discover gods who seem to have been men, or men who resemble gods; we read in the form of prose what had once been a poem; imaginations so wildly constructed, and afterwards as strangely allegorised, served as the milky food of the children of society, quieting their vague curiosity, and circumscribing the illimitable unknown. The earliest epoch of society is unapproachable to human inquiry. Greece, with all her ambiguous poetry, was called “the mendacious;” credulous Rome rested its faith on five centuries of legends; and our Albion dates from that unhistorical period when, as our earliest historian, the Monk of Monmouth, aiming at probability, affirms, “there were but a few giants in the land,”2 and these the more melancholy