Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/602

588 from his own scorched lips the draught of cold water to the dying soldier at his side.

The list of the great prose writers of this period presents no more honourable name than that of the great champion of the Church of England, Richard Hooker, whose composition is as remarkable for its cogent reasoning and grave but elevated style, as Sidney's is for fancy and grace of sentiment. Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," in eight books, is justly regarded as the most able defence of church establishments that ever appeared. From the breadth of its principles it drew the applause of Pope Clement VIII. as well as of the Royal pedant James I. To those who study it as an example of the intellect, learning, and language of the time, it presents itself, even to such as dissent from its conclusions, as a labour most honourable to the country and age which produced it.

A still greater man was yet behind. Bacon was figuring as the great lawyer, the eloquent advocate and senator; but under the duties of these arduous offices lay concealed the master who was to revolutionise philosophy and science; the father of the new world of discovery, and the most marvellous career of social and intellectual advance. To this period he is the sun sending its rays above the horizon, but not yet risen. His speeches, his "Essays Civil and Moral," and "Maxims of Law," already predicated the fame which was ere long to dawn.



A very different writer was John Lyly, the Euphuist. Lyly was a poet and dramatist of repute; but in 1579 he published "Euphues; or, Anatomy of Wit;" which was followed, in 1581, by a second part, called "Euphues and his England." In this, like Carlyle in our day, he invented a style and phraseology of his own, which seized the fancy of the public like a mania, and set the court, the ladies, the dandies, and dilettanti of the day speaking and writing in a most affected, piebald, and fantastic style. Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Arcadia," ridiculed it, not without being in a considerable degree affected by it himself. Shakespeare, in "Love's Labour's Lost," and Sir Walter Scott, in his Sir Piercie Shafton, in "The Monastery," have made the modern public familiar with it. Yet, after all, probably, Lyly was only laughing in his sleeve at the follies of others, and was, as has been asserted, aiming at the purification of the language; for in his dramas, to which we shall call attention, his diction is simple enough, considering the taste of the age.

Amongst the rising writers was also Sir Walter Raleigh; but his literary reputation belongs rather to