Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/68

Rh Shakspere," as Coleridge called him, if he had not best expressed the thought of a myriad-minded age. Most of the new literary forms were first made known to the Elizabethans by translations from the Italian and French. Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Italian songs and sonnets and presages a burst of lyric music from that "nest of singing-birds," the poets and dramatists of Elizabeth's time. William Painter translated novels from Boccaccio and Queen Marguerite, and Robert Greene composed original tales after their manner. Translations of Machiavelli and Comines taught men how to write history, and Sir Walter Ralegh, ending his days in imprisonment, wrote the History of the World in the Tower. Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, "the great Elizabethan bible of adventure," largely translated from the journals of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese navigators, is the beginning of that splendid series of stories of voyage and discovery and peaceable conquest by Englishmen which is unsurpassed in the literature of any nation. Sir Philip Sidney, an Italianated Englishman of the noblest type, inaugurates English criticism in The Defence of Poesie. With Francis Bacon begins philosophical reflection upon life, in the style of Plutarch's Morals and the Essais of Montaigne. Bacon's mind was catholic in its range like Plutarch's, but the subjects of moral thought that interest him are comparatively few, because generalized. His treatment of a moral subject is more scientific also than that of the classical writer, more scientific than Rh