was it so potent, as it had now become an accredited factor in English civilization and life. The attempt made by Mr. Buckle to explain such an era with this religious factor eliminated is as lamentable as it is futile. Gibbon, in his notable history, took a wiser course in acknowledging such an element, though seeking to explain it away. Taine is never more interesting than when he aims to account for this recognized element in English thought and letters. So pervasive was this biblical influence in the sixteenth century that Bishop Wordsworth has not found it difficult to fill a volume with scriptural references from Shakespeare only, the specific question of Shakespeare's relation to Protestantism being, for the time, in abeyance. The several Bible versions of the time, from the Genevan to that of King James, were, partly, the occasion and, partly, the outcome of the age, while the Protestant character of the versions, whether Anglican or Presbyterian, served to deepen and widen the great reformatory movement. Despite the fact that the Vulgate version just preceded the era and the Rheims-Douay version followed it, the dominant type was Protèstant far on to the days of James the Second. Had a Romish king or queen sat on the throne in the

second half of the sixteenth century, the face of English civilization would have entirely changed, while the English language and literature would have been subjected to the theology and standards of the Middle Ages. The Golden Age of English Letters owes as much to the English Bible as to any other single influence.

Two or three suggestions of interest emerge aş we close our brief survey of the Elizabethan Age.

1. The first is, that golden ages are applied to specific literary eras in a relative sense and on well-understood conditions. The phrase is one of accommodation only, and may or may not be applicable at other periods in the historic development of the literature. In the nature of the case, such periods cannot be permanent, and, even before they give place to something different, assume various phases indicative of change and give abundant premonition of their decadence and disappearance. It was thus with the Age of Elizabeth. No sooner had the era been established as superior than marks of change and decline began to appear. Moreover, such an age in the sixteenth century could not possibly mean just what it means to the present century, for civilization advances and literary standards advance.

In fine,

the Elizabethan Age is but the first golden age in point of time. Subsequent eras have surpassed it.

2. The later influence of this earlier era is noteworthy. Critics and historians have always been at a loss where to draw the line of demarcation between any two literary periods, the Elizabethan Age closing properly in 1603, the year of the death of Elizabeth, or more accurately, at the close of the reign of James the First, in 1625. In any case, the influence of this brilliant era passes on from age to age, through the reign of the Stuarts and the House of Hanover to the days of Victoria. It is thus that Milton has been called "the last of the Elizabethans," while the great Romantic Movement in the days of Wordsworth and Burns and Scott and Gray was but another evidence of the reappearance of sixteenth-century influences. Shakespeare, as the great Elizabethan, still dominates the province of English drama, and bids fair to maintain his primacy as the years

go on.

3. The close relations of English literature and the English language appear in this period as at no other modern era. The mooted discussion as to the relative claims of our literature and our language could have had no place at a time when

the best English authors were those who wrote and spoke the best English, with whom the English vocabulary was, first and last, a collection of English words for literary uses, and who had no conception of what is now meant by the textual and technical study of a language quite apart from its content and pervading spirit. Modern English literature and Modern English language began together at the Elizabethan Era and with the ideal, at least, of concomitant development down to our own day. It was one of the exceptional merits of Shakespeare as a dramatist that with a vocabulary of but fifteen thousand words he compassed the widest reaches of dramatic art and set the model of idiomatic English for all his successors to imitate while in it all he had no thought the most remote of assuming the attitude of what is now known as the English philologist. He had no other uses for the parts of speech than that which Lowell suggests when he tells us that they should. be made "vividly conscious" of the thought behind them. In this respect, at least, we have made no improvement upon this earliest standard which was set us by the masters.

As our discussion closes, we are led to ask, What are the signs, if any, of a golden age as the

twentieth century opens? Dependent, as it will be, on what Taine has called the race and place and time factors, who can foretell the emergence of . such an era as the natural result of friendly antecedents and conditions? Interwoven as these epochs are with the complex network of human history, when they come they often come unheralded and in violation of all precedent and historic sequence, bursting in upon the indifferent life of the time with something like dramatic effect. It may be so in the century now at hand, inasmuch as, when we scan the horizon, we may discover some manifest signs of its approach, even though the signs be somewhat indistinct.

The Victorian masters who evinced in their work much of the genius of Elizabethan days have gone from us, but we can recall as vividly as possible who they were and what they did, and look with heroic hopefulness for a succession of authors worthy to follow them and to maintain the standards which they established.