SOURCE: "The Age of Elizabeth (1560-1620)," in A Short History of Modern English Literature, D. Appleton and Company, 1897, pp.73-128.

In the following excerpt, Gosse argues that the literature of the early Elizabethan period was inferior to, yet preparatory of, a golden age in poetry inaugurated with the publication of Edmund Spenser's The Shepherd's Calender in 1579.

The accession of Queen Elizabeth, in 1558, was immediately followed by such a quickening of the political, social, and religious life of England as makes a veritable epoch in history. In literature, too, we are in the habit of regarding the development and range of those "spacious" times as having been extraordinary. Ultimately, indeed, nothing that the world has seen has been more extraordinary, but this expansion of the national temperament did not by any means reach the sphere of letters at once. For the first twenty years of the Queen's reign English...