of our poets to create a world of dreams, fancies, and illusions.  His second quality is a wonderful sensitiveness to beauty, which shows itself not only in his subject-matter but also in the manner of his poetry.  Like Chaucer, he is an almost perfect workman; but in reading Chaucer we think chiefly of his natural characters or his ideas, while in reading Spenser we think of the beauty of expression.  The exquisite Spenserian stanza and the rich melody of Spenser’s verse have made him the model of all our modern poets.

MINOR POETS

Though Spenser is the one great non-dramatic poet of the Elizabethan Age, a multitude of minor poets demand attention of the student who would understand the tremendous literary activity of the period.  One needs only to read The Paradyse of Daynty Devises (1576), or A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), or any other of the miscellaneous collections to find hundreds of songs, many of them of exquisite workmanship, by poets whose names now awaken no response.  A glance is enough to assure one that over all England “the sweet spirit of song had arisen, like the first chirping of birds after a storm.”  Nearly two hundred poets are recorded in the short period from 1558 to 1625, and many of them were prolific writers.  In a work like this, we can hardly do more than mention a few of the best known writers, and spend a moment at least with the works that suggest Marlowe’s description of “infinite riches in a little room.”  The reader will note for himself the interesting union of action and thought in these men, so characteristic of the Elizabethan Age; for most of them were engaged chiefly in business or war or politics, and literature was to them a pleasant recreation rather than an absorbing profession.

THOMAS SACKVILLE (1536-1608).  Sir Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord High Treasurer of England, is generally classed with Wyatt and Surrey among the predecessors of the Elizabethan Age.  In imitation of Dante’s Inferno, Sackville formed the design of a great poem called The Mirror for Magistrates.  Under guidance of an allegorical personage called Sorrow, he meets the spirits of all the important actors in English history.  The idea was to follow Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and let each character tell his own story; so that the poem would be a mirror in which present rulers might see themselves and read this warning:  “Who reckless rules right soon may hope to rue.”  Sackville finished only the “Induction” and the “Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham.”  These are written in the rime royal, and are marked by strong poetic feeling and expression.  Unfortunately Sackville turned from poetry to politics, and the poem was carried on by two inferior poets, William Baldwin and George Ferrers.

Sackville wrote also, in connection with Thomas Norton, the first English tragedy, Ferrex and Porrex, called also Gorboduc, which will be considered in the following section on the Rise of the Drama.