and Samson speaks of himself as one who,

“Like a foolish pilot have shipwracked
My vessel trusted to me from above
Gloriously rigged.”

The influence of the voyages of discovery persisted long after the first bloom of the Renaissance had flowered and withered.  On the reports brought home by the voyagers were founded in part those conceptions of the condition of the “natural” man which form such a large part of the philosophic discussions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hobbes’s description of the life of nature as “nasty, solitary, brutish, and short,” Locke’s theories of civil government, and eighteenth century speculators like Monboddo all took as the basis of their theory the observations of the men of travel.  Abroad this connection of travellers and philosophers was no less intimate.  Both Montesquieu and Rousseau owed much to the tales of the Iroquois, the North American Indian allies of France.  Locke himself is the best example of the closeness of this alliance.  He was a diligent student of the texts of the voyagers, and himself edited out of Hakluyt and Purchas the best collection of them current in his day.  The purely literary influence of the age of discovery persisted down to Robinson Crusoe; in that book by a refinement of satire a return to travel itself (it must be remembered Defoe posed not as a novelist but as an actual traveller) is used to make play with the deductions founded on it.  Crusoe’s conversation with the man Friday will be found to be a satire of Locke’s famous controversy with the Bishop of Worcester.  With Robinson Crusoe the influence of the age of discovery finally perishes.  An inspiration hardens into the mere subject matter of books of adventure.  We need not follow it further.

CHAPTER II

ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE

(1)

To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember that the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of literature in our own day.  The splendours of the Medicis in Italy had set up an ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an integral and indispensable part.  For the Renaissance, the man of letters was only one aspect of the gentleman, and the true gentleman, as books so early and late respectively as Castiglione’s Courtier and Peacham’s Complete Gentleman show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his accomplishments.  In England special circumstances intensified this tendency of the time.  The queen was unmarried:  she was the first single woman to wear the English crown, and her vanity made her value the devotion of the men about her as something more intimate than mere loyalty or patriotism.  She loved personal homage, particularly the homage of half-amatory eulogy in prose and verse.  It followed that the ambition of every courtier was to be an author, and of every author to be a courtier; in fact, outside the drama,