English literature if he knows what Dekker tells of the seven deadly sins of London and does not know the Fairy Queen.  Though the wide and curious interest of the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and illumined the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of approach is the method of their predecessors—­to keep hold on common sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong end of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening time, to know the best—­the “classic”—­and study it before the minor things.

In Elizabeth’s reign, prose became for the first time, with cheapened printing, the common vehicle of amusement and information, and the books that remain to us cover many departments of writing.  There are the historians who set down for us for the first time what they knew of the earlier history of England.  There are the writers, like Harrison and Stubbs, who described the England of their own day, and there are many authors, mainly anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of the discoverers in the Western Seas.  There are the novelists who translated stories mainly from Italian sources.  But of authors as conscious of a literary intention as the poets were, there are only two, Sidney and Lyly, and of authors who, though their first aim was hardly an artistic one, achieved an artistic result, only Hooker and the translators of the Bible.  The Authorized Version of the Bible belongs strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to that of James, and we shall have to look at it when we come to discuss the seventeenth century.  Hooker, in his book on Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour to set forth the grounds of orthodox Anglicanism) employed a generous, flowing, melodious style which has influenced many writers since and is familiar to us to-day in the copy of it used by Ruskin in his earlier works.  Lyly and Sidney are worth looking at more closely.

The age was intoxicated with language.  It went mad of a mere delight in words.  Its writers were using a new tongue, for English was enriched beyond all recognition with borrowings from the ancient authors; and like all artists who become possessed of a new medium, they used it to excess.  The early Elizabethans’ use of the new prose was very like the use that educated Indians make of English to-day.  It is not that these write it incorrectly, but only that they write too richly.  And just as fuller use and knowledge teaches them spareness and economy and gives their writing simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice taught Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave us the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden—­the first really modern English prose.  But the Elizabethans loved gaudier methods; they liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose no less than in verse.  The first author to give them these things was John Lyly, whose book Euphues was for the five or