Palace of Pleasure (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio’s Decameron and the novels of Bandello.  These translations are mainly of interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists.  Lodge’s Rosalind and Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the sources respectively of Shakspere’s As You Like It and Winter’s Tale, are short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artificial way.  The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against “Martin Marprelate,” an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them.  The most noteworthy of them were Nash’s Piers Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil, Lyly’s Pap with a Hatchet, and Greene’s Groat’s Worth of Wit.  Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the Chronicle of England, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580.  This was Shakspere’s English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in his historical plays.  In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot.

Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most important was Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, the first four books of which appeared in 1594.  This was a work on the philosophy of law, and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of the English Church by bishops.  No work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose.  It was written in sonorous, stately, and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne.  Had the Ecclesiastical Polity been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, years earlier, it would doubtless have been written in Latin.

The life of Francis Bacon, “the father of inductive philosophy,” as he has been called—­better, the founder of inductive logic—­belongs to English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to the history of English philosophy.  But his volume of Essays was a contribution to general literature.  In their completed form they belong to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of pregnant maxims—­the text for an essay—­than that developed treatment of a subject which we now understand by the word essay.  They were, said their author, “as grains of salt, that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety.”  They were the first essays, so called, in the language.  “The word,” said Bacon, “is late, but the thing is ancient.”