While the drama reflected alike the good and the bad, all the finer aspirations of the time found expression in poetry.  Spenser, Sackville, Drayton, Donne, Hall, the two Fletchers, are but leaders in a band of more than two hundred, who made this period unrivalled in the annals of English poetry.  It was a time of unexampled prosperity, of an enlarged freedom, of an active intelligence, when men were eagerly seeking for whatever was novel and brilliant; when translations without number of the classical writers and contemporary foreign works were welcomed alike with the “costly attire of the new cut, the Dutch hat, the French hose, the Spanish rapier, the Italian hilt.”  “It is a world to see how Englishmen desire to hear finer speech than the language will allow, to eat finer bread than is made of wheat, or wear finer cloth than is made of wool.”  Such are the words in which John Lyly, the Euphuist, characterized his own time, and they were the words of one who expressed in his own writings the tendency to fanciful exaggeration, which was so strong among the men about him.

[Footnote 37:  Froude’s “History of England,” vol. 8, p. 429.]

[Footnote 38:  Stone, “Chronicles of Fashion.”]

[Footnote 39:  Holinshed, vol.  I, p. 315; Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times”, vol. 1, p. 72.]

[Footnote 40:  Holinshed, vol.  I, p. 275; Drake’s “Shakespeare”, vol. 1, p. 99.]

[Footnote 41:  Harrison’s “Description”; Drake’s “Shakespeare,” vol. 1, p. 101.]

[Footnote 42:  Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” vol. 1, p. 101.]

[Footnote 43:  Henry Peacham, “Compleat Gentleman,” 1624.]

[Footnote 44:  Bourne; Drake’s “Shakespeare,” vol. 1, p. 153.]

[Footnote 45:  Stubbes, “Anatomie of Abuses,” p. 168.]

[Footnote 46:  Douce, “Illustrations of Shakespeare.”]

[Footnote 47:  Stubbes; Drake’s “Shakespeare,” vol. 1, ch. vi.]

[Footnote 48:  Laevinius Lemnius; Drake, vol. 2, p. 113.]

[Footnote 49:  Nichol’s “Progresses of Elizabeth,” vol. 2, p. 391.]

[Footnote 50:  Harrison:  Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” vol. 2, p. 87.]

[Footnote 51:  Harrison’s “Description of England”; Holinshed, vol.  I, pp. 289-90; Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times” vol. 2, pp. 88, 89.]

[Footnote 52:  “Nugae Antique”, Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” vol. 2, p. 90.]

[Footnote 53:  “The Gull’s Horn Book”; Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times”, vol. 2, p. 184.]

[Footnote 54:  Lodge’s “Illustrations.”]

[Footnote 55:  Idem.]

[Footnote 56:  Green, “Short History of the English People,” p. 429.]

II.