the respect in which the name of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering remains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for the dead rise naturally to Anglican lips.  On the other hand, the strife between Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle of episcopalian with Calvinistic reformers, was quite as plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse and Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy was first unmistakably represented on the stage.  The “saucy merchant, that was so full of his ropery,” with his ridicule of the “stale” practice of Lenten fasting and abstinence, his contempt for “a Lenten pie,” and his preference for a flesh diet as “very good meat in Lent,” is clearly a disciple of Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, however scandalised at the nakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against it by appeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis sufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet’s own sympathies and convictions.  In Romeo’s attempt at conciliation, and his poor excuse for Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and accommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only too ready to accept as valid) as “one that God hath made, for himself to mar,”—­the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionary tendencies of the doctrine of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate developments of individualism and private judgment—­we recognise the note of Burghley’s lifelong policy and its endeavour to fuse the Protestant or Puritan party with the state Church of the Tudors as by law established.  The distaste of Elizabeth’s bishops for such advances, their flutter of apprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation at the insolence of the Calvinists, are significantly expressed in terms which seem to hint at a possible return for help and protection to the shelter of the older faith and the support of its partisans.  “An ’a speak anything against me, I’ll take him down an ’a were lustier than he is, and twenty such Jacks;” (the allusion here is again obvious, to the baptismal name of John Calvin and John Knox, if not also to the popular byword of Jack Presbyter;) “and if I cannot,” (here the sense of insecurity and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes transparent) “I’ll find those that shall.”  She disclaims communion with the Protestant Churches of the continent, with Amsterdam or Geneva:  “I am none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates.”  Peter, who carries her fan ("to hide her face:  for her fan’s the fairer face”; we may take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal consecration still retained in the Anglican Church as a cover for its separation from Catholicism), is undoubtedly meant for Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury; the name Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by and suffer every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is ready to draw as soon as another man if only he