Spenser composed his poem, the “Faerie Queen,” as he said, to extol “the glorious person of our sovereign Queen.”  Shakespeare is reported to have written the “Merry Wives of Windsor” for her amusement, and in his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” he addresses her as the “fair vestal in the West.”  The translators of the Bible spoke of her as “that bright Occidental Star,” and the common people loved to sing and shout the praises of their “good Queen Bess.”  After her death at Richmond, when her body was being conveyed down the Thames to Westminster, one extravagant eulogist declared that the very fishes that followed the funeral barge “wept out their eyes and swam blind after!”

390.  Grandeur of the Age; More’s “Utopia.”

The reign of Elizabeth was, in fact, Europe’s grandest age.  It was a time when everything was bursting into life and color.  The world had suddenly grown larger; it had opened toward the east in the revival of classical learning; it had opened toward the west, and disclosed a continent of unknown extent and unimaginable resources.

About twenty years after Cabot had discovered the mainland of America (S335), Sir Thomas More (SS339, 351) wrote a remarkable work of fiction, in Latin (1516), called “Utopia” (the Land of Nowhere).  In it he pictured an ideal commonwealth, where all men were equal; where none were poor; where perpetual peace prevailed; where there was absolute freedom of thought; where all were contented and happy.  It was, in fact, the Golden Age come back to earth again.

More’s book, now translated into English (1551), suited such a time, for Elizabeth’s reign was one of adventure, of poetry, of luxury, of rapidly increasing wealth.  When men looked across the Atlantic, their imaginations were stimulated, and the most extravagant hopes did not appear too good to be true.  Courtiers and adventurers dreamed of fountains of youth in Florida, of silver mines in Brazil, of rivers in Virginia, whose pebbles were precious stones.[1] Thus all were dazzled with visions of sudden riches and of renewed life.

[1] “Why, man, all their dripping-pans [in Virginia] are pure gould; ... all the prisoners they take are feterd in gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they goe forth on holydayes and gather ’hem by the sea-shore, to hang on their children’s coates.”—­“Eastward Hoe,” a play by John Marston and others, “as it was playd in the Blackfriers [Theatre] by the Children of her Maiesties Revels.” (1603?)

391.  Change in Mode of Life.

England, too, was undergoing transformation.  Once, a nobleman’s residence had been simply a square stone fortress, built for safety only; but now that the Wars of the Roses had destroyed the old feudal barons (SS299, 316), there was no need of such precaution.  Men were no longer content to live shut up in somber strongholds, surrounded with moats of stagnant water, or in meanly built houses, where the smoke curled around the rafters for want of chimneys by which to escape, while the wind whistled through the unglazed latticed windows.