In the first place, without officially acknowledging their native tongue or its literature, our two Universities had no sooner acquired Greek than their members became immensely interested in English.  Take, for one witness out of many, Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke Hall.  His letters to Edmund Spenser have been preserved, as you know.  Now Gabriel Harvey was a man whom few will praise, and very few could have loved.  Few will quarrel with Dr Courthope’s description of him as ’a person of considerable intellectual force, but intolerably arrogant and conceited, and with a taste vitiated by all the affectations of Italian humanism,’ or deny that ’his tone in his published correspondence with Spenser is that of an intellectual bully.’[1] None will refuse him the title of fool for attempting to mislead Spenser into writing hexameters.  But all you can urge against Gabriel Harvey, on this count or that or the other, but accumulates proof that this donnish man was all the while giving thought—­giving even ferocious thought—­to the business of making an English Literature.

Let me adduce more pleasing evidence.  At or about Christmas, in the year 1597, there was enacted here in Cambridge, in the hall of St John’s College, a play called “The Pilgrimage to Parnassus,” a skittish work, having for subject the ‘discontent of scholars’; the misery attending those who, unsupported by a private purse, would follow after Apollo and the Nine.  No one knows the author’s name:  but he had a wit which has kept something of its salt to this day, and in Christmas, 1597, it took Cambridge by storm.  The public demanded a sequel, and “The Return from Parnassus” made its appearance on the following Christmas (again in St John’s College hall); to be followed by a “Second Part of the Return from Parnassus,” the author’s overflow of wit, three years later.  Of the popularity of the first and second plays—­“The Pilgrimage” and “The Return, Part I”—­we have good evidence in the prologue to “The Return, Part II,” where the author makes Momus say, before an audience which knew the truth: 

“The Pilgrimage to Parnassus” and “The Returne from Parnassus” have stood the honest Stagekeepers in many a crowne’s expense for linckes and vizards:  purchased many a Sophister a knocke with a clubbe:  hindred the butler’s box, and emptied the Colledge barrells; and now, unlesse you have heard the former, you may returne home as wise as you came:  for this last is the last part of The Returne from Parnassus; that is, the last time that the Author’s wit will turne upon the toe in this vaine.

In other words, these plays had set everybody in Cambridge agog, had been acted by link-light, had led to brawls—­either between literary factions or through offensive personal allusions to which we have lost all clue—­had swept into the box-office much money usually spent on Christmas gambling, and had set up an inappeasable thirst for College ale.  The point for us is that