invisible church, composed of the elect and the.pure, is examined in the eighth book.

6

(5) The Apology (1533), for his previous controversial writings, was written soon after he had resigned the Great Seal, from the fear of coming into collision with the king on the marriage question. In this work he says that it always had been, and still was, his opinion that it was a thing very good and profitable, that the Scripture, well and truely translated, should be in the Englishe tongue;' only he did not believe either in the competency or the good faith of those who were at the time engaged in the task.

(6) The Debellacyon of Salem and Bizance (1533).-This treatise was occasioned by the appearance of a work called Salem and Bizance, by one who styled himself 'the Pacifier,' and impugned More's Apology.

(7) A Dialogue of Comforte against Tribulacyon (1534) was written in the Tower. After resigning the seals in 1532, More was not molested for some time. In 1533, on the death of Warham, Cranmer was made Archbishop of Canterbury, and by his management the king obtained a divorce, and married Anne Boleyn. An act was passed to regulate the succession, and to this act a form of oath was attached, recognising the king as supreme head of the church in England. All the bishops, except Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, took this oath when tendered to them. More, being known to hold that the oath could not lawfully be taken, was summoned to appear before the primate at Lambeth in April 1534. A letter to his daughter, Margaret Roper, written in that month, tells how he had appeared accordingly before Cranmer and a great number of the clergy; how he had been pressed on all sides to take the oath, but, though not blaming any that took it, had still refused; how the archbishop pressed him with a sophistical argument, to which he did not at the moment see the answer; and how he saw Latimer amusing himself at horse-play with his friends in the Lambeth garden. Soon afterwards he was committed to the Tower, and his property, though he had taken the precaution to convey it to his wife and children, was seized by the king.

The Dialogue of Comforte, &c., is an eloquent composition. It purports to be a translation from a Latin work by an Hungarian author, who, writing at a time when his countrymen were under the continual terror of a Turkish invasion, animates them to face these dangers by the help of religion and divine philosophy. The work has been several times printed.

37. During two years and more, while More was in the Tower, he wrote, so far as opportunities served, continually; when

ink was denied him, he made use of a piece of coal. On the 5th May, 1535, he writes to his daughter that he had just seen Raynolds, a Brigittine monk of the Sion convent, and three Carthusians, led to execution for denying the royal supremacy; his reflections on what he had seen are noteworthy. Soon after this he was indicted of high treason, formalitiouslie, traitorouslie, and divellishlie denying the king to be the supreme head of the Church of England. At his trial, the particulars of which were related to Roper, his son-in-law, by some who were present, he said, among other things, that to give the king this supremacy involved a manifest violation of Magna. Charta, the first clause of which provided 'quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit, et habeat omnia jura sua integra et illæsa' (that the English Church should be free, and have all its rights entire and inviolate). Audley, the new chancellor, urged upon him strongly the consent of the bishops and the universities in favour of the doctrine, but More replied that the majority of the bishops in Christendom, to say nothing of the saints in heaven, condemned it. The scene that followed the trial is familiar to all readers-the condemned man issuing from the hall of unjust judgment, his Margaret rushing in among the guards and falling upon his neck, kissing him with a passion of love and grief, he blessing and comforting her, all the bystanders weeping.

All the letters written by More from the Tower are full of interest. In one of them he explains to Cromwell the growth of his present convictions on the authority of the Holy See; saying that he was originally little inclined to believe the primacy of the pope to be of divine institution, but that, after reading the king's Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, he had been led to examine the question, and, after much study of the Fathers, had become convinced that the doctrine was true.

(8) A Treatise upon the Passion of Christ (1534). The introduction to this unfinished tract, which is founded on the narratives in all the four Gospels, is very beautiful. In a colophon the editor has appended these words: Sir Thomas More wrote no more of this woorke; for when he had written this farre, he was in prison kept so streyght, that all his bokes and penne and ynke and paper was taken from hym, and sone after was he putte to death.'

Besides the works above enumerated, there are extant several Meditations and Prayers, written with a coal in the Tower. In these we see that happy wit, that shaping imagination, though chastened by long suffering, still keeping their lustre undimmed even to the glorious close. More was brought to the block on the 6th July 1535. The Emperor Charles V., on hearing of it,

said to the English ambassador, 'We would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than such a worthy counsellor.'

38. The close of the period was adorned by the scholarship and refined good sense of Roger Ascham. A native of Yorkshire, he was sent at an early age to Cambridge, and during a lengthened residence there diligently promoted the study of the new learning. In 1544 he wrote and dedicated to Henry VIII. his Toxophilus, a treatise on Archery, in which, for military and other reasons, he deprecates the growing disuse of that noble art. His exertions were vain; we hear indeed of the bow as still a formidable weapon at the battle of Pinkie in 1547, but from that date it disappears from our military history. 1550 Ascham went to Germany as secretary to Sir Richard Morrisine, who was then proceeding as ambassador to the Imperial Court; and in 1553, while at Brussels, he wrote, in the form of a letter to a friend in England, a curious unfinished tract, in which the character and career of Maurice of Saxony, whose successful enterprise he had witnessed, and of two or three other German princes, are described with much acute

ness.

In

In 1553 he was appointed Latin Secretary to Edward VI., and retained the office (the same that Milton held under Cromwell) during the reign of Mary. On the accession of Elizabeth he received the additional appointment of reader in the learned languages to the Queen. Elizabeth used to take lessons from him at a stated hour each day. In 1563 he wrote his Schoolmaster, a treatise on education. This work was never finished, and was printed by his widow in 1571. The sense and acuteness of many of his pedagogic suggestions have been much dwelt upon by Johnson. An excellent biography of Ascham may be found in Hartley Coleridge's Northern Worthies.

39. Sir Thomas Elyot, a courtier in the time of Henry VIII., is the author of the political treatise called The Governour. The book is dedicated to the king, and was first published in 1531. Experience and reading of the ancients, he tells us, have qualified him, and inclination incited him, to write of the form of a juste publike weale.' Such an opening makes us think of Plato's Republic, or More's Utopia, or, at the least, Fortescue's Absolute and Limited Monarchy. But the promise was not kept, nor could it well have been kept; for who that had any regard for his life, and was not hopelessly servile in nature, could have written freely and fully on political questions under the horrible despotism of Henry VIII.? After the first few pages, the author slides into the subject of education for the remainder of the first book; the second and third books, again, with the exception of a few pages, form an ethical treatise on virtues and vices, with but slight reference to the bearing of these on the work of government. In the brief portion which is political, Elyot argues on behalf of ranks and

degrees among men from the examples of subordination afforded in the kingdoms of nature. Superior knowledge he deems to be, in itself, the best and most legitimate title to superior honour. Monarchy, as a form of government, he sets above aristocracy and democracy. He draws an argument from a beehive :

'In a little beaste, whiche of all other is most to be mervailed at, I meane the Bee, is lefte to man by nature a perpetual figure of a just governaunce or rule; who have among them one principall bee for their governour, which excelleth all other in greatnesse, yet hath he no pricke or stinge, but in him is more knowledge than in the residewe.'

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CHAPTER III.

ELIZABETHAN PERIOD.

1558-1625.

1. THIS is the golden or Augustan age of English literature. After its brilliant opening under Chaucer, a period of poverty and feebleness had continued for more than a hundred and fifty years. Servile in thought and stiff in expression, it remained unvivified by genius even during the first half of the reign of Elizabeth; and Italy with her Ariosto and Tasso, France with her Marot and Rabelais, Portugal with her Camoens, and even Spain with her Ercilla, appeared to have outstripped England in the race of fame. Hence Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie, written shortly before his death in 1586, after awarding a certain meed of praise to Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser (whose first work had but lately appeared), does not 'remember to have seen many more [English poets] that have poetical sinews in them.' Gradually a change became apparent. The Paradise of Dainty Devices, a collection of poems published in 1578, contains pieces by Richard Edwards, Jasper Heywood, and others, which evince a skill of poetical handling not before met with. England's Helicon, a poetical miscellany (comprising fugitive pieces composed between 1580 and 1600), to which Sidney, Raleigh, Lodge, and Marlowe contributed, is full of genuine and native beauties. Spenser published the first three books of the Faerie Queene in 1590; Shakspere began to write for the stage about the year 1586; the Essays of Francis Bacon were first published in 1597; and the first portion of Hooker's great work on Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in 1594.

2. The peaceable and firmly settled state of the country after 1558 was largely instrumental in the rise of this literary greatness. Queen Elizabeth, whose sagacity detected the one paramount political want of the country, concluded in the second year of her reign a rather inglorious peace with France, and devoted all her energies to the work of strengthening the power of her government, passing good laws, and improving the internal administration of the kingdom. The consequences of the