(2)

This rough sketch of the Renaissance has been set down because it is
only by realizing the period in its largest and broadest sense that we
can understand the beginnings of our own modern literature. The
Renaissance reached England late. By the time that the impulse was at
its height with Spenser and Shakespeare, it had died out in Italy, and
in France to which in its turn Italy had passed the torch, it was
already a waning fire. When it came to England it came in a special form
shaped by political and social conditions, and by the accidents of
temperament and inclination in the men who began the movement. But the
essence of the inspiration remained the same as it had been on the
Continent, and the twin threads of its two main impulses, the impulse
from the study of the classics, and the impulse given to men's minds by
the voyages of discovery, runs through all the texture of our
Renaissance literature.

Literature as it developed in the reign of Elizabeth ran counter to the
hopes and desires of the men who began the movement; the common usage
which extends the term Elizabethan backwards outside the limits of the
reign itself, has nothing but its carelessness to recommend it. The men
of the early renaissance in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, belonged
to a graver school than their successors. They were no splendid
courtiers, nor daring and hardy adventurers, still less swashbucklers,
exquisites, or literary dandies. Their names--Sir John Cheke, Roger
Ascham, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, belong rather to
the universities and to the coteries of learning, than to the court. To
the nobility, from whose essays and _belles lettres_ Elizabethan poetry
was to develop, they stood in the relation of tutors rather than of
companions, suspecting the extravagances of their pupils rather than