the Knight without Pity. Fawns, satyrs, and nymphs brought their
greetings, while an Echo replied to the addresses of welcome.
Amusements of every variety occupied the succeeding days. Hunting, bear
baiting, fireworks, tilting, Morris dances, a rustic marriage, a fight
between Danes and English, curious aquatic sports,--all succeeded each
other, interspersed with brilliant feasts. Poems founded on the legends
of Arthur, or drawn from the inexhaustible sources of mythology, were
recited in the pauses of festivity, or sung beneath the windows of the
queen. The same readiness of invention and luxuriance of fancy
characterized all the celebrations of the time. The love of the
dramatic which applauded Pyramus and Thisbe in the rural districts,
made actors of the courtiers. When the French commissioners came to
negotiate the marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou, they were
entertained with a triumph, in which the Earl of Arundel, Lord Windsor,
Master Philip Sidney, and Master Fulk Grevil, impersonating the four
"foster children of Desire," carried by force of arms the "Fortress of
Beauty," which represented Elizabeth herself.

The age of Elizabeth, although it had worked itself free from the
intellectual sloth of the Middle Ages, although it was familiarizing
itself with an almost unknown world abroad, and creating a new world at
home, yet had inherited with little qualification the violence, the
cruelty, and the unbridled passions of the centuries which had gone
before. All this variety of life was expressed in the drama, which, as
a reflection of contemporary thought and manners, was to Elizabeth's
time what the novel is to our own. Before the end of this reign there
were eighteen theatres in London, all crowded with audiences which
embraced every class of the people,--from the noble and court gallant
who played cards on the stage, to the workmen and apprentices who
fought and bandied coarse jests in the pit. The names of Marlowe, of