[Footnote 49: Nichol's "Progresses of Elizabeth," vol. 2, p. 391.]

[Footnote 50: Harrison: Drake's "Shakespeare and his Times," vol. 2, p.
87.]

[Footnote 51: Harrison's "Description of England"; Holinshed, vol. I,
pp. 289-90; Drake's "Shakespeare and his Times" vol. 2, pp. 88, 89.]

[Footnote 52: "Nugæ Antique", Drake's "Shakespeare and his Times," vol.
2, p. 90.]

[Footnote 53: "The Gull's Horn Book"; Drake's "Shakespeare and his
Times", vol. 2, p. 184.]

[Footnote 54: Lodge's "Illustrations."]

[Footnote 55: _Idem._]

[Footnote 56: Green, "Short History of the English People," p. 429.]



II.

It is to the drama that we must look for the most complete literary
expression of the social condition of the period. The student of
history must regret, indeed, that the realistic novel, with its study
of human thoughts and motives, with its illustration of manners and
customs, so valuable in a reconstruction of the past, should have been
delayed till the end of the seventeenth century. But though there be