anything which the world accepts as great, though they have supplied
some subjects for `Punch'."

Spenser who, of all the great English poets, is regarded
by some critics as the most remote from real life,
and the least reflecting his age, is, nevertheless, filled with
the spirit of his age -- its chivalric, romantic, patriotic, moral,
and religious spirit. When he began to write, the nation had
just passed through the fiery furnace of a religious persecution,
and was rejoicing in its deliverance from the papistical rule of Mary.
The devotion to the new queen with which it was inspired was grateful,
generous, enthusiastic, and even romantic. This devotion
Spenser's great poem everywhere reflects, and it has been
justly pronounced to be the best exponent of the subtleties
of that Calvinism which was the aristocratic form of Protestantism
at that time in both France and England.

The renewed spiritual life which set in so strongly with Spenser,
reached its springtide in Shakespeare. It was the secret
of that sense of moral proportion which pervades his plays.
Moral proportion cannot be secured through the laws of the ancients,
or through any formulated theory of art. It was, I am assured,
through his deep and sensitive spirit-life that Shakespeare felt
the universal spirit and constitution of the world as fully, perhaps,
as the human soul, in this life, is capable of feeling it. Through it
he took cognizance of the workings of nature, and of the life of man,
BY DIRECT ASSIMILATION OF THEIR HIDDEN PRINCIPLES, --
principles which cannot be reached through an observation,
by the natural intelligence, of the phenomenal. He thus became
possessed of a knowledge, or rather wisdom, far beyond