long and perilous career, it suddenly burst upon their sight, together with the sentiments of heartfelt contrition, by which their first rapture was succeeded, when, casting aside plume and crest, and all outward appliances of splendour, and pouring forth their penitential tears, they press forward, like a company of pilgrims, with naked feet, along the hallowed ground.

Light is thrown upon the immense enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of the "Jerusalem Delivered, when we remember that, notwithstanding the lapse of five centuries since the events there celebrated, the mingled feelings of hatred and dismay occasioned by the advance of the Turks, were as rife in the sixteenth as in the eleventh century. Though the battle-field was changed, the war between the Christians and the Turks was waged as fiercely as ever; the dread of the Ottoman power, which possessed the whole of Eastern Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, having been intensified by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1452.

Bernardo Tasso, the poet's father, had attended the Emperor Charles V. on his celebrated expedition to abolish piracy, when he defeated an army of sixty thousand Moors and Turks, destroyed their numerous fleet and liberated from miserable slavery twenty thousand Christian captives, whom he sent back to their several homes. Accordingly, in narrating the exploits of his heroes against the dreaded foe, culminating in the humiliation of the Infidel and in the temporary triumph of the Cross, the poet might confidently rely upon the enthusiastic sympathy of his readers, which is one essential element of success.

The "Jerusalem Delivered," notwithstanding its immense popularity, does not entitle its author to a place beside Dante, among the world's supreme poets. Nevertheless, appealing, as it does, to the imagination and to the highest sentiments of humanity; glorifying, through its immortal verse, the great principles of reverence and humility, and exhibiting, in its principal personages, with

some few exceptions, noble types of Christian character, its tendency is to elevate and to idealize human life and thus to fulfil the highest function of poetry.

Accordingly Tasso, like his contemporary Spenser, may be enrolled not only among the world's great poets, but also among the world's great teachers, and it is an interesting fact that his "Jerusalem" has received the highest possible tribute which could be paid to its merits, "by being translated into every civilized tongue, not only of Europe, but also into Turkish, Arabic, and Chinese."

ENGLAND.

EDMUND SPENSER.

1552-1598.

IF, on returning to England, at the time of Chaucer's death, we traverse, in imagination, a period of rather more than one hundred and fifty years, we enter upon another great epoch in our national history, known as the Elizabethan age. During the fifteenth century, the literary history of England presents a dreary blank; Chaucer's poetical revival, which gave such glorious promise, had been arrested by the Wars of the Roses, which had deluged England with blood.

It might almost seem as if the Muse of Britain, scared by the tumult of battle, which prevailed in the southern portion of the Island, had taken refuge in the north, where a series of poets, including James the First of Scotland, Dunbar, Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay, together with the ballad-writers, "the minstrels of the Border," continued from generation to generation to transmit the light kindled by "the Poet of the Dawn."

The darkness which had brooded over England during the fifteenth and the earlier decades of the sixteenth century, was partially dispelled by the appearance at the Court of Henry VIII., of Sir Thomas Wyat, a distinguished statesman and poet, who, with his friend, the Earl of Surrey, succeeded in infusing new life into the poetry of England, enfeebled by the continued imitation of French models. How highly these two distinguished

men were esteemed by their contemporaries appears from the following extract, which bears witness also to their deep indebtedness to the poets of Italy. "In the latter end of the same king's reign " (Henry VIII.), writes Puttenham, an author of the sixteenth century, "Sprög up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat, the elder, and Henry, Earle of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled in Italie, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and stile of the Italian Poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manër of vulgar Poesie from that it had bene before, and for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English meetre and stile." Great as is the boon conferred by Wyat and Surrey upon English literature by the introduction of the sonnet, and great as is our obligation to the latter for having, in his translation of the "Eneid," originated blank verse, they are especially noteworthy as having inaugurated a new epoch in our literature, an epoch, memorable in the literary history, not of England only, but of the world.

In Italy, meanwhile, as we have seen, the work inaugurated by Petrarch and Boccaccio, had been consummated by their successors, and the Renaissance had been crowned by the appearance of the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto, and somewhat later by that of the Gerusalemme Liberata " of Tasso.

While the genius of Italy was manifesting itself in these splendid achievements, Germany had witnessed the Reformation, which, accomplished under the auspices of Luther, had ushered in a new epoch of European history, while the religious wars in France, culminating in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, had stirred the heart of England to its depths.

The literary activity of Italy, and the religious movements in Germany and France, were not without their effect upon England, and before dwelling upon the poetry of the Elizabethan Age, it may be desirable to notice briefly

a few of the more characteristic features of the period, which we shall find faithfully mirrored in its literature.

Through the religious revolutions of the previous reigns, with their unexpected vicissitudes, and their heroic martyrdoms, the prolonged struggle against Romanism, inaugurated by Wyclif, had finally triumphed. Religion, freed from the despotic yoke of Rome, and appealing with her open Bible to the national heart, met with an enthusiastic response. New worlds, both in the Eastern and Western hemispheres were being opened to the enterprise of Europe; men's imaginations were enriched by hearing from travellers of the innumerable races of mankind, inhabiting the most distant regions of the globe, and differing from each other in appearance, in customs, and in laws. The master-works of classical antiquity, brought to light by the scholars of Italy, had been introduced into England; some of these, through the medium of translation, were widely known, as was also the contemporary literature of Europe, especially that of Italy and Spain, while, at the same time, men's minds were startled by the publication of the Copernican theory, which revolutionized their conception of the heavens, and which, at this period, was expounded for the first time at Oxford, by Giordano Bruno.

The spirit of chivalry, not yet extinct, found its representative in Sir Philip Sidney, of whom it has been justly said that "he combined the wisdom of a grave councillor, with the romantic chivalry of a knighterrant;" while Sir Walter Raleigh, with his many-sided genius, distinguished not only for his courage and adventurous daring exhibited both by land and sea, but remarkable also as a scholar, historian, and poet, concentrated in his own person the leading characteristics of the epoch.

The splendour of the victory achieved over the Spanish Armada, raised the spirit of nationality, which, in the fourteenth century, had appeared as a feeble germ, into a proud consciousness of national independence and as the presiding genius of England, in its sense of this newly