Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH AND THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. The times, in many cases, give great light to true interpretations.' Advancement of Learning. ' On fair ground I could beat forty of them.' ' I could myself Take up a brace of the best of them, yea the two tribunes.' ' But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic, And manhood is called foolery when it stands Against a falling fabric.' — Coriolanus. fact that the immemorial liberties of the English People, and that idea of human government and society which they brought with them to this island,, had been a second time violently overborne and suppressed by a military chieftainship, — one for which the unorganised popular resistance was no match, — that the English People had been a second time ' conquered' — for that is the word which the Elizabethan historian suggests — less than a hundred years before the beginning of the Elizabethan Age, is a fact in history which the great Elizabethan philosopher has contrived to send down to us, along with his philosophical works, as the key to the reading of them. It is a fact with which we are all now more or less familiar, but it is one which the Elizabethan Poet and Philosopher became acquainted with under circumstances calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the sensibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and expositions of it which our time can furnish us. That this second conquest was unspeakably more degrading than the first had been, inasmuch as it was the conquest of a chartered, constitutional liberty, recovered and established inacts that had made the English history, recovered on battle-fields that were fresh, not in oral tradition only; inasmuch as it was effected in violation of that which made the name of Englishmen,...