of these perished on the battle-field, or on the scaffold. They mutually broke each other in pieces, and when the succession was finally established in the strong hand of Henry VII. they were prepared to render an obedience more complete, and to fall into a position more subordinate, than ever before. The government was established on stronger foundations; and later insurrections, like those of Suffolk and of the Commonwealth, were in the interests. of the people rather than of the nobles. The law of Henry the VII. forbidding to the nobles the maintenance of retainers, other than domestic servants, shows at once how thoroughly the power of the aristocracy was broken. This pulverizing afresh of society, making way for a new, national aggregation, was the chief beneficial result of the Wars of the Roses, and was ultimately, therefore, favorable to the more truly national life which belonged to the reign of Elizabeth. These wars helped to do, in the political world, what reform, at a later period, accomplished in the religious world; and an arrogant nobility and an haughty clergy slowly sank to a level more consistent with national unity and national liberty. Separate centres of influence and intrigue were broken up, and all power began to go forth from the court, the government, the nation, the popular heart.

The latter portion of the fifteenth century, 1474, was marked by the introduction of printing into England. This art, however, unfolded its vast resources very slowly. It offers means only, and demands a great and noble spirit for their use. For

the first fifty years of its existence, it was waiting for the power, that should lay hold of it, as a ready weapon, and smite with it the intellectual tyranny of the times. Its first labors were inspired by no great purpose, and were in part unfavorable to scholarship. Manuscripts were negligently reproduced, and, displaced by their printed rivals, disappeared, rendering more difficult the careful editing of later critical periods. There was, none the less, slumbering in the press another of those powers which were to make the next struggle for intellectual liberty so different in its results from those that had preceded. The bullet was not more fatal to the sway of the mailed knight than were the swift, prolific messengers of the press to the dominion of the religious and philosophical bigot. Invention, which has always found its home with the people, furnished the two weapons, which, more than all others, have levelled aristocracy and hierarchy, and put men in possession of their civil and religious birthright. The people have wrought most effectively in their own cause by that inventive power which is the best development of their strength.

This period of subsidence, in which every repressive influence rushed in to submerge the germinant seeds of progress, presents as much to interest us in its prose as in its poetry, and offers but very little in either direction. On the one side are Pecock, Fortescue, Malory; on the other Occleve, Lydgate, Skelton. We pass them all, merely mentioning them that they may give a little dis

tention to a period that would otherwise collapse, and be lost to our literature; a dreary one hundred and fifty years whose consolation is, that the downward here touched the upward movement, and passed into it. Out of this darkness leaped the day we hail with double delight. As this period drew to a close, in the vigorous reign of Henry VIII., those forces were active, which were to shape the coming years of progress, and began to show in such men as Tyndale, Coverdale, More, Ascham, Surrey, the strength and diversity of later years.

We now pass to the period designated as Elizabethan; the first creative period of English letters. Times, like colors on the clouds, have no definite outlines; they have centres, surfaces, directions, not margins. We gather into this period the antecedent causes which gave rise to it, and its own fruits ripening in times immediately subsequent. It is the period of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. It is clearly defined in the first, reaches its zenith. in the second, and passes away in the third. As this is the great era of our literary history, and also the first of its stages of consecutive, derivative growth, we must study carefully its productive forces; those in which it had its origin.

As we attribute very much of the superiority of. this period to the ethical activity called out by the Reformation, we wish to inquire into the real value in progress of the ethical power. Some, like Buckle, have assiduously disparaged its influence in civilization. His view owes whatever of plausibility belongs to it to the limited meaning attached to the

word moral. It is often restricted to religious activity, and even at that, to a dogmatic, formal and preceptive, one. If we give to the word ethical, the compass which falls to it from the depth and activity of the ethical sentiment in our constitution, we shall hardly afterward deny the important part played by this impulse in all periods of progress. Religious activity is but the more intense play of the moral nature, its movement under the leading facts of our spiritual relations in life. A false religion is the most fatal of anodynes to the conscientious insight of the mind, and times of quiet submission to this external tyranny of priest, ritual and creed, should be instanced, not as examples of the activity of the moral sentiments, but of their repression and perversion. The fungi that feed upon a tree, consuming its native quality, are no measure of its own vital force. The moral nature is never so thoroughly put to sleep, and never so truly impotent, as in periods of corrupt sacerdotal rule; in which external authority is substituted for internal conviction, submission for virtue, and a ritual service for the guidance of a quickened conscience. If we were in search of specimen periods, showing what is possible in art and literature aside from the moral nature, we should bring forward these moments of paralysis, of torpid and benumbed sensibility. On the other hand, reform in religion, a reasserting of individual rights, a resurrection of private thought, interpretation, conviction, constitute the spring-time of ethical sentiment. Though the movement may be partial, so far as it goes, it is a rebellion of con

science against usurped authority. Civil liberty and the love of liberty are to be pronounced upon, not during the stretches of despotism, but in those halcyon days in which every man's blood tingles with hope, desire, achievement; nor in those only, save as the end is wisely proposed, the labor successfully consummated.

All that activity, then, within the field of religion by which truth has struggled to cast off error, the better to abolish the worse tendency, the freer the more servile one, appeal being taken to the moral nature of man, to his own convictions, is the product of ethical force, whose seeds are always in the soil, and sure, when the reign of winter relaxes, to find their way to the light. This appeal, to the individual life may not always be direct; it may be made, in the first instance to history, or to the Bible, or, as by Voltaire, to practical intelligence; but it underlies none the less every other appeal, since history and the Bible and practical intelligence must have interpretation; and this can only be given by the individual to the individual. Even if we abrogate our own powers in behalf of those of another, or those of a set of men, this new bill of disfranchisement we must first consider, and put to it our own seal; we catch at least a gleam of light, though we see fit to quench it again.

Hence periods of struggle in belief are pre-eminently ethical periods, and also periods of intense individuality and personal activity, accompanied with an exalted sense of power and responsibility. The whole nature of man is lifted by this inspira