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Pythonic Programming
Tips for Becoming an Idiomatic
Python Programmer
by Dmitry Zinoviev

Version: P1.0 (October 2021)

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 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction
About the Software
About the Notation
About the Reader

1. Documentation Tips

Tip
1. Hello, World!

Tip
2. Import This

Tip
3. Know Ownership and Licensing

Tip
4. Use Quotes of All Sorts
Tip
5. Keep Letter Case Consistent

Tip
6. Wrap Long Lines

Tip
7. Self-Document Your Code

Tip
8. Do Not Misuse Docstrings

Tip
9. Let input() Speak for Itself

Tip
10. Mark Dummy Variables

Tip
11. Distinguish Parameters and Arguments

Tip
12. Avoid “Magic” Values

Tip
13. Enumerate Your Constants

2. General Tips
Tip
14. Chain Comparison Operators

Tip
15. Expand the Tabs

Tip
16. Pickle It

Tip
17. Avoid range() in Loops

Tip
18. Pass It

Tip
19. Try It

Tip
20. Embrace Comprehensions

Tip
21. Make Your Code Compact with Conditional
Expressions

Tip
22. Find the “Missing” Switch
Tip
23. Eschew Comprehension Expressions, If
Needed

Tip
24. Use Slicing to Reverse and Split

Tip
25. sum() Almost Anything

Tip
26. Transpose with zip()

Tip
27. Discover All Characters in One Place

Tip
28. glob() the Files

Tip
29. Use Strings as Files

Tip
30. Pick to str() or to repr()

Tip
31. Remember, input() Remembers
Tip
32. Do Linear Algebra in Python

3. Data Types and Data Structures Tips

Tip
33. Construct a One-Element Tuple

Tip
34. Improve Readability with Raw Strings

Tip
35. Unpack Lists and Tuples

Tip
36. Print a List

Tip
37. Flatten That List

Tip
38. Treat Your Code as a Module

Tip
39. Let Modules Act Independently

Tip
40. Add Class Attributes
Tip
41. Serialize Objects

Tip
42. Count with defaultdict

Tip
43. Count with Counter

Tip
44. Explore How int() Supports Other Bases

Tip
45. Discover Complex Numbers

Tip
46. Rational Numbers Exist

Tip
47. Discover an Infinity

Tip
48. Carve It in Stone

Tip
49. No Trees? Use a dict()

4. Function Tips
Tip
50. Make Functions Always Return Something

Tip
51. Return Consistently

Tip
52. Let the Caller Print

Tip
53. Return Many Values

Tip
54. Understand Optional and Keyword
Parameters

Tip
55. Pass Arguments Your Way

Tip
56. Omit Else After Return

Tip
57. Chain Function Calls

Tip
58. Yield, Do Not Return
Tip
59. Return and Apply Functions

Tip
60. Savvy Anonymous Functions

5. Performance Tips

Tip
61. Time It

Tip
62. Avoid Function Calls; They Are Costly

Tip
63. Build, Then Print

Tip
64. Format with Formatted Strings

Tip
65. Import Wisely

Tip
66. Import as Needed

Tip
67. Optimize Lookups
Tip
68. Cache It

Tip
69. Checkpoint, It Saves Time

Tip
70. Sort Big in Place

Tip
71. Delete Your Garbage

Tip
72. Beware of Large and Slow Ints

Tip
73. Waste Space, Save Time

Tip
74. Do Not str() a str

6. Safety Tips

Tip
75. Call That Function

Tip
76. Get the Hang of Local Variables
Tip
77. Grasp What Is Truth

Tip
78. Check for Range

Tip
79. Strip User Input

Tip
80. Let Python Close Your Files

Tip
81. Read Files Safely

Tip
82. Hide Everything

Tip
83. Use Properties

Tip
84. Compare One to Many

Tip
85. Check, Then Touch
Tip
86. Assert Conditions

Tip
87. Do Not eval(); It Is Evil

Tip
88. Parse with literal_eval()

Tip
89. Treat Variables as References

Tip
90. Isolate Exceptions

Tip
91. Compare Prefixes and Suffixes

Tip
92. Remember, There Are No Globals

Tip
93. Is Is Not What You Think It Is

Tip
94. Distinguish type() and isinstance()
Tip
95. 50,000 Is Not a Number, but 50_000 Is

Tip
96. Do Not Confuse Boolean and Bitwise
Operators

Tip
97. Do Not Call Your List “List”

Tip
98. Do Not Change That Loop Variable

Tip
99. str.split() by White Spaces

Tip
100
. Get over str.split()

7. Wrapping Up

Bibliography

Copyright © 2022, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Early praise for Pythonic
Programming
Python is a beautiful language. People from all walks of life can
use it to create simple programs and websites quickly and
easily. Sometimes too easily, one could say. Python is very
forgiving of poor style and minor mistakes. As those simple
programs and websites evolve, they often become maintenance
nightmares. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone who
wants to learn the correct Pythonian way of writing high-
performance code that is easy to maintain and grow.

→ Dmitri Tcherevik
Founder and CEO, Morebell, Inc.
There are at least two reasons to read this book. First, it equips
the reader with dozens of useful Python idioms that can and
should be used on a daily basis by any practitioner. Second (and
in my opinion even more important) is that it provides a
consistent view of the language spirit and instills in the reader a
true Pythonic view of the world of modern programming.

→ Ilya Usvyatsky
Senior Software Development Engineer, Amazon Web
Services
As someone who uses Python to automate security operations, I
find the tips in this book useful in writing and maintaining clean
code for my scripts. I would recommend it especially to people
who already know Python but are looking for tips in writing
Pythonic code.
→ Dan Wanjohi
Security Engineer, World Bank Group
This is a great collection of unusual and useful Python features
and a great chance to reflect about nonobvious points. Newbies
will find a lot of new and useful information, and experienced
developers will find new information and be reminded of most
useful tips.

→ Evgenii Kozhanov
Software Engineer, Inplat Technologies Ltd.
This is a wonderful book. In highly accessible and always fun
prose, it explores all the nooks and crannies of Python
programming, exploring not only how it works but also what it
means.

→ Aditi Singh
Graduate Assistant, Kent State University
 Acknowledgments
This book is my third Pragmatic book produced in enjoyable
cooperation with the outstanding editor Adaobi Obi Tulton. I can’t
stop admiring her helpfulness, mastery of the language, knowledge
of the procedures, and willingness to understand the subject.

The book was inspired by many students that I had taught, tutored,
and advised in the last twenty years, too plentiful to acknowledge by
name. However, I must explicitly mention Andrea Olsen and Anna
Nyulund: they were the muses of the book who triggered me into
writing the manuscript.

My dear friend Dmitrii Cherevik was not an official technical reviewer,

but his contribution to the clarity and correctness of the story is
enormous.

The official technical reviewers combed the manuscript for any

errors, typos, and inconsistencies that I overlooked. So here they
are, listed in the alphabetic order of their last names: Anatol
Gusakov, Evgenii Kozhanov, Svetlana Levitan, Emin Mammadov,
Ankush Patel, Gabriela Karina Paulus, Aditi Singh, Ilya Usvyatsky, and
Dan Wanjohi.

My beloved family: my wife, Anna; my daughter, Eugenia; my son,

Roman; and my cats, Cesar and Susan—as always, they provided
immense encouragement and emotional support.
Last but not least, my dear friend Boris Bugalter loaned me his
second display exclusively to be used as a part of the “writer’s
workstation” so that I would spend less time juggling the windows
and more time actually writing. And that was priceless.

Thank you!

Copyright © 2022, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

 Preface
Welcome, reader! Let me briefly introduce myself. I am a computer
science professor, and I have been teaching Python since 2012—that
is, for the last nine years. I have been teaching Python 2.7 and
Python 3.4. I have been teaching undergraduate and graduate
students. I have been teaching adults in their fifties, and teenagers,
and everyone in between. I have even been teaching my twin cats in
my dreams, and they were not the worst learners.

Over those nine years, I answered hundreds of questions and

graded hundreds of programming assignments ranging from
print(’Hello, world!’) to several-pages-long data acquisition and analysis
scripts. I am not exaggerating: literally hundreds.

Besides, in the last three years, I have answered close to 2,000

Python-related questions on StackOverflow.[1] That’s a lot of
questions. I wonder what took me so long to start seeing patterns in
the questions and the students’ programs; most questions were the
same, and most programs had the same programming errors.

That’s when I decided to select one hundred Pythonic tips—solutions

to the most common errors and answers to the most common
questions—and compile them into a book.

And that is how this book was born.

Yours, D.Z.
Professor
mailto:[email protected]
Boston, April 2021

Footnotes
[1] https://stackoverflow.com

Copyright © 2022, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

 Introduction
Python is a fantastic programming language. It is concise. It is
flexible. It is versatile. It is elegant. It is unbelievably popular, firmly
holding its position as the number three language in the world since
September 2018, according to TIOBE Index.[2] It comes with a great
collection of about 200 modules in the standard library, an
unmeasurable pile of third-party modules, and a well-documented
extension mechanism. Finally, Python is very efficient, despite being
an interpreted language. You just have to follow its spirit.

Every programming language and system has its spirit. The spirit of
FORTRAN 66/77 is bulky multidimensional arrays of real numbers,
uppercase letters, and a lack of recursion. The spirit of C is pointers
and the happy sisters malloc and free. The spirit of Java is pages-long
classes and the Java virtual machine. What is the spirit of Python,
then?

This book offers almost one hundred tips that explain how to write
Pythonic code in the namesake language. It is hard to explain what
“Pythonic” means. Just like Zen that I mention in Tip 2, ​Import This​
and elsewhere in the book, “pythonicity” (yes, there is such word!) is
an epiphany, an enlightenment that is not learned but experienced.
Hopefully, after browsing or reading the book, you will become a
more Pythonic programmer—and, therefore, a better Python
programmer in general.
The tips are grouped into six chapters: documentation tips, data
types/data structures tips, safety tips, performance tips, function
design tips, and general tips. They embrace different aspects of
pythonicity: how to make your programs correct, safe, fast, easy to
read, and easy to maintain.
About the Software
All you need is Python. Almost any Python suffices. Ninety-five
percent of the tips are compatible with any currently supported
version (3.4 and above) and with 2.7, which is not supported
anymore but is still used in legacy software. Five percent of the tips
work only for Python 3.4 and above. And there is only one
exception: Tip 64, ​Format with Formatted Strings​—that requires
Python 3.6.
About the Notation
Each tip in the book comes with a brief “stars-and-numbers”
annotation that describes its complexity and compatibility. The
number of stars ranges from one ★ (a simple, almost trivial tip) to
three ★★★ (an advanced tip). Naturally, the star ratings are
subjective, but rest assured that any one-star tip is much simpler
than any three-star tip. Most of the tips belong to the middle
category.

The number or numbers in the exponent are the Python versions

that are compatible with the tip. Most tips work for any Python at or
above 2.7, but some require a more recent version. (And if you still
have an installation of Python 2.6 that was officially retired in
October 2013, you must seriously ask yourself why.)

The most common combination of stars and numbers is ★★2.7, 3.4+:

an intermediate-to-advanced tip that works for any popular version
of Python.
About the Reader
The book is primarily for programmers who are already somewhat
familiar with the language. You may be a first-year computer science
or engineering undergraduate student; a student or researcher in
another field, trying to learn programming skills; a seasoned
programmer switching to Python from Fortran or C/C++/Java; or
merely adding Python to your toolset.

Is that you? Enjoy the book! Are you someone else? Enjoy it all the
same!

Footnotes

[2] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Copyright © 2022, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

 Chapter 1

Documentation Tips
Software documentation is essential. A poorly documented program
is hard to understand and, as a result, hard to maintain. Python is
proud of being a self-documented language—which is not the same
as a self-documenting language. You, as a programmer, are still in
charge of developing the documentation.

Quality documentation begins with proper formatting, which Python,

fortunately, enforces at the syntactic level. Quality documentation
includes properly constructed identifiers (variable, function, method,
class, and module names) and proper choice of quotation symbols
for your strings. You will learn how to avoid “magic” (not explicitly
clear) values. Finally, you will master the docstring mechanism that
allows you to attach documentation to every Python code unit.

Writing documentation is a tedious process, but it is worth it—for the

sake of the future readers of your code, including yourself.
 Tip 1 Hello, World!
★2.7, 3.4+ Python has its own way of saying “Hello world!”—the first
program you must have written when you learned to code. You don’t
even need to know how to do the printing. Import the module
__hello__ and enjoy the greeting:

​ ​import​​__hello__​

​ ​Hello world!​
=
>

I hear you ask, What is the point of having this useless module?
__hello__ is an Easter egg: an unexpected or undocumented feature
in computer software included as a joke. Jokes are fun, and
programming is fun, too. Let’s have fun.
 Tip 2 Import This
★2.7, 3.4+ Every Python installation comes with the module named
this. The module has nothing to do with the namesake Java or C++
keyword denoting a reference to a class object. The module contains
The Zen of Python—a set of guiding principles that define the
“Pythonic” programming style. Just like with any other kind of Zen,
the Zen of Python is learned by practicing. Practicing meditation
does not hurt, but practicing good programming helps. Let’s start
our practice by looking at the principles first. Type:

​ ​import​​this​

And you will see The Zen of Python.

I will occasionally refer to some of these principles throughout the

rest of the book.

For a reason beyond my understanding (probably Zen-related), The

Zen of Python is stored in the module as a scrambled string, this.s
(remember, this is the name of the module), that comes with a
dictionary, this.d, for unscrambling. The unscrambling process is
trivial:

​ ​''​.join(this.d.get(x, x) ​for​x ​in​this.s)

I do not know why the authors of the module decided to scramble

the contents. Quite possibly nobody knows, aside from them.
 Tip 3 Know Ownership and Licensing
★2.7, 3.4+ Have you ever wondered who “owns” Python? Type
copyright on the command line. How about those who contributed to
it? Type credits.

​ credits()

​T ​ hanks to CWI, CNRI, BeOpen.com, Zope Corporation and a cast of

= thousands for​
>
​ ​supporting Python development. See www.python.org for more
= information.​
>

And how about the current legal status of the product? Is it legally
suitable for your needs? Type license. I do not include the other
functions’ output because it may differ for different builds of Python.
But there seems to be a function for every occasion.
 Tip 4 Use Quotes of All Sorts
★2.7, 3.4+ You can enclose string literals in Python in four types of
quotation marks. Single and double quotation marks define single-
line strings. Line breaks are not allowed within:

​ '​Mary had a little lamb'​

​ ​"Mary had a little lamb"​

There is no difference whatsoever between single and double

quotation marks in Python, unlike C/C++/Java (where single marks
are used for individual characters and double marks are used for
strings) or PHP (where double-quoted strings are interpreted but
single-quoted strings are not). Should you use single or double
quotation marks? It is up to you.

Triple-single and triple-double quotation marks define multiline

strings. They can include literal line breaks.

​ '​''Mary​
​ ​had a little​
​ ​lamb'''​
​
​ "​ ""Mary​
​ ​had a little​
​ ​lamb"""​

And again, there is no difference whatsoever between triple-single

and triple-double quotation marks. Use whatever you like. Just try to
be consistent.
 Tip 5 Keep Letter Case Consistent
★2.7, 3.4+ Any Python identifier must start with a Latin letter (“a”
through “z” or “A” through “Z”) or an underscore and contain only
Latin letters, decimal digits (“0” through “9”), or underscores. It is
advised that identifiers are short (to facilitate typing) and
descriptive.

Additionally, use all uppercase letters for the so-called constants.

Python does not have constants as such. You can change the value
of any variable. However, when you spell an identifier in all capital
letters, you suggest that the variable’s value should not be changed.
Here is a constant:

​ PI = 3.14159 ​# But please use math.pi instead!​

Use identifiers in lowercase, connected with underscores, if

necessary, or mixedCase identifiers for variables, functions, and
modules. Here are variable, function, and module identifiers:

​ my_cat_s_age = 11
​ myCatSAge = 11
​ _var = ​'I do not care'​
​ ​def​​silly_function​():
​ ​pass​
​ ​def​​anotherSillyFunction​():
​ ​pass​
​ ​import​​myjunk​

Use CapitalizedWords for classes (but not for class objects). Here is
a class identifier:

​ c
​ lass​ADoNothingClass:
​ ​ ass​
p

Readability counts!
 Tip 6 Wrap Long Lines
★2.7, 3.4+ Python is known as a language of one-liners: statements
that consist of only one line. That line, for sure, may be quite long. A
long line does not fit your IDE or text editor’s window and is hard to
read. If you have to use a long line statement, break it into several
lines. Python treats a single backslash “\” at the very end of a line as
a continuation symbol—it is ignored, and the line break that follows
it is ignored too.

The best place to break a line is before an operator (for example,

arithmetic, Boolean or comparison operator, or the “dot” (“.”)
operator. Try to align the first operator on the continuation line with
a similar operator on the previous line. These are “good”
continuations that improve the readability of your code:

​ 1+2+3+4\
​ +5+6
​ s.lower().strip() \
​ .split()

This is a “bad” continuation that makes your code harder to read:

​ dir( \
​ )

Note that if you typed an opening bracket (“[”, “(”, or “{”) that has
not been closed yet, there is no need for the continuation symbol:
Python will patiently wait until you restore the balance:

​ dir( ​# This is legal, but do not do it, anyway!​

​ )

Unlike C/Java, Python allows breaking a line even within a single- or

double-quoted string:
 ​ ​print​(​'hello, ​\​
​ ​ world'​)

If you put any spaces in front of the "world" in the previous example
(as I did), they will become a part of the string! Only the rest of the
wrapped line is removed, not the beginning of the continuation.
 Tip 7 Self-Document Your Code
★2.7, 3.4+ A module, function, method, and class can and should be
self-documented. Self-documentation is a feature that allows you to
combine object implementation and object description in one piece
of code. As a courtesy to yourself and your future customers, always
self-document everything that can be self-documented!

The description part of self-documentation is called a docstring. A

docstring is implemented as a string literal (an unassigned string) as
the first statement of the object’s body.

Despite a common belief, a docstring does not have to be a multiline

(triple-quoted, see Tip 4, ​Use Quotes of All Sorts​) string. You can
use single-quoted and double-quoted strings as docstrings, except
that, naturally, they are limited to a single line. Also, despite a
common belief, the docstring must be the first statement of an
object. If an unassigned string is not the first statement, Python
does not recognize it as a docstring.

A docstring explains the purpose of the object that it documents. For

functions and methods, it also explains the meaning of the
parameters and the return values. Here is an example of a docstring
of a popular built-in function len:

​ d
​ ef​​len​(obj):
​ '​Return the number of items in a container.'​
​ ​# Do something​

Once defined, a docstring can be obtained in two ways. First, it

becomes a property of the defined object called __doc__. You can
access it like any other object property using the dot (“.”) operator:

​ ​print​(len.__doc__)
 ​ ​Return the number of items in a container.​
=
>

Note that the parentheses do not follow the function name. You do
not call the function here; you refer to its attribute. In Python,
functions and methods are objects and have attributes too.

Second, you can call the built-in function help and pass the object in
question as an argument. Again, do not call the object if it is a
function or a method.

​ help(len)

​ ​Help on built-in function len in module builtins:​

=
>
​​
=
>
​ ​len(obj, /)​
=
>
​​ Return the number of items in a container.​
=
>

As a bonus, you get the expected parameters and the name of the
module in which the object is defined.
 Tip 8 Do Not Misuse Docstrings
★2.7, 3.4+ Docstrings are a form of documentation, but you should
use them only to describe the purpose of having objects and the
way of using them. For everything else, such as explaining the
implementation detail and design choices, there are comments.

​ ​# This is a comment​
​
​ '​''​
​ ​This is not a comment​
​ ​'''​
​
​ ​'This is not a comment, either'​

Do not use unassigned strings as general comments. At the time of

code writing, integrated development environments (IDEs) and
stand-alone editors do not highlight them as comments, making
them harder to spot. At runtime, the interpreter may need to spend
time constructing the useless string objects. The latter is not a
concern if your interpreter knows how to optimize string literals, but
in general, this may be an issue.

The Zen of Python says: “There should be one—and preferably only

one—obvious way to do it.” Comments are for commenting.
 Tip 9 Let input() Speak for Itself
★3.4+ There is little that is more embarrassing than a console-based
program that suddenly stops and shows no signs of life. Why??? Did
it hang up? Is it busy? Is it waiting for your input? If so, for what is
it waiting? As a programmer, you can eliminate most of these
questions by providing prompts.

A prompt is a printed invitation to enter some missing information.

You should display a prompt just before the program stops and waits
for user input (presumably by calling the function input). The prompt
should explain concisely, in a language suitable to the expected user,
what the user should input and how. It is customary, but not
required, for a prompt to end with a colon and space.

You can use function print to display the prompt, followed by input to
collect the input. A better solution is to let input speak for itself; if
you pass an argument to input, the argument will be printed just
before the function stops:

​ year = input(​'Enter year of birth: '​)

​ ​Enter year of birth: 2048​

=
>

Keeping the prompt and the collector together self-documents the

collector’s purpose and reminds the user what input is expected,
especially if the program needs more than one input.

Remember that the prompt is just a string. It can be a constant. It

can be pre-calculated. It can be calculated during the call to
personalize the invitation or configure it in any other way:

​ name = input(​'Enter your name: '​).strip()

 ​ ​Enter your name: DZ​
=
>

​ year = input(f​'What is your year of birth, {name}? '​)

​ ​What is your year of birth, DZ? 2048​

=
>

See Tip 64, ​Format with Formatted Strings​for the explanation of

format strings, and Tip 79, ​Strip User Input​for the description of
str.strip.

Here is another example of prompt customization: the code

fragment displays an updated prompt for each new input.

​ size = int(input(​'Enter the number of readings: '​))

​ data = [0] * size
​ ​for​i ​in​range(size):
​ data[i] = int(input(f​'Reading #{i+1} of {size}: '​))

Bear in mind that converting user input to a number without

checking is dangerous: you cannot force the user to enter a number,
even if you ask for one. Tip 19, ​Try It​, offers an answer.
Other documents randomly have
different content
munificence that he had only to confiscate the revenues of a small
monastery to make himself full-pocketed for the endowment of a
college. ’Tis certain that he loved learning, and that he did much for
its development in the season of his greatest power and influence;
certain, too, that his ambitions were too large for the wary King, his
master, and brought him to that dismal fall from his high estate,
which is pathetically set forth in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.:

“——Farewell to all my greatness!

This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost—a killing frost;
And—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a ripening—nips his root
And then he falls as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory;
But far beyond my depth; my high-blown pride
At length broke under me; and now has left me,
Weary, and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must forever hide me.”

Another favorite of Henry in the early days of his kingship, and

one bearing a far more important name in the literary annals of
England than that of Wolsey, was Sir Thomas More. He was a Greek
of the very Greeks, in both character and attainment. Born in the
heart of London—in Milk Street, now just outside of the din and roar
of Cheapside, he was a scholar of Oxford, and was the son of a
knight, who, like Sir Thomas himself, had a reputation for shrewd
sayings—of which the old chronicler, William Camden,[71] has
reported this sample:—
“Marriage,” said the elder More, “with its chances, is
like dipping one’s hand into a bag, with a great many
 snakes therein, and but one eel; the which most
serviceable and comfortable eel might possibly be
seized upon; but the chances are largely in favor of
catching a stinging snake:”
But, says the chronicler—this good knight did himself thrust his hand
three several times into such a bag, and with such ensuing results as
preserved him hale and sound to the age of ninety or thereabout.
The son inherited this tendency to whimsical speech, joining with it
rare merits as a scholar: and it used to be said of him as a boy, that
he could thrust himself into the acting of a Latin comedy and
extemporize his part, with such wit and aptness, as not to break
upon the drift of the play. He studied, as I said, at Oxford; and
afterward Law at Lincoln’s Inn; was onewhile strongly inclined to the
Church, and under influence of a patron who was a Church dignitary
became zealous Religionist, and took to wearing in penance a
bristling hair-shirt—which (or one like it) he kept wearing till prison-
days and the scaffold overtook him, as they overtook so many of the
quondam friends of Henry VIII. For he had been early presented to
that monarch—even before Henry had come to the throne—and had
charmed him by his humor and his scholarly talk: so that when More
came to live upon his little farm at Chelsea (very near to Cheyne
Row where Carlyle died but a few years since) the King found his
way thither on more than one occasion; and there are stories of his
pacing up and down the garden walks in familiar talk with the
master.
There, too, came for longer stay, and for longer and friendlier
communings, the great and scholarly Erasmus (afterward teacher of
Greek at Cambridge)—and out of one of these visitations to Chelsea
grew the conception and the working out of his famous Praise of
Folly, with its punning title—Encomium Moriæ.[72]
The King promised preferment to More—which came in its time. I
think he was in Flanders on the King’s business, when upon a certain
day, as he was coming out from the Antwerp Cathedral, he
encountered a stranger, with long beard and sunburnt face—a man
of the “Ancient Mariner” stamp, who had made long voyages with
that Amerigo Vespucci who stole the honor of naming America: and
this long-bearded mariner told Sir Thomas More of the strange
things he had seen in a country farther off than America, called
Utopia. Of course, it is something doubtful if More ever really
encountered such a mariner, or if he did not contrive him only as a
good frontispiece for his political fiction. This is the work by which
More is best known (through its English translations); and it has
given the word Utopian to our every-day speech. The present
popular significance of this term will give you a proper hint of the
character of the book: it is an elaborate and whimsical and yet
statesmanlike forecast of a government too good and honest and
wise to be sound and true and real.
Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name
Utopia, which is Greek for Nowhere. If, indeed, men were all honest,
and women all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might
all live in a Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites—the Socialists—the
Knights of Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this
reservoir of the ideal maxims of statecraft. In this model country,
gold was held in large disrespect; and to keep the scorn of it
wholesome, it was put to the vilest uses: a great criminal was
compelled to wear gold rings in his ears: chains were made of it for
those in bondage; and a particularly obnoxious character put to the
wearing of a gold head-band; so too diamonds and pearls were
given over to the decoration of infants; and these, with other baby
accoutrements, they flung aside in disgust, so soon as they came to
sturdy childhood. When therefore upon a time, Ambassadors came
to Utopia, from a strange country, with their tricksy show of gold and
jewels—the old Voyager says:—
“You shᵈ have sene [Utopian] children that had caste
away their peerles and pretious stones, when they
sawe the like sticking upon the Ambassadours cappes;
—digge and pushe theire mothers under the sides,
sainge thus to them,—‘Loke mother how great a
lubbor doth yet were peerles, as though he were a litel
 child stil!’ ‘Peace sone,’ saith she; ‘I thinke he be some
of the Ambassadours fooles.’”
Also in this model state industrial education was in vogue; children
all, of whatsoever parentage, were to be taught some craft—as
“masonrie or smith’s craft, or the carpenter’s science.” Unlawful
games were decried—such as “dyce, cardes, tennis, coytes [quoits]
—do not all these,” says the author, “sende the haunters of them
streyghte a stealynge, when theyr money is gone?”
The Russian Count Tolstoi’s opinion that money is an invention of
Satan and should be abolished, is set forth with more humor and at
least equal logic, in this Latin tractate of More’s.
In the matters of Religion King Utopus decreed that
“it should be lawful for everie man to favoure and
folow what religion he would, and that he mighte do
the best he could to bring other to his opinion, so that
he did it peaceablie, gentelie, quietlie and sobelie,
without hastie and contentious rebuking.”
Yet this same self-contained Sir Thomas More did in his after
controversies with Tyndale use such talk of him—about his “whyning
and biting and licking and tumbling in the myre,” and “rubbing
himself in puddles of dirt,”—as were like anything but the courtesies
of Utopia. Indeed it is to be feared that theologic discussion does not
greatly provoke gentleness of speech, in any time; it is a very
grindstone to put men’s wits to sharpened edges. But More was a
most honest man withal;—fearless in advocacy of his own opinions;
eloquent, self-sacrificing—a tender father and husband—master of a
rich English speech (his Utopia was written in Latin, but translated
many times into English, and most languages of Continental
Europe), learned in the classics—a man to be remembered as one of
the greatest of Henry VIII.’s time; a Romanist, at a date when
honestest men doubted if it were worthiest to be a King’s man or a
Pope’s man;—not yielding to his royal master in points of religious
scruple, and with a lofty obstinacy in what he counted well doing,
going to the scaffold, with as serene a step as he had ever put to his
walks in the pleasant gardens of Chelsea.

Cranmer, Latimer, Knox, and Others.

A much nobler figure is this, to my mind, than that of Cranmer,[73]

who appears in such picturesque lights in the drama of Henry VIII.—
who gave adhesion to royal wishes for divorce upon divorce; who
always colored his religious allegiances with the colors of the King;
who was a scholar indeed—learned, eloquent; who wrought well, as
it proved, for the reformed faith; but who wilted under the fierce
heats of trial; would have sought the good will of the blood-thirsty
Mary; but who gave even to his subserviencies a half-tone that
brought distrust, and so—finally—the fate of that quasi-martyrdom
which has redeemed his memory.
He stands very grandly in his robes upon the memorial cross at
Oxford: and he has an even more august presence in the final scene
of Shakespeare’s play, where amidst all churchly and courtly pomp,
he christened the infant—who was to become the Royal Elizabeth,
and says to the assembled dignitaries:

“This royal infant

Tho’ in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time will bring to ripeness: She shall be
A pattern to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed her. Truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her:
She shall be loved and feared.
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.”[74]
 Tennyson, in his drama of Queen Mary (a most unfortunate choice
of heroine) gives a statuesque pose to this same Archbishop
Cranmer; but Shakespeare’s figures are hard to duplicate. He was
with Henry VIII. as counsellor at his death; was intimate adviser of
the succeeding Edward VI.: and took upon himself obligations from
that King (contrary to his promises to Henry) which brought him to
grief under Queen Mary. That brave thrust of his offending hand into
the blaze that consumed him, cannot make us forget his weaknesses
and his recantations; nor will we any more forget that he it was,
who gave (1543) to the old Latin Liturgy of the Church that noble,
English rhythmic flow which so largely belongs to it to-day.
It is quite impossible to consider the literary aspects of the period
of English history covered by the reign of Henry VIII., and the short
reigns of the two succeeding monarchs, Edward VI. and Mary,
without giving large frontage to the Reformers and religious
controversialists. Every scholar was alive to the great battle in the
Church. The Greek and Classicism of the Universities came to have
their largest practical significance in connection with the settlement
of religious questions or in furnishing weapons for the ecclesiastic
controversies of the day. The voices of the poets—the Skeltons, the
Sackvilles, the Wyatts, were chirping sparrows’ voices beside that din
with which Luther thundered in Germany, and Henry VIII. thundered
back, more weakly, from his stand-point of Anglicanism.
We have seen Wolsey in his garniture of gold, going from court to
school; and Sir Thomas More, stern, strong, and unyielding; and
Archbishop Cranmer, disposed to think rightly, but without the
courage to back up his thought; and associated with these, it were
well to keep in mind the other figures of the great religious
processional. There was William Tyndale, native of Gloucestershire, a
slight, thin figure of a man; honest to the core; well-taught; getting
dignities he never sought; wearied in his heart of hearts by the
flattering coquetries of the King; perfecting the work of Wyclif in
making the old home Bible readable by all the world. His translation
was first printed in Wittenberg about 1530:[75] I give the Lord’s
Prayer as it appeared in the original edition:—
“Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy
name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as
well in erth, as hit ys in heven. Geve vs this daye oure
dayly breade. And forgeve vs oure trespases, even as
we forgeve them which treespas vs. Leade vs not into
temptacion but delyvre vs from yvell. Amen.”
But Tyndale was not safe in England; nor yet in the Low Countries
whither he went, and where the long reach of religious hate and
jealousy put its hand upon him and brought him to a death whose
fiery ignominies are put out of sight by the lustrous quality of his
deservings.
I see too amongst those great, dim figures, that speak in
Scriptural tones, the form of Hugh Latimer, as he stands to-day on
the Memorial Cross in Oxford. I think of him too—in humbler dress
than that which the sculptor has put on him—even the yeoman’s
clothes, which he wore upon his father’s farm, in the Valley of the
Soar, when he wrought there in the meadows, and drank in humility
of thought, and manly independence under the skies of
Leicestershire[76]—where (as he says), “My father had walk for an
hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine.” He kept his head
upon his shoulders through Henry’s time—his amazing wit and
humor helping him to security;—was in fair favor with Edward; but
under Mary, walked coolly with Ridley to the stake, where the fires
were set, to burn them both in Oxford.
Foxe[77] too is to be remembered for his Stories of the Martyrs of
these, and other times, which have formed the nightmare reading
for so many school-boys.
I see, too, another figure that will not down in this coterie of
Reformers, and that makes itself heard from beyond the Tweed. This
is John Knox,[78] a near contemporary though something younger
than most I have named, and not ripening to his greatest power till
Henry VIII. had gone. Born of humble parentage in Scotland in the
early quarter of the century, he was a rigid Papist in his young days,
but a more rigid Reformer afterward; much time a prisoner; passing
years at Geneva; not altogether a “gloomy, shrinking, fanatic,” but
keeping, says Carlyle, “a pipe of Bordeaux in that old Edinboro
house of his;” getting to know Cranmer, and the rest in England;
discussing with these, changes of Church Service; counselling
austerities, where Cranmer admitted laxities; afraid of no man,
neither woman;—publishing in exile in Mary’s day—The first Blaste
of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of Women, and
repenting this—quietly no doubt—when Elizabeth came to power. A
thin, frail man; strong no ways, but in courage, and in brain; with
broad brows—black cap—locks floating gray from under it, in
careless whirls that shook as he talked; an eye like a falcon’s that
flashed the light of twenty years, when sixty were on his shoulders;
in after years, writhing with rheumatic pains—crawling upon his stick
and a servant’s arm into his Church of St. Andrews; lifted into his
pulpit by the clerk and his attendant—leaning there on the desk, a
wilted heap of humanity—panting, shaking, quivering—till his breath
came, and the psalm and the lifted prayer gave courage; then—
fierce torrents of speech (and a pounding of the pulpit till it seemed
that it would fly in shivers), with a sharp, swift, piercing utterance
that pricked ears as it pricked consciences, and made the roof-
timbers clang with echoes.
Of all these men there are no books that take high rank in
Literature proper—unless we except the Utopia of More, and the
New Testament of Tyndale: but their lives and thought were welded
by stout blows into the intellectual texture of the century and are not
to be forgotten.

Verse-Writing and Psalmodies.

And now, was there really no dalliance with the Muses in times
that brought to the front such fighting Gospellers as we have talked
of?
 Yes, even Thomas More did write poems—having humor in them
and grammatic proprieties, and his Latin prosody is admired of
Classicists: then there were the versifiers of the Psalms, Sternhold
and Hopkins, and the Whittingham who succeeded John Knox at
Geneva—sharing that Scotchman’s distaste for beautiful rubrics, and
we suspect beautiful verses also—if we may judge by his version of
the Creed. This is a sample:—

“The Father, God is; God, the Son;

God—Holy Ghost also;
Yet are not three gods in all
But one God and no mo.”

From the Apostles’ Creed again, we excerpt this:—

“From thence, shall he come for to judge

All men both dead and quick.
I, in the Holy Ghost believe
And Church thats Catholick.”

Hopkins,[79] who was a schoolmaster of Suffolk, and the more

immediate associate of Sternhold, thus expostulates with the Deity:
—

“Why doost withdraw thy hand aback

And hide it in thy lappe?
Oh, plucke it out, and be not slacke
To give thy foes a rap!”

As something worthier from these old psalmists’ versing, I give

this of Sternhold’s:—
 “The earth did shake, for feare did quake,
The hills their bases shook
Removed they were, in place most fayre
At God’s right fearful looks.
He rode on hye and did so flye
Upon the Cherubins,
He came in sight, and made his flight
Upon the wings of winds,” etc.

It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely
Saxonism of such psalms than the Stabat Maters and Te Deums and
Jubilates, which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess
Katharine of Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such
psalmodies received small crumbs of favor from the Court, the
English Bible was by no means a free-goer into all companies.
“A nobleman or gentleman may read it”—(I quote
from a Statute of Henry VIII.’s time)—“in his house, or
in his garden, or orchard, yet quietly and without
disturbance of order. A merchant may read it to
himself privately: But the common people, women,
artificers, apprentices, journeymen and servingmen,
are to be punished with one month’s imprisonment, as
often as they are detected in reading the Bible, either
privately or openly.”[80]
Truly this English realm was a strange one in those times, and this
a strange King—who has listened approvingly to Hugh Latimer’s
sermons—who harries Tyndale as he had harried Tyndale’s enemy—
More; who fights the Pope, fights Luther, holds the new Bible (even
Cranmer’s) in leash, who gives pension to Sternhold, works easy
riddance of all the wives he wishes, pulls down Religious Houses for
spoils, calls himself Defender of the Faith, and maybe goes to see (if
then on show) Gammer Gurton’s Needle,[81] and is hilariously
responsive to such songs as this:—
 “I cannot eat but little meat
My Stomach is not good
But sure I think, that I can drink
With him that wears a hood;
Tho’ I go bare, take ye no care
I nothing am a colde,
I stuffe my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and olde.”

Wyatt and Surrey.

The model poets, however, of this reign[82]—those who kept alive

the best old classic traditions, and echoed with most grace and spirit
the daintiness of Italian verse, were the Earl of Surrey and Sir
Thomas Wyatt. The latter was son of an old courtier of Henry VII.,
and inheritor of an estate and castle in Kent, which he made
noteworthy by his decorative treatment, and which is even now
counted worthy a visit by those journeying through the little town of
Maidstone. He was, for those times, brilliantly educated; was in high
favor with the King (save one enforced visit to the Tower); he
translated Petrarch, and in his own way imitated the Italian poet’s
manner, and was, by common consent, the first to graft the
“Sonnet” upon English forms of verse. I find nothing however in his
verse one-half so graceful or gracious as this tribute to his worth in
Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”—

“Courtier of many courts, he loves the more

His own gray towers, plain life, and lettered peace,
To read and rhyme in solitary fields;
The lark above, the nightingale below,
And answer them in song.”
 Surrey was well born: was son to the Duke of Norfolk who figures
in the Shakespearean play of Henry VIII., and grandson to the
Surrey who worsted the Scotch on Flodden Field: he was companion
of the King’s son, was taught at the Universities, at home and
abroad. There was no gallant more admired in the gayer circles of
the court; he too loved Petrarch, and made canzonets like his; had a
Geraldine (for a Laura), half real and half mythical. The further story
once obtained that he went with a gay retinue to Florence, where
the lists were opened—in the spirit of an older chivalry—to this
Stranger Knight, who challenged the world to combat his claims in
behalf of the mythical Geraldine. And—the story ran—there were
hot-heads who contended with him; and he unhorsed his
antagonists, and came back brimming with honors, to the court—
before which Hugh Latimer had preached, and where Sternhold’s
psalms had been heard—to be imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent, in
that Windsor Castle where he had often played with the King’s son.
The tale[83] is a romantic one; but—in all that relates to the
Florentine tourney—probably untrue.
I give you a little taste of the graceful way in which this poet sings
of his Geraldine:—
 “I assure thee even by oath
And thereon take my hand and troth
That she is one of the worthiest
The truest and the faithfullest
The gentlest, and the meekest o’ mind
That here on earth a man may find;
And if that love and truth were gone
In her it might be found alone:
For in her mind no thought there is
But how she may be true, iwis,
And is thine own; and so she says
And cares for thee ten thousand ways;
Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks
With thee she eats, with thee she drinks
With thee she talks, with thee she moans
With thee she sighs, with thee she groans
With thee she says—‘Farewell mine own!’
When thou, God knows, full far art gone.”

Surrey is to be held in honor as the first poet who wrote English

blank verse; he having translated two books of the Æneid in that
form. But this delicate singer, this gallant soldier cannot altogether
please the capricious monarch; perhaps he is too fine a soldier;
perhaps too free a liver; perhaps he is dangerously befriended by
some ladies of the court: Quite certain it is that the King frowns on
him; and the frowns bring what they have brought to so many
others—first, imprisonment in the Tower, and then the headsman’s
axe. In this way the poet died at thirty, in 1547: his execution being
one of the last ordered by Henry VIII., and the King so weak that he
could only stamp, instead of signing the death warrant.
Honest men breathed freer, everywhere, when the King died, in
the same year with Surrey: and so, that great, tempestuous reign
was ended.
 A Boy-King, a Queen, and Schoolmaster.
Edward VI. succeeded his father at the age of ten years—a
precocious, consumptive boy, who gave over his struggle with life
when only sixteen; and yet has left his “Works,” printed by the
Roxburgh Club. There’s a maturity about some of the political
suggestions in his “Journal”—not unusual in a lively mind
prematurely ripening under stress of disease; yet we can hardly
count him a literary king.
The red reign of Mary, immediately following, lasted only five
years, for which, I think, all Christian England thanked God: In those
five years very many of the strong men of whom we have talked in
this chapter came to a fiery end.
Only one name of literary significance do we pluck from the annals
of her time; it is that of Roger Ascham,[84] the writer of her Latin
letters, and for a considerable time her secretary. How, being a
Protestant as he was, and an undissembling one, he kept his head
upon his shoulders so near her throne, it is hard to conjecture. He
must have studied the art of keeping silence as well as the arts of
speech.
He was born in that rich, lovely region of Yorkshire—watered by
the River Swale—where we found the young Wyclif: his father was a
house-steward; but he early made show of such qualities as invited
the assistance of rich friends, through whose offices he was entered
at St. John’s College, Cambridge, at fifteen, and took his degree at
eighteen. He was full of American pluck, aptness, and industry; was
known specially for his large gifts in language; a superb penman too,
which was no little accomplishment in that day; withal, he excelled
in athletics, and showed a skill with the long-bow which made
credible the traditions about Robin Hood. They said he wasted time
at this exercise; whereupon he wrote a defence of Archery, which
under the name of Toxophilus has come down to our day—a model
even now of good, homely, vigorous English. “He that will write well
in any tongue,” said he, “must follow this counsel—to speak as the
common people do—to think as wise men do.” Our teachers of
rhetoric could hardly say a better thing to-day.
The subject of Archery was an important one at that period; the
long-bow was still the principal war weapon of offence: there were
match-locks, indeed, but these very cumbrous and counting for less
than those “cloth-yard” shafts which had won the battle of
Agincourt. The boy-King, Edward, to whom Ascham taught
penmanship, was an adept at archery, and makes frequent allusion
to that exercise in his Journal. In every hamlet practice at the long-
bow was obligatory; and it was ordered by statute that no person
above the age of twenty-four, should shoot the light-flight arrow at a
distance under two hundred and twenty yards. What would our
Archery Clubs say to this? And what, to the further order—dating in
Henry VIII.’s time—that “all bow-staves should be three fingers thick
and seven feet long?”
This book of Ascham’s was published two years before Henry’s
death, and brought him a small pension; under the succeeding king
he went to Augsburg, where Charles V. held his brilliant court; but
neither there, nor in Italy, did he lose his homely and hearty English
ways, and his love of English things.
In his tractate of the Schoolmaster, which appeared after his
death, he bemoans the much and idle travel of Englishmen into Italy.
They have a proverb there, he says, “Un Inglese italianato é un
diabolo incarnato” (an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate).
Going to Italy, when Tintoretto and Raphael were yet living, and
when the great Medici family and the Borgias were spinning their
golden wheels—was, for a young Englishman of that day, like a
European trip to a young American of ours: Ascham says—“Many
being mules and horses before they went, return swine and asses.”
There is much other piquant matter in this old book of the
Schoolmaster; as where he says:—
“When the child doeth well, either in the choosing or
true placing of his words, let the master praise him,
 and say, ‘Here ye do well!’ For I assure you there is no
such whetstone to sharpen a good wit, and encourage
a will to learning as is praise. But if the child miss,
either in forgetting a word, or in changing a good with
a worse, or mis-ordering the sentence, I would not
have the master frown, or chide with him, if the child
have done his diligence and used no truantship: For I
know by good experience, that a child shall take more
profit of two faults gently warned of, than of four
things rightly hit.”
And this brings us to say that this good, canny, and thrifty Roger
Ascham was the early teacher, in Greek and Latin, of the great
Princess Elizabeth, and afterward for years her secretary. You would
like to hear how he speaks of her:—
“It is your shame (I speak to you all young
gentlemen of England) that one mind should go
beyond you all in excellency of learning, and
knowledge of divers tongues. Point forth six of the
best given gentlemen of this court, and all they
together show not so much good will, spend not so
much time, bestow not so many hours daily, orderly,
and constantly, for the increase of learning and
knowledge as doth this Princess. Yea, I believe that
beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French
and Spanish, she readeth here now, at Windsor more
Greek every day, than some prebendarys of this
Church doth read Latin in a whole week.”
He never speaks of her but with a hearty tenderness; nor did she
speak of him, but most kindly. At his death, she said, “She would
rather that £10,000 had been flung into the sea.” And—seeing her
money-loving, this was very much for her to say.
 In our next chapter we shall meet this prudent and accomplished
Princess face to face—in her farthingale and ruff—with the jewels on
her fingers, and the crown upon her head—bearing herself right
royally. And around her we shall find such staid worthies as Burleigh
and Richard Hooker; and such bright spirits as Sidney and Raleigh,
and that sweet poet Spenser, who was in that day counting the
flowing measures of that long song, whose mellow cadences have
floated musically down from the far days of Elizabeth to these fairer
days of ours.
 CHAPTER VI.
n our last talk we entered upon that brilliant sixteenth century,

I within whose first quarter three great kings held three great
thrones:—Charles V. of Spain, Francis I. of France, and Henry
VIII. of England. New questions were astir; Art—in the seats of
Art—was blazing at its best: the recent fall of Constantinople under
the Turk had sent a tide of Greek scholars, Greek art, and Greek
letters flowing over Western Europe, and drifting into the antiquated
courts of Oxford and Cambridge. I spoke of the magnificent Wolsey,
and of his great university endowments; also, of that ripe scholar, Sir
Thomas More, who could not mate his religion, or his statesmanship
with the caprices of the King, and so, died by the axe. We saw
Cranmer—meaning to be good, if goodness did not call for strength;
we heard Latimer’s swift, homely speech, and saw Tyndale with his
English Testament—both these coming to grief; and we had
glimpses of John Knox shaking the pulpit with his frail hand, and
shaking all Scotch Christendom with his fearless, strident speech.
We heard the quaint psalmody of Sternhold, and the sweeter and
more heathen verse of Wyatt and of Surrey; lastly, I gave a sketch of
that old schoolmaster, Roger Ascham, who by his life, tied the reigns
of Henry and of Elizabeth together, and who taught Greek and Latin
and penmanship and Archery to that proud princess—whom we
encounter now—in her high ruff, and her piled-up head-dress, with a
fair jewelled hand that puts a man’s grip upon the sceptre.

Elizabethan England.
Elizabeth was in her twenty-sixth year when she came to the
throne, and it was about the middle of the sixteenth century; the
precise year being 1558. The England she was to dominate so
splendidly was not a quiet England: the fierce religious controversies
which had signalized the reign of Henry VIII.—who thwacked with
his kingly bludgeon both ways and all ways—and which continued
under Edward VI.—who was feebly Protestant; and which had
caught new vigor under Mary—who was arrant and slavish Papist—
had left gouts of blood and a dreadful exasperation. Those great
Religious Houses, which only a quarter of a century before, were
pleasantly embayed in so many charming valleys of Great Britain—
with their writing-rooms, their busy transcribing clerks—their great
gardens, were, most of them, despoiled—and to be seen no more.
An old Venetian Ambassador,[85] writing to the Seigneury in those
days, says—“London itself is disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of
Churches and Monasteries which once belonged to Friars and Nuns.”
Piers Plowman, long before, had attacked the sins growing up in the
pleasant Abbey Courts; Chaucer had echoed the ridicule in his Abbot
riding to Canterbury, with jingling trappings: Gower had repeated
the assault in his Vox Clamantis, and Skelton had turned his ragged
rhymes into the same current of satire. But all would have availed
nothing except the arrogant Henry VIII. had set his foot upon them,
and crushed them out.
There was a wild justice in it—if not an orderly one. The spoils
went to fill the Royal coffers; many of those beautiful properties
were bestowed upon favorites; many princely estates are still held in
England, by title tracing back to those days of spoliation—a fact
which will be called to mind, I suspect—with unction, in case of any
great social revolution in that country. Under Mary, some of these
estates had been restored to Church dignitaries; but the restoration
had not been general: and Elizabeth could not if she would, and
would not if she could, sanction any further restitution.
She was Protestant—but rather from policy than any heartiness of
belief. It did not grieve her one whit, that her teacher, Roger
Ascham, had been private secretary to bloody Mary: the
lukewarmness of her great minister, Lord Burleigh, did not disturb
her; she always kept wax tapers burning by a crucifix in her private
chamber; a pretty rosary gave her no shock; but she was shocked at
the marriage of any member of the priesthood, always. In fact, if
Spanish bigotry had not forced her into a resolute antagonism of
Rome, I think history would have been in doubt whether to count
her most a Lutheran, or most a Roman.
Yet she made the Papists smoke for it—as grimly as ever her sister
Mary did the Protestants—if they stood one whit in the way of
England’s grasp on power.

Personality of the Queen.

I think our friend Mr. Froude, whose history we all read, is a little
unfair toward Queen Bess, as he was a little over-fair, and white-
wash-i-ly disposed in the case of Henry VIII.: both tendencies being
attributable to a mania this shrewd historian has—for unripping and
oversetting established forms of belief. I think that he not only bears
with a greedy zeal upon her too commonly manifest selfishness and
heartlessness, but that he enjoys putting little vicious dabs of bad
color upon her picture—as when he says, “she spat, and swore like a
trooper.” Indeed it would seem that this clever biographer had
carried a good deal of his fondness for “vicious dabs” in portraiture
into his more recent post-mortem exhibits; as if it were his duty and
pleasure to hang out all sorts of soiled linen, in his office of Clean-
Scrubber: Yet, I wish to speak with all respect of the distinguished
historian—whose vigor is conspicuous—whose industry is
remarkable, whose crisp sentences are delightful, but whose
accuracy is not of the surest; and whose conscience does, I think,
sometimes go lame—under strain of his high, rhetorical canter.
The authority for all most damnatory statements with respect to
the private life of the Queen, rests upon those Spanish Relations—so
minute as to be suspicious—if they were not also so savagely bitter
as to twist everything to the discredit of the Protestant Sovereign.
Signor Soranzo—the Venetian ambassador (whom Froude does not
cite—but who had equal opportunities of observation with the
Spanish informer), says of Elizabeth (in a report—not written for
publication, but lying for years in the archives of Venice): “Such an
air of dignified majesty pervades all her actions that no one can fail
to judge her a queen. She is a good Greek and Latin scholar; and
beside her native tongue she speaks Latin, French, Spanish, and
Italian benissimo—and her manners are very modest and
affable.”[86]
I talk thus much—and may talk more—about the personality of
Queen Elizabeth, because she must be counted—in a certain not
very remote sense—one of the forces that went to endow what is
called the English Literature of her day—so instructed was she; so
full of talent; so keen-sighted; so exact—a most extraordinary
woman. We must not think her greatness was factitious, and
attributable to her only because she was a queen. There could be no
greater mistake. She would have been great if she had been a
shoemaker’s daughter; I do not mean that she would have rode a
white horse at Tilbury, and made the nations shake: but she would
have bound more shoes, and bound them better, and looked sharper
after the affairs of her household than any cobbler’s wife in the land.
Elizabeth would have made a wonderful post-mistress—a splendid
head of a school—with perhaps a little too large use of the ferule:
and she would have had her favorites, and shown it; but she would
have lifted her pupils’ thoughts into a high range of endeavor; she
would have made an atmosphere of intellectual ambition about her;
she would have struck fire from flinty souls; and so she did in her
court: She inspired work—inspired imagination; may we not say that
she inspired genius. That auburn hair of hers (I suppose we should
have called it red, if her name had been Abigail) made an aureole,
around which wit coruscated by a kind of electric affinity. It was
counted worth toil to have the honor of laying a poem at her
gracious feet, who was so royally a Queen—whose life, and power,
and will and culture, made up a quadrature of poems.

Burleigh and Others.

 And who was there of literary significance about Elizabeth in those
early days of her reign? Roger Ascham was still doling out his
sagacious talk, and his good precepts; but he was not a force—only
what we might call a good creature. There was Sackville[87]
(afterward the elegant Earl of Dorset); he was in his prime then, and
had very likely written his portion of the Mirror for Magistrates—a
fairish poetic history of great unfortunate people—completed
afterward by other poets, but hardly read nowadays.
Old Tusser,[88] too—the farmer-poet—lived in these times; an
Essex man, of about the same age as Ascham, but who probably
never came nearer to the court than to sing in the choir of old St.
Paul’s. He had University experience, which, if it did not help his
farming, on the banks of the Stour, did, doubtless, enable him to
equip his somewhat prosy poems with such classic authentication
and such directness and simplicities as gave to his Pointes of
Husbandrie very great vogue. Many rhyming saws about farming,
still current among old-fashioned country-folk, trace back to Master
Tusser, who lived and farmed successively (tradition says not very
successfully) at Ipswich, Dereham, and Norwich. His will, however,
published in these later times, shows him to have been a man of
considerable means.
Then there was Holinshed,[89] who, though the date of his birth is
uncertain, must have been of fair working age now—a homely,
honest, simple-hearted chronicler (somewhat thievish, as all the old
chroniclers were) but whose name is specially worth keeping in
mind, because he—in all probability—supplied Shakespeare’s
principal historic reading, and furnished the crude material,
afterward beaten out into those plaques of gold, which we call
Shakespeare’s Historic Plays. Therefore, we must always, I think,
treat Holinshed with respect. Next, there was the great Lord
Burleigh,[90] the chief minister and adviser of the Queen—whom she
set great store by: the only man she allowed to sit in her presence;
and indeed he was something heavy, both in mind and in person;
but far-sighted, honest, keen, cautious, timid—making his nod count
more than most men’s words, and in great exigencies standing up
for the right, even against the caprices of the sovereign. Whoever
goes to Stamford in England should not fail to run out—a mile away
only—to the princely place called Burleigh House (now the property
of the Marquis of Exeter) which was the home of this minister of
Elizabeth’s—built out of his savings, and equipped now with such
paintings, such gardens, such magnificent avenues of oak, such
great sweeps of velvet lawn, such herds of loitering deer as make it
one of the show-places of England. Well—this sober-sided, cautious
Burleigh (you will get a short, but good glimpse of him in Scott’s
tragic tale of Kenilworth) wrote a book—a sort of earlier
Chesterfield’s Letters, made up of advices for his son Robert Cecil,
who was cousin, and in early life, rival of the great Francis Bacon. I
will take out a tid-bit from this book, that you may see how this
famous Lord Burleigh talked to his son:
 “When it shall please God to bring thee to man’s
estate”—he says—“use great Providence, and
circumspection in choosing thy wife: For from thence
will spring all thy future good and evil. And it is an
action of life—like unto a stratagem of War, wherein a
man can err but once. If thy estate be good, match
near home and at leisure: if weak—far off, and quickly.
Inquire diligently of her disposition, and how her
parents have been inclined in their youth. Choose not
a base, and uncomely creature, altogether for Wealth;
for it will cause contempt in others, and loathing in
thee: Neither make choice of a fool, for she will be thy
continual disgrace, and it will irk thee to hear her talk.”

A Group of Great Names.

But the greater names which went to illustrate with their splendor
the times of Elizabeth, only began to come to people’s knowledge
after she had been upon the throne some twenty years.
Spenser was a boy of five, when she came to power: John Lilly,
the author of Euphues which has given us the word euphuistic, and
which provoked abundant caricatures, of more or less fairness—was
born the same year with Spenser; Sir Philip Sidney a year later; Sir
Walter Raleigh a year earlier (1553); Richard Hooker, the author of
the Ecclesiastical Polity, in 1554; Lord Bacon in 1561; Shakespeare in
1564. These are great names to stand so thickly strewed over ten or
twelve years of time. I do not name them, because I lay great stress
on special dates: For my own part, I find them hard things to keep
in mind—except I group them thus—and I think a man or woman
can work and worry at worthier particularities than these. But when
Elizabeth had been twenty years a Queen, and was in the prime of
her womanly powers—six years after the slaughter of St.
Bartholomew—when the first English colony had just been planted in
Virginia, and Sir Francis Drake was coasting up and down the shores
of California; when Shakespeare was but a lad of fourteen, and
poaching (if he ever did poach there—which is doubtful) in
Charlecote Park; when Francis Bacon was seventeen, and was
studying in Paris—Philip Sidney was twenty-four; in the ripeness of
his young manhood, and just returned from Holland, he was making
love—vainly as it proved—to the famous and the ill-fated Penelope
Devereaux.
Richard Hooker—of the same age, was teaching Hebrew in the
University of Oxford, and had not yet made that unfortunate London
marriage (tho’ very near it) by which he was yoked with one whom
old Izaak Walton—charitable as the old angler was—describes as a
silly, clownish woman, and withal a perfect Xantippe.
The circumstances which led to this awkward marriage show so
well the child-like simplicity of this excellent man, that they are
worth noting. He had come up to London, and was housed where
preachers were wont to go; and it being foul weather, and he
thoroughly wetted, was behoven to the hostess for dry clothes, and
such other attentions as made him look upon her as a special
Providence, who could advise and care for him in all things: So, he
accepted her proffer to him of her own daughter, who proved to him
quite another sort of Providence, and a grievous thorn in the side;
and when his friends, on visits to his homestead in after years,
found the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity—rocking the cradle, or
minding the sheep, or looking after the kettles, and expressed
sympathy—“My dear fellows,” said he—“if Saints have usually a
double share in the miseries of this Life, I, that am none, ought not
to repine at what my Wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labor
(as indeed I do daily) to submit mine to his will and possess my soul
in patience and peace.”
I don’t know if any of our parish will care to read the Ecclesiastical
Polity; but if you have courage thereto, you will find in this old
master of sound and cumbrous English prose, passages of rare
eloquence, and many turns of expression, which for their winning
grace, their aptitude, their quality of fastening themselves upon the
mind, are not overmatched by those of any Elizabethan writer. His
theology is old and rankly conservative; but he shows throughout a
beautiful reverence for that all-embracing Law, “whose seat (as he
says) is the Bosom of God, and whose voice is the Harmony of the
World.”[91]

Edmund Spenser.
As for Edmund Spenser, he was a year older at this date—twenty-
five: he had taken his master’s degree at Cambridge and had just
returned to London from a visit to the North of England, where he
had encountered some fair damsel to whom he had been paying
weary and vain suit, and whom he had embalmed in his Shepherd’s
Calendar (just then being made ready for the press) under the name
of Rosalind.

“Ah, faithless Rosalind, and voyd of grace,

That art the root of all this ruthful woe
[My] teares would make the hardest flint to flow;”

and his tears keep a-drip through a great many of those charming
eclogues—called the Shepherd’s Calendar. Some of the
commentators on Spenser have queried—gravely—whether he ever
forgot this Rosalind; and whether the occurrence of the name and
certain woe-worn words in some madrigal of later years did not
show a wound unhealed and bleeding. We are all at liberty to guess,
and I am inclined to doubt here. I think he was equal to forgetting
this Rosalind before the ink of the Shepherd’s Calendar was fairly
dry. He loved dreams and fed on dreams; and I suspect enjoyed the
dream of his woe more than he ever suffered from a sting of rebuff.
Indeed, much as we must all admire his poetic fervor and fancies,
I do not find in him traces of heroic mould;—easily friendly rather
than firmly so;—full of an effusive piety, but not coming in way of
martyrdom for faith’s sake;—a tenderly contemplative man, loving
and sensing beauty in the same sure and abounding way in which
Turner has sense of color—exhaustless in his stock of brilliant and
ingenious imagery—running to similes as mountain rills run to rivers;
a courtier withal—honeyed and sometimes fulsome; a richly
presentable man (if portraits may be trusted), with a well-trimmed
face, a cautious face—dare I say—almost a smirking face;—the face
of a self-contained man who thinks allowably well of his parts, and is
determined to make the most of them. And in the brows over the
fine eyes there is a bulging out—where phrenologists place the
bump of language—that shows where his forte lies: No such word-
master had been heard to sing since the days when Chaucer sung.
He is deeply read in Chaucer too; and read in all—worth reading—
who came between. His lingual aptitudes are amazing. He can tear
words in tatters, and he can string them rhythmically in all shapes;
he makes his own law in language, as he grows heated in his work;
twists old phrases out of shape; makes new ones; binds them
together; tosses them as he will to the changing level of his thought:
so that whereas one may go to Chaucer, in points of language, as to
an authority—one goes to Spenser as to a mine of graceful and
euphonious phrases: but the authority is wanting—or, at least, is not
so safe. He makes uses for words which no analogy and no good
order can recognize. And his new words are not so much the
product of keen, shrewd search after what will fullest and strongest
express a feeling or a thought, or give color to epithet, as they are
the luxuriant outcropping of a tropical genius for language, which
delights in abundant forms, and makes them with an easy show of
its own fecundity, or for the chance purpose of filling a line, or
meting out the bounds of an orderly prosody.
He came up to London, as I said, about the year 1578, at the
invitation of a prig of a classmate, who makes him known to Philip
Sidney: Sidney is the very man to recognize and appreciate the
tender beauty of those woful plaints in the Shepherd’s Calendar, and
invites the poet down to Penshurst, that charming home of the
Sidneys, in Kent. There, such interest is made for him that he is
appointed to a secretaryship in Ireland, where the Queen’s
lieutenants are stamping out revolt. Spenser sees much of this fiery
work; and its blaze reddens some of the pages of the Faery Queen.
In the distribution of spoils, after the Irish revolt was put down, the
poet has bestowed upon him, amongst other plums, some three
thousand acres of wild land, with Kilcolman Castle, which stands
upon a valley spur of this domain. This castle is represented as an
uninteresting fortress—like Johnnie Armstrong’s tower in Scotland—
upon the borders of a small lake or mere, and the landscape—
stretching in unlovely waste around it—savage and low and tame.
Yet he finds rich rural pictures there—this idealist and dreamer: let
him see only so much of sky as comes between the roofs of a city
alley, and he will pluck out of it a multitude of twinkling stars; let
him look upon a rood square of brown grass-land, and he will set it
alight with scores of daisies and of primroses.

The Faery Queen.

And it is in this easy way he plants the men and women, the hags
and demons, the wizards and dragons that figure in the
phantasmagoria of the Faery Queen; they come and go like twilight
shadows; they have no root of realism.
There is reason to believe that the first cantos of this poem were
blocked out in his mind before leaving England; perhaps the scheme
had been talked over with his friend Sidney; in any event, it is quite
certain that they underwent elaboration at Kilcolman Castle, and
some portions doubtless took color from the dreary days of rapine
and of war he saw there. I will not ask if you have read the Faery
Queen: I fear that a great many dishonest speeches are made on
that score; I am afraid that I equivocated myself in youngish days;
but now I will be honest in saying—I never read it through
continuously and of set purpose; I have tried it—on winter nights,
and gone to sleep in my chair: I have tried it, under trees in
summer, and have gone to sleep on the turf: I have tried it, in the
first blush of a spring morning, and have gone—to breakfast.
 Yet there are many who enjoy it intensely and continuously: Mr.
Saintsbury says, courageously, that it is the only long poem he
honestly wishes were longer. It is certainly full of idealism; it is full of
sweet fancies; it is rich in dragonly horrors; it is crammed with
exquisite harmonies. But—its tenderer heroines are so shadowy, you
cannot bind them to your heart; nay, you can scarce follow them
with your eyes: Now, you catch a strain which seems to carry a
sweet womanly image of flesh and blood—of heartiness and
warmth. But—at the turning of a page—his wealth of words so
enwraps her in glowing epithets, that she fades on your vision to a
mere iridescence and a creature of Cloud-land.
 “Her face so faire, as flesh it seemèd not,
But Heavenly Portrait of bright angels hew,
Clear as the skye, withouten blame or blot
Thro’ goodly mixture of Complexion’s dew!
And in her cheeks, the Vermeil red did shew,
Like Roses in a bed of Lillies shed,
The which ambrosial odors from them threw,
And gazers sense, with double pleasure fed,
Hable to heal the sick, and to revive the dead!

“In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame

Kindled above at the Heavenly Makers Light,
And darted fiery beams out of the same
So passing persant and so wondrous bright,
That quite bereaved the rash beholders sight.
In them the blinded God—his lustful fire
To kindle—oft assay’d, but had no might,
For with dred Majesty, and awful ire
She broke his wanton darts, and quenchèd base desire!

“Upon her eyelids many Graces sate

Under the shadow of her even brows,
Working Belgardes and amorous Retrate,
And everie one her with a grace endows,
And everie one, with meekness to her bowes;
So glorious mirror of Celestial Grace
And soveraigne moniment of mortal vowes,
How shall frail pen describe her Heavenly face
For feare—thro’ want of skill, her beauty to disgrace?

“So faire, and thousand times more faire

She seem’d—when she, presented was, to sight.
And was y-clad, for heat of scorching aire
All in a silken Camus, lilly white,
Purfled upon, with many a folded plight
Which all above besprinkled was throughout