CHAPTER V.
SPENSER AND HIS FRIENDS.
We have now arrived at the period of English history in every way fullest of marvel--the period of Elizabeth.

As in a northern summer the whole region bursts into blossom at once, so with the thought and feeling of England in this glorious era.
The special development of the national mind with which we are now concerned, however, did not by any means arrive at its largest and clearest result until the following century.

Still its progress is sufficiently remarkable.

For, while everything that bore upon the mental development of the nation must bear upon its poetry, the fresh vigour given by the doctrines of the Reformation to the sense of personal responsibility, and of immediate relation to God, with the grand influences, both literary and spiritual, of the translated, printed, and studied Bible, operated more immediately upon its devotional utterance.
Towards the close of the sixteenth century, we begin to find such verse as I shall now present to my readers.

Only I must first make a few remarks upon the great poem of the period: I mean, of course, _The Faerie Queen_.
I dare not begin to set forth after any fashion the profound religious truth contained in this poem; for it would require a volume larger than this to set forth even that of the first book adequately.