'Doubtless,' I said.

'But do you mean to say that Scotland has any nearer claim upon Shakespeare than we have?
I do not now allude to the fact that in the large sense he is the common property of the English-speaking world' (Salemina told me to say that), 'but Shakespeare died in 1616, and the union of Scotland with England didn't come about till 1707, nearly a century afterwards.

You really haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't leave England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four years.
We took very good care not to come away too soon.

Chaucer and Spenser were dead too, and we had nothing to stay for!'" I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of merriment at Francesca's absurdities.
"I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light before," she went on gaily, encouraged by my laughter, "but he braced himself for the conflict, and said 'I wonder that you didn't stay a little longer while you were about it.

Milton and Ben Jonson were still alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in thirty or forty years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Paradise Lost; Newton's Principia, too, in 1687.