Acme library of standard biography Author:Daniel Defoe 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: , SPENSER. CHAPTER I. Spenser's Early Life. [1552-1579.] Spenser marks a beginning in English literature. He .was the first Englishman who, in tha... more »t great divisiom-Of our' history which dates from the Reformation, attempted and achieved a poetical work of the highest order. Born about the same time as Hooker (1552-1554), in the middle of that eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as Hooker was the earliest of the great modern writers in prose. In that reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise, had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and then by the religious troubles of -the Reformation, these two were the writers who first realized-to Englishmen the ideas of a high literary perfection. These ideas vaguely filled many minds; but no one had yet shown the genius and the strength to grasp and exhibit them in a way to challenge comparison with what had be'en accomplished by the poetry and prose of Greece, Rome, and Italy. There had been poets in England since Chaucer, and prose-writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible. Surrey and Wyatt had deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness, have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition, of the offices of the English Prayer-Book, showed that they understood the power of the English language over many of the subtleties and difficulties of thought, and were alive to the music of its cadences. Some of these works, consecrated by the highest of all poss...« less