467769 4723 GREAT ENGLISHMEN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY BY SIDNEY LEE LITT.D., EDITOR OF THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY A BIOGRAPHY' LONDON LIMITED PREFACE THE contents of this volume are based on a series of eight lectures which I delivered, by invitation of the Trustee, at the Lowell Institute, Boston, in the spring of last year. I paid a first visit to America for the purpose of fulfilling that engagement. My reception was in all ways of the pleasantest, and I feel especially grateful to my Boston audience for the considerate attention which they extended to me. In preparing the lectures for the press I have adhered to the main lines which I followed in their delivery. But I have judged it necessary to make sweeping alterations in form and detail. I have introduced much information which was scarcely fitted for oral treatment. I have endeavoured to present more coherently and more exhaustively the leading achievements of the Renaissance in England than was possible in the time at the disposal of a lecturer. I have tried, however, to keep in view the requirements of those to whom the lectures were originally addressed. Though I have embodied in my revision the fruits of some original research, I have not overloaded my pages with recondite references. My chief aim has been to interest the cultivated reader of general intelligence rather than the expert. The opening lecture of my course at Boston surveyed in general terms the uses to the public (alike in England and America) of the Dictionary of National Biography. Of that lecture I have only printed a small section in this volume. I have substituted for it, by way of introduction, a sketch of the intellectual spirit which was peculiar to the sixteenth century. This preparatory essay, which is practically new, gives, I trust, increased unity to the general handling of my theme. The six men of whom I treat are all obviously, in their several ways, representative of the highest culture of sixteenth-century England. But they by no means exhaust the subject. Many other great Englishmen of the sixteenth century-statesmen like Wolsey and Burghley, theologians like Colet and Hooker, dramatists like Marlowe and Ben Jonson, men of science like William Gilbert, the electrician, and Napier of Merchiston, the inventor of logarithms-deserve association with them in any complete survey of sixteenth-century culture. In choosing five of the six names, I was moved by the fact that I had already studied, with some minuteness, their careers and work in my capacity of contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography. I wrote there the lives of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney and Shakespeare, and I collaborated with others in the biographies of Sir Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser. I have not written at any length on Bacon before; but it is obvious that not the briefest list of great Englishmen of the sixteenth century would be worthy of attention were he excluded from it. I hope that, by presenting Bacon in juxtaposition with Shakespeare, I may do something to dispel the hallucination |