which was almost the only popular writing at the time, every author was in a greater or less degree attached to the court.  If they were not enjoying its favours they were pleading for them, mingling high and fantastic compliment with bitter reproaches and a tale of misery.  And consequently both the poetry and the prose of the time are restricted in their scope and temper to the artificial and romantic, to high-flown eloquence, to the celebration of love and devotion, or to the inculcation of those courtly virtues and accomplishments which composed the perfect pattern of a gentleman.  Not that there was not both poetry and prose written outside this charmed circle.  The pamphleteers and chroniclers, Dekker and Nash, Holinshed and Harrison and Stow, were setting down their histories and descriptions, and penning those detailed and realistic indictments of the follies and extravagances of fashion, which together with the comedies have enabled us to picture accurately the England and especially the London of Elizabeth’s reign.  There was fine poetry written by Marlowe and Chapman as well as by Sidney and Spenser, but the court was still the main centre of literary endeavour, and the main incitement to literary fame and success.

But whether an author was a courtier or a Londoner living by his wits, writing was never the main business of his life:  all the writers of the time were in one way or another men of action and affairs.  As late as Milton it is probably true to say that writing was in the case even of the greatest an avocation, something indulged in at leisure outside a man’s main business.  All the Elizabethan authors had crowded and various careers.  Of Sir Philip Sidney his earliest biographer says, “The truth is his end was not writing, even while he wrote, but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in words or opinion but in life and action good and great.”  Ben Jonson was in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the first poet laureate.  Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, and he wrote his novel Rosalind, on which Shakespeare based As You Like It while he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Spanish Main.  This connection between life and action affected as we have seen the tone and quality of Elizabethan writing.  “All the distinguished writers of the period,” says Thoreau, “possess a greater vigour and naturalness than the more modern ... you have constantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read.  The little that is said is eked out by implication of the much that was done.”  In another passage the same writer explains the strength and fineness of the writings of Sir Walter Raleigh by this very test of action, “The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done.  Nay almost it must have taken the place