her from the Knight without Pity.  Fawns, satyrs, and nymphs brought their greetings, while an Echo replied to the addresses of welcome.  Amusements of every variety occupied the succeeding days.  Hunting, bear baiting, fireworks, tilting, Morris dances, a rustic marriage, a fight between Danes and English, curious aquatic sports,—­all succeeded each other, interspersed with brilliant feasts.  Poems founded on the legends of Arthur, or drawn from the inexhaustible sources of mythology, were recited in the pauses of festivity, or sung beneath the windows of the queen.  The same readiness of invention and luxuriance of fancy characterized all the celebrations of the time.  The love of the dramatic which applauded Pyramus and Thisbe in the rural districts, made actors of the courtiers.  When the French commissioners came to negotiate the marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou, they were entertained with a triumph, in which the Earl of Arundel, Lord Windsor, Master Philip Sidney, and Master Fulk Grevil, impersonating the four “foster children of Desire,” carried by force of arms the “Fortress of Beauty,” which represented Elizabeth herself.

The age of Elizabeth, although it had worked itself free from the intellectual sloth of the Middle Ages, although it was familiarizing itself with an almost unknown world abroad, and creating a new world at home, yet had inherited with little qualification the violence, the cruelty, and the unbridled passions of the centuries which had gone before.  All this variety of life was expressed in the drama, which, as a reflection of contemporary thought and manners, was to Elizabeth’s time what the novel is to our own.  Before the end of this reign there were eighteen theatres in London, all crowded with audiences which embraced every class of the people,—­from the noble and court gallant who played cards on the stage, to the workmen and apprentices who fought and bandied coarse jests in the pit.  The names of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Johnson, are sufficient to remind us of the grandeur to which the Elizabethan drama attained, under the influence of prosperity at home, victory abroad, and the quickening of the national intelligence which followed the revival of learning.  But while the stage reflected all that was most noble, it reflected also all that was most base in human nature.  Ecclesiastical discipline had been laid aside, and the unrestrained passions of men, which in actual life found vent in violence and debauchery, were gratified by the dramatic representation of the worst crimes and most vitiated tastes.  The Puritans brought about reformation and self-restraint, by enforcing a new code of morals all the more rigid from the looseness which on every side they found to combat.  In closing the theatres, they were actuated, in Mr. Green’s words, by the hatred “of God-fearing men against the foulest depravity presented in a poetic and attractive form."[56]