A man does not possess English literature if he knows what Dekker tells of the seven deadly sins of London and does not know the _Fairy Queen_.

Though the wide and curious interest of the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and illumined the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of approach is the method of their predecessors--to keep hold on common sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong end of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening time, to know the best--the "classic"-- and study it before the minor things.
In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first time, with cheapened printing, the common vehicle of amusement and information, and the books that remain to us cover many departments of writing.

There are the historians who set down for us for the first time what they knew of the earlier history of England.

There are the writers, like Harrison and Stubbs, who described the England of their own day, and there are many authors, mainly anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of the discoverers in the Western Seas.

There are the novelists who translated stories mainly from Italian sources.