It
is instructive to follow the lives of Elizabethans as different as Sir
Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith,
and John Winthrop, and to note the varied experiences of each. Yankee
ingenuity had an Elizabethan ancestry. The hard conditions of the New World
merely gave an opportunity to exercise to the utmost an ingenuity which the
colonists brought with them.
In the third place, the Elizabethans were unusually democratic; that is,
the different classes mingled together in a marked degree, more than in
modern England, more even than in the United States to-day. This
intermingling was due in part to increased travel, to the desire born of
the New Learning to live as varied and as complete a life as possible, and
to the absence of overspecialization among individuals. This chance for
varied experience with all sorts and conditions of men enabled Shakespeare
to speak to all humanity. All England was represented in his plays. When
the Rev. Thomas Hooker, born in the last half of Elizabeth's reign, was
made pastor at Hartford, Connecticut, he suggested to his flock a
democratic form of government much like that under which we now live.
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