In Spain, then, the Renaissance met something on which it could secure no hold, something in a sense barbarous, not quite European, and recalcitrant to all classic influences. In England it met a strong national genius, but not one which was entirely alien. Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe showed the influence of the Renaissance, not as mere imitators of forms, but as Englishmen, and yet fully. In Shakespeare it was included with much more. Its love of beauty and its sense of form were never better expressed than in the lyrics. The difference between the two nations is profound. The Spaniard either copied the mere form, or produced what one feels would have come as a natural growth from the Middle Ages, the _Libro de Caballerías_, the _Novela de Pícaros_, the _Auto Sacramental_, and even the _comedia_, in which no trace of the classic influence is to be seen. A drama which is in no sense classic might have developed from the morality and the farce. As much might be said of the form of the English drama. Seneca might have been forgotten, and Tansillo might never have written (without Seneca he never would have written as he did), as far as the construction of the English play is concerned. But then much of the Renaissance spirit did pass into Elizabethan literature. We could not deduct what it shared with Italy without fatal loss. The genius of Spenser could perhaps have dispensed with a teacher, but as a matter of fact it did not. With no model save Chaucer he would yet have been one of the greatest of poets. He would not have been exactly the poet he was without Ariosto, Tasso, and Du Bellay. Shakespeare had, of all sons of Adam, the least need to borrow, and yet without the influence of the Renaissance we should not have the _Sonnets_, _Venus and Adonis_, _The Rape of Lucrece_, or many passages in the plays. The English genius, in fact, accepted and absorbed the Renaissance without losing its native independence. All the manifestations of its freedom were not equally admirable. The wild incoherence of the early dramatists is not good in itself. When we see it at its worst, we are half tempted to wish that Greene and Marlowe had been more subservient. Yet it was good in so far as it was a striving after an ideal both national and good. It was the necessary preparation for Shakespeare and the great things of the Elizabethan drama. If the time was less mighty in prose than in verse, yet the germs of all that was to come were in Hooker. He had the secret of lucid arrangement, the art of dealing with the greatest questions in his own tongue, and in a form at once unaffected, instantly intelligible to the average thoughtful man, and yet eloquent where the occasion required him to rise above the usual level of speech.