We do not need to apply the key of times to those indirectly historical remains in which the real history, the life and soul of a time, is always best found, and in which the history of such a time, if written at all, must necessarily be inclosed; we do not need to unlock these works to perceive the indications of suppressed movements in that age, in which the most illustrious men of the age were primarily concerned, the history of which has not yet fully transpired. We do not need to find the key to the cipher in which the history of that time is written, to perceive that there was to have been a change in the government here at one time, very different from the one which afterwards occurred, if the original plans of these men had succeeded. It is not the Plays only that are full of that frustrated enterprise.
These were the kind of men who are not easily baffled. They changed their tactics, but not their ends; and the enterprises which were conducted with so much secresy under the surveillance of the Tudor, began already to crown themselves as certainties, and compare their 'olives of endless age' with the spent tombs of brass' and 'tyrant's crests,' at that sure prospect which, a change of dynasties at that moment seemed to open,--at least, to men who were in a position then to estimate its consequences.
That _this_, at all events, was a state of things that was not going to endure, became palpable about that time to the philosophic mind. The transition from the rule of a sovereign who was mistress of 'the situation,' who understood that it was a popular power which she was wielding--the transition from the rule of a Queen instructed in the policy of a tyranny, inducted by nature into its arts, to the policy of that monarch who had succeeded to her throne, and whose 'CREST' began to be reared here then in the face of the insulted reviving English nationality,--this transition appeared upon the whole, upon calmer reflection, at least to the more patient minds of that age, all that could reasonably at that time be asked for. No better instrument for stimulating and strengthening the growing popular sentiment, and rousing the latent spirit of the nation, could have been desired by the Elizabethan politicians at that crisis, 'for the great labour was with the people'--that uninstructed power, which makes the sure basis of tyrannies--that power which Mark Antony takes with him so easily--the ignorant, tyrannical, humour-led masses--the masses that still roar their Elizabethan stupidities from the immortal groups of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. We ourselves have not yet overtaken the chief minds of this age; and the gulf that separated them from those overpowering numbers in their own time, to whose edicts they were compelled to pay an external submission, was broad indeed. The difficulty of establishing an understanding with this power was the difficulty. They wanted that 'pulpit' from which Brutus and Mark Antony swayed it by turns so easily--that pulpit from which Mark Antony showed it Caesar's mantle. They wanted some organ of communication with these so potent and resistless rulers--some 'chair' from which they could repeat to them in their own tongue the story of their lost institutions, and revive in them the memory of '_the kings_ their ancestors'--some school in which they could collect them and instruct them in the scientific doctrine of the _commons_, the doctrine of the common-_weal_ and its divine supremacy. They wanted a school in which they could tell them stories--stories of various kinds--such stories as they loved best to hear--Midsummer stories, or Winter's tales, and stories of their own battle-fields--they wanted a school in which they could teach the common people _History_ (and not English history only), with illustrations, large as life, and a magic lantern to aid them,--'visible history.'