inhabitants of the strange new world, a world not yet familiar with commercial depression and the stock exchange, were thus touchingly described in English verse?
"Guiltless men who danced away their time,
Fresh as their groves, and happy as their clime."
And what gayer irresponsibility could be found even in the fields of Arcadia?
"In Elizabeth's day," says M. Jusserand, "adventurous narratives were loved for adventure's sake. Probability was only a secondary consideration." Geographical knowledge being in its innocent infancy, people were curious about foreign countries, and decently grateful for information, true or false. When a wandering knight of romance "sailed to Bohemia," nobody saw any reason why he should not, and readers were merely anxious to know what happened to him when he got there. So great, indeed, was the demand for fiction in the reign of the virgin queen that writers actually succeeded in supporting themselves by this species of composition, a test equally applicable to-day; and it is worth while to remember that the prose tales of Nash, Green, and Sidney were translated into French more than a century
