[276] Then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere,
there must have been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so
called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and
everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations
([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing
capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277]
England had long been growing more truly insular in language and
political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national
consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe.
Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly
hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud or
not as the case might be, but there was no England as a separate entity
from the sovereign who embodied it for the time being.[278] But now an
English people began to be dimly aware of itself. Their having got a
religion to themselves must have intensified them much as the having a
god of their own did the Jews. The exhilaration of relief after the long
tension of anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the
hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a provincial
deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring into flower all that
there was of imaginative or sentimental in the English nature, already
just in the first flush of its spring.
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