THE SPIRIT of Dante came into England with Chaucer in the fourteenth century; and through the writers inspired by Chaucer’s spirit, Italian poetry became a great civilizing force, making the ways straight for Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age. But that age, the most remarkable phenomenon in modern literary history, would not have been possible as a result of Latin inspiration alone. As Chaucer was inspired by Dante, as Dante was taught by Virgil, so Virgil was made possible by Homer; and before England could be prepared to do its great work in leading the Gothic nations of northern Europe, it was necessary that it should have the direct inspiration of the first great prophet of European civilization,—of Homer himself. Sir Thomas Elyot, born ninety years after the death of Chaucer, seems to be the first notable English writer whom the greatness of Homer’s mind had inspired with a due reverence for the supernatural forces which have worked such miraculous results through the deathless music of his verse. “I could rehearse divers other poets which for matter and eloquence be very necessary,” writes Elyot; “but I fear me to be too long from noble Homer, from whom as from a fountain proceeded all eloquence and learning. For in his books be contained, and most perfectly expressed, not only the documents martial and discipline of arms, but also incomparable wisdoms, and instructions for politic governance of people: with the worthy commendation and laud of noble princes: wherewith the readers shall be so all inflamed, that they most fervently shall desire and covet, by the imitation of their virtues, to acquire semblable glory.”

  Constantinople fell in 1453, and learned Greeks, the last custodians of the Homeric traditions, had scattered over Europe as far north as England. It was as a result of their teaching that Elyot could write this simple and noble tribute to the simple and noble idealism which made Homer at once the greatest musician, the greatest poet, the greatest prophet of Europe. When Homer came thus to a people who already had Dante, Virgil, and Chaucer, they acquired the one thing they still needed to make the Shakespearean cycle possible,—the constructive intellect which can so compel the sententiousness natural to the Gothic peoples, that the idea of unity incident to a definite and fully determined purpose will govern throughout every work that is attempted. This the Greeks had as no other people ever did. The sublimity of Hebrew poetry is greater than that of Homer or Æschylus, but no Hebrew poem is unified by such a purpose resulting from predetermined poetic conception as runs through the “Odyssey,” as it does through the plan of the Parthenon.

  When in England we find not only Shakespeare, but a hundred poets, named and nameless, of whose abilities his are the sum, producing works of the highest lyrical value; when we compare such works with the “Ormulum” and the “Vision of Piers Plowman,” they seem a miraculous result, beyond the power of any evolution possible for the race intellect. But a dozen lines of Elyot’s tribute to Homer make it clear that long-separated peoples of a common stock are at last reunited by the intellectual and spiritual power of their poets. Modern England was promised when Chaucer learned Italian and when Elyot learned Greek, all after times were given assurance that the promise must necessarily be fulfilled.

  Elyot, who was one of the most accomplished scholars of the reign of Henry VIII. is claimed by both Oxford and Cambridge. He wrote a Latin Dictionary, a “Defense of Good Women,” “The Knowledge which Maketh a Wise Man,” and other essays and treatises, including “The Boke Named the Governour,” an essay on education, for which he is best remembered. He died in 1546 and was buried at Carleton in Cambridgeshire.