In selecting material for this ""Portable"" the editor has chosen verse and prose, essays and plays, that reflected the quality and flavor of the times and life. The period in many of its paradoxes, its upheaval in mass thinking, bore parallels to our own, and the material included has a lively quality that makes it refreshing reading. Among the authors represented are familiar names such as Donne, Hakluyt, Raleigh, Digges, Hooker, Ascham, Francis Bacon, Marlowe, Greville, Edmund Spenser, Sidney, Essex, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare. The selections- in no case-are hackneyed.