The average person invests the Elizabethan Age with the glamour of romance. One thinks of the Drakes and the Raleighs and the Shakespeares, of the "Mermaid Tavern" and all the picturesqueness of half-timbered, gabled houses of black and white, with winding, leafy lanes, a countryside smiling with flowers, with maypoles on the village greens where simple, honest-to-goodness swains lived idyllic lives with their blushing sweethearts. We fondly imagine that this was the "Merrie England" which flung back the might of the Spanish Armada with the unhurried quickness of the Elizabethan sea-dogs who nonchalantly played bowls at Plymouth Hoe almost within sight of the enemy.