The origin of the English drama is discussed in the articles DRAMA and MYSTERIES AND MinAcLE PLAYS. It is therefore only necessary here to note that the first English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, was written by Nicholas Udall about 1552-53, and the first English tragedy, Gorboduc, or Ferret and Porrex, by Sackville and Norton a few years later. The era on which we are next to look, the Elizabethan, is the most bril liant in the literary history of England. We may quote here the words of lord Jeffrey: " In point of real force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo X. or of Louis XIV., can come at all into com parison. For in that short period we shall find the names of almost till the great men that this nation has ever produced; the names of Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Sidney: of Raleigh, and Hooker, and Taylor; of Napier, and Milton, and Cud worth, and Hobbes; and many others—men, all of them not merely of great talents and accomplishments, but of vast compass and reach of understanding, and of minds truly creative; not men who perfected art by the delicacy of their taste, or digested knowledge by the justness of their reasonings; but men who made vast and substantial additions to the materials upon which taste and reason must hereafter be employed, and who enlarged to an incredible and unparalleled extent both the stores and the resources of the human faculties." Even the minor dramatists of the time, such as Marlowe and Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson and Drummond, are all nearly the equals of any suc ceeding poets that have appeared. In the latter half of this period a new class of poetic writers started up, who were lyrical rather than dramatic, and whose occasional verses. sometimes descriptive, sometimes amatory, and sometimes religious, are characterized by a bright and delicate fancy, as if morning sunbeams glittered on their pages. These are George Wither, William 3rowne, Francis Quarles, and George Herbert, " the sweet psalmist of the 17th c." (as Emerson calls him). The last forty years of the 17th c. are generally known as the age of the restoration and the revolution. During this period, the literature of the stage wa,s disgraced by its indecency. Charles II. and his court had brought back with them from France a love of polite profligacy, which found its most fitting ekpression in the comedy of intrigue. Four names stand out conspicuous as "sinners above all men in that generation"—Wycherly, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. Yet theology could boast of such names as Baxter, Owen, Calamy, Collier, Leighton, South, Tillotson, and Barrow. This was also the epoch when the great Mil ton, driven into the shades of obscurity by political adversities, fulfilled the uttered hope of his youth, and wrote " something which posterity will not willingly let die." About this time, too, Walton angled, and Butler burlesqued dissent; Marvell turned his keen irony against the high church; Locke and Newton speculated and discovered; and John Dryden, the literary chief of the time, "found the English language," according to Dr. Johnson, "of brick, and left it of marble." The literary history of the 18th c.. and of the reign of queen Anne, has been vari ously estimated. "If it was overvalued," says praf. Spalding, "by those who lived in it, and in the age that succeeded, it has assuredly been undervalued in our own day. It was long glorified as the Augustan age of English literature; but among ourselves it has been set aside as a skeptical, utilitarian a,c,re; when poetry could find no higher field than didactic discussion, and prose found nothing to amuse but comic and domestic narrative, or bitter and stinging satire. The truth, as usual, lies in the middle. This age was far from being superior to every era that had gone before it, and it was not quite so low as some of its hostile critics have represented: One thing, however, is beyond dispute, viz., that the form, both in poetry and in prose, had come to be much
more regarded than the matter. Addison, Swift, and Johnson may be taken as types of the prose writers of this century. The first, for ease and grace, is unmatched in. any age; the second stands equally high for rough and pointed vigor; and the third is famous for his ponderous, finely balanced sentences, the dignity of which not unfre quently surpassed the sense. Defoe created no school, but the author of Robinson Crusoe will live for ever. The poetry of the time is represented by Pope, and it has been gravely asked whether he was a_ poet at all. He certainly versified with brilliant elegance, and the terror which his polished epigrams excited in the breasts of his enemies, showed him to possess a force of genius which at least demands our admira tion. Young and Akenside were perhaps animated by a higher poetic sense, but they accomplished much less; and the same may also be said of Thomson, Gray, Collins, Beattie, and Cowper. Incomparably the greatest poet, however, of the 18th c. was Robert Burns, though he wrote in a dialect of English that has since become a patois, and even then, though used by a nation, was not the recognized standard of literary expression. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie are its novelists; Htime, Robertson, and Gibbon, its historians; Butler, Berkeley, Clarke, Shaftesbury, Hume, Paley, and Adam Smith its philosophers.
The 19th c., though full of interest for us, is, from the novelty and the variety of the intellectual character employed in it, one of the most difficult to analyze of the whole range of English literature. It has been a time of extraordinary activity; books have been multiplied to an unprecedented degree, and readers have increased in an equal proportion. It cannot be doubted, however, that the first quarter of this century is greater in pure literature than any subsequent portion of it. It is greater, besides, in poetry than in prose. The early names of Coleridge and Wordsworth, of Scott and Byron, of Shelley and Keats, of Campbell and Southey, are higher than any now promi nent except that of Tennyson and perhaps Browning. The 19th c. is the age of novels and romances, of reviews and periodicals. Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, Hazlitt and John Foster, De Quincey and Carlyle, are the great names in review-literature; Hall, Chalmers, Irving, and Liddon in pulpit oratory; Stewart, Mackintosh, Bentham, Brown, Hamilton, Ferrier, Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Bain in philosophy; Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Miss Bronte, and Miss Evans, as novelists; Hallam, Macaulay, Thirl wall, Grote, Milman, Carlyle, Fronde, and Freeman, as historians; Ruskin, as a writer on art; Tennyson, the Brownings, Matthew and Edwin Arnold, Dobell, Smith, and Swinburne, as poets; and in the new world beyond the Atlantic, Washington Irving, Poe, Longfellow, Bryant, Cooper, Prescott, Emerson, Bancroft, Holmes, Hawthorne, and Bret I:Tarte, with many more, rise before the mind when one tries to seize upon the great living authors of this age or those recently dead. A considerable portion of the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries is devoted to science, which can show a crowd of illustrious names too numerous to mention. Besides, in scientific works, the matter is of so much greater importance, and so much more attended to than the form, that it is not customary to include scientific writers in a survey of literature proper, though Tyndall and Huxley might well he named in any catalogue of English authors who write English with beauty and force.—See Chambers' Cyclopedia of English Literature; Taine's English Literature, translated by Van Laun.