(If the other Elizabethan dramatists not so much need be said The gradual evolution and as stir, and steady decline of the drama in land has been elsewhere; but a few mem orable II:11111'i, al the world would have marveled longer had Shakespeare' not been. must be chronicled. Dekke•'s real if disorderly genius, Iteywood's simple and touching portraiture of domestic life, are worth a word. The 'tragedy of blood' which, repellent as it is to modern taste, answered the cry of the time for intensity at any cost, was inaugurated by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy; INIarlowe and even Shakespeare touched it in pass ing; and two really fine poets, 'Middleton and Webster, signalized themselves in this style, the latter devoting his magnificent power of expres sion almost exclusively to these horrors. Beau mont and Fletcher can scarcely be named apart, though long and patient study has led modern critics to the conclusion that Beau mont contributed to their partnership the greater depth of thought and constructive power, while his older fellow furnished lyric grace, sentiment, 'and smooth-flowing diction. Massinger, a Puri tan at heart, is at his best when he treats some theme of unworldly idealism. Ford, on the other hand, shows his decadent spirit by his morbid quest of the abnormal in character and situation. Shirley, an imitator in tragedy, is a precursor in the opposite style, writing in the exact manner of the light, graceful trifling of the Restoration comedy.
The greatest prose writer of the early seven teenth century is a man whose services to science, elsewhere dealt with, are even more commanding and universally recognized. Just as Bacon saw the need of an entire reversal of the old scientific methods before modern science had realized the task before it, so he struck out for himself a way of writing English which anticipated the results of another century of thought on the matter. lie had no confidence in the vulgar tongue, and refused to intrust to it his scientific speculations; but when he had occasion to use it, when his Essays began to grow under his hand from mere jottings in his note-book into their rounded and satisfying form, he set to work to shape an in strument that should be adequate to his purpose. Saturated as he was with Latin, and going to that language very much for his vocabulary, he saw that it was impossible to write one language by the rules of another, and developed an English kind of sentence, compact, brief, and manageable, in strong contrast to the long, rambling periods of his contemporaries. But prose was not long in developing into something more than a mere convenient instrument. Two writers who were boys at flacon's death carried it to a pitch of sublimity and impressiveness which, amid varied modern excellences, has scarcely been surpassed. l'neven, to be sure, sometimes almost too rich, Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne at their best will always give delight.
They, far more typical of their age than Bacon, and another man even more typical than they, represent its overshadowing meloneholy and its tendency to imaginative contemplation rather than to abstract thinking. Donne is the best rep resentative in these points, as in the suddenness with which he "passes from moods of earthly passion to moods of religions ecstasy." As often happens, it was not his strength, but his weak ness, that found imitators and created a school; his love of `conceits,' reeondife and too subtle analogies and metaphors, which 'Marini and non gora were at the same time making the fashion on the Continent, affected o number of the young er poets, of whom George Herbert., Crashaw, and
Vaughan 'the Silutist' were the most notable; but in him and in them depth and intensity of feeling atone for much that is merely fantastic. Two alternatives to the inelaneholy which Rich ard Burton was at this time anatomizing with so much quaint learning were taken by different men; the cavalier poets, Lovelace, Carew, and Suckling, escaped it by their graceful absorption in the charms of real or imaginary mistresses; while the pastoral writers, Browne and Wither with whom and Marvell may be classed, though religion meant at times much to both of them, and the latter went with Milton into poli tics), delight in the contemplation of nature and the sweet, unspoiled life of the beautiful Eng lish country, which touched Shakespeare in such diverse ways at the beginning and end of his eareer—in the Midsummer .bight's Dream and in 1-he Tempest. The same spirit breathes in lsaak Walton, and teaches him to write, little as he may have thought it, an undying classic.
The link between the Elizabethan age and that whose eulmination is assigned to the reign of a later queen (Anne) is to be found in the work of Milton. In his sonnets (except for the innova tion of using the form for something else than love poetry), his elegies, and his masques, he is a true Elizabethan; in his thorough appropria tion of the classics, in such technical points as the use of blank verse out of drama, and in many of the articles of his ereed, he anticipates that which is to follow. Born eight years before the death of Shakespeare, and the heir of the great traditions of that glorious company, he is in one aspect, as Matthew Arnold called him, 'the last of the immortals': but still more truly he is a product of the new forces that were stirring in the England of his youth. The change from the mood of the Renaissance to the sober earnestness of Puritanism may be summed up in Green's vivid words: "The daring which had turned Eng land into a people of adventurers, the sense of inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty and joy which created Sidney, and Marlowe, and Drake. were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the craving to order man's life aright before God." The magnificent bursts of elo quence which diversify the long reaches of Para dise Lost, and the exquisite grace and melody of his shorter poems. especially "Lycidas," which Tennyson called "a touchstone of poetic taste," set noble models before his successors. Perhaps the greatest single lesson which he taught was the use of the caesura in the iambic pentameter, which, in its variations according to the de mands of a nice ear, makes all the difference be tween the best of his blank verse and prose chopped up into lengths of ten syllables. lie did less for prose than for poetry; in fact, his prose is more rugged and harder to read than that of the earlier Bacon, and he himself confessed that in it he had the use of his left hand only. But what the accomplished scholar failed to do, a simple Bedfordshire tinker, nourished on the Bible and Foxes Book of Martyrs, accomplished with triumphant ease, Bunyan little thought, as he followed the fortunes of Christian on his pil grimage, that later critics would call his book one of the three great allegories of the world, and discover in it at once a revival of the old French romance and an anticipation of the eighteenth century novel.