beauty. When Donne speculates as to the finding on the body of his dead lover

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone

when he tells us how

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the god of love was born;

the effect is that of summer lightning on a dark night suddenly exposing unsuspected realms of fantastic and poetical suggestion. But at its worst the school was certainly bad enough, and its badnesses had already been exhibited by Dryden with considerable felicity in his poem on Lord Hastings and the small-pox. I really do not know that in all Johnson's carefully picked specimens in his Life of Cowley, a happier absurdity is to be found

than

Each little pimple had a tear in it,

To wail the fault its rising did commit.

Of such a school as this, though it lent itself more directly than is generally thought to the unequalled oddities of Butler, little good in the way of serious poetry could come. On the other hand, the great romantic school was practically over, and Milton, its last survivor, was, as has been said, in a state of poetical eclipse. There was therefore growing up a kind of school of good sense in poetry, of which Waller, Denham, Cowley, and Davenant were the chiefs. Waller derives most of his fame from his lyrics, inferior as these are to those of Herrick and Carew. Cowley was a metaphysician with a strong hankering after something different. Denham, having achieved one admirable piece of versification, had devoted himself chiefly to

doggrel; but Davenant, though perhaps not so good a poet as any of the three, was a more living influence. His early works, especially his dirge on Shakespeare and his exquisite lines to the Queen, are of the best stamp of the older school. His Gondibert, little as it is now read, and unsuccessful as the quatrain in which it is written must always be for a very long work, is better than any long narrative poem, for many a year before and after. Both his poetical and his dramatic activity (of which more anon) were incessant, and were almost always exerted in the direction of innovation. But the real importance of these four writers was the help they gave to the development of the heroic couplet, the predestined common form of poetry of the more important kind for a century and a half to come. The heroic couplet was, of course, no novelty in English; but it had hitherto been only fitfully patronized for poems of length, and had not been adapted for general use. The whole structure of the decasyllabic line before the middle of the seventeenth century, was ill calculated for the perfecting of the couplet. Accustomed either to the stately plainness of blank verse, or to the elaborate intricacies of the stanza, writers had got into the habit of communicating to their verse a slow and somewhat languid movement. The satiric poems in which the couplet had been most used were, either by accident or design, couched in the roughest possible verse, so rough that in the hands of Marston and Donne it almost ceased to be capable of scansion. In general, the couplet had two drawbacks. Either it was turned by means of enjambements into something very like rhythmic prose, with rhymes straying about at apparently indefinite intervals, or it was broken up into a staccato motion by the neglect to support and carry on the rhythm at the termination of the distichs. All the

C

four poets mentioned, especially the three first, did much to fit the couplet for miscellaneous work. All of them together, it is hardly needful to say, did not do so much as the young Cambridge man who, while doing bookseller's work for Herringman the publisher, hanging about the coffee-houses, and planning plays with Davenant and Sir Robert Howard, was waiting for opportunity and impulse to help him to make his way.

But

The drama was in an even more critical state than poetry pure and simple, and here Davenant was the important person. All the giant race except Shirley were dead, and Shirley had substituted a kind of tragédie bourgeoise for the work of his masters. Other practitioners chiefly favoured the example of one of the least imitable of those masters, and out-forded Ford in horrors of all kinds, while the comedians clung still more tightly to the humour-comedy of Jonson. Davenant himself had made abundant experiments-experiments, let it be added, sometimes of no small merit-in both these styles. the occupations of tragedy and comedy were gone, and the question was how to find a new one for them. Davenant succeeded in procuring permission from the Protector, who like most Englishmen of the time was fond of music, to give what would now be called entertainments; and the entertainments soon developed into something like regular stage plays. But Shakespeare's godson, with his keen manager's appreciation of the taste of the public, and his travelled experience, did not content himself with deviating cautiously into the old paths. He it was who, in the Siege of Rhodes, introduced at once into England the opera, and a less long-lived but, in a literary point of view, more important variety, the heroic play, the latter of which always retained some tinge of the former. There

are not many subjects on which, to put it plainly, more rubbish has been talked than the origin of the heroic play. Very few Englishmen have ever cared to examine accurately the connexion between this singular growth and the classical tragedy already flourishing in France; still fewer have ever cared to investigate the origins of that classical tragedy itself. The blundering attribution. of Dryden and his rivals to Corneille and Racine, the more blundering attribution of Corneille and Racine to the Scudéry romance (as if somebody should father Shelley on Monk Lewis) has been generally accepted without much hesitation, though Dryden himself has pointed out that there is but little connexion between the French and the English drama; and though the history of the French drama itself is perfectly intelligible, and by no means difficult to trace. The French classical drama is the direct descendant of the drama of Seneca, first imitated by Jodelle and Garnier in the days of the Pléiade; nor did it ever quit that model, though in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century something was borrowed from Spanish sources. The English heroic drama, on the other hand, which Davenant invented, which Sir Robert Howard and Lord Orrery made fashionable, and for which Dryden achieved a popularity of nearly twenty years, was one of the most cosmopolitan-I had almost said the most mongrel-of literary productions. It adopted the English freedom of action, multiplicity of character, and licence of stirring scenes acted coram populo. It borrowed lyrical admixture from Italy, exaggerated and bombastic language came to it from Spain, and to France. it owed little more than its rhymed dialogue, and perhaps something of its sighs and flames. The disadvantages of rhyme in dramatic writing seem to modern Englishmen

so great, that they sometimes find it difficult to understand how any rational being could exchange the blank verse of Shakespeare for the rhymes of Dryden, much more for the rhymes of his contemporaries and predecessors. But this omits the important consideration that it was not the blank verse of Shakespeare or of Fletcher that was thus exchanged. In the three-quarters of a century, or thereabouts, which elapsed between the beginning of the great dramatic era and the Restoration, the chief vehicle of the drama had degenerated full as much as the drama itself; and the blank verse of the plays subsequent to Ford is of anything but Shakespearian quality—is indeed in many cases such as is hardly to be recognized for verse at all. Between this awkward and inharmonious stuff and the comparatively polished and elegant couplets of the innovators there could be little comparison, especially when Dryden had taken up the couplet himself.

Lastly, in prose the time was pretty obviously calling for a reform. There were great masters of English prose living when Dryden joined the literary world of London, but there was no generally accepted style for the journeywork of literature. Milton and Taylor could arrange the most elaborate symphonies; Hobbes could write with a crabbed clearness as lucid almost as the flowing sweetness of Berkeley; but these were exceptions. The endless sentences out of which Clarendon is wont just to save himself, when his readers are wondering whether breath and brain will last out their involution; the hopeless coils of parenthesis and afterthought in which Cromwell's speech lay involved, till Mr. Carlyle was sent on a special mission to disentangle them, show the dangers and difficulties of the ordinary prose style of the day. It was terribly cumbered about quotations, which it introduced with