humor excite, not laughter, but rather a dismal feeling of pitying contempt. His great gift is displayed in the tragedy of The Broken Heart, and in two or three thrilling scenes of the tragedy of Love's Sacrifice. In The Broken Heart, the noblest of his works, our sympathies are on the whole rightly directed; and the death of Calantha, after enduring the most soulcrushing calamities, concealed from others under a show of mirth, is exquisitely pathetic:

"O my lords,

I but deceived your eyes with antick gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another,
Of death, and death, and death, still I danced forward;
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant.

They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings;
Let me die smiling."

Of another of Ford's tragedies, which can hardly be named here, Campbell justly remarks: "Better that poetry should cease to exist than have to do with such subjects." But it is characteristic of Ford, that his power and tenderness are seldom so great as in their worst perversions. Without any austerity of soul, diseased in his sympathies, a sentimentalist rather than a man of sentiment, he brooded over guilt until all sense of its wickedness was lost in a morbid pity for its afflic

tions, and the tears he compels us to shed are rarely the tears of honest and manly feeling.

Ford died, or disappeared, about the year 1640, and with him died the last original dramatist of the Elizabethan age; for Shirley, though his plays fill six thick volumes, was but a faint echo of Fletcher. Thus, in

a short period of fifty years, from 1590 to 1640, we have the names of thirteen dramatists, varying in power and variety of power and perversion of power, but each individual in his genius, and one the greatest genius of the world, the names of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Webster, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. Though little is known of their lives, it is through them we learn the life of their time, — the manners, customs, character, ideas, habits, sentiments, and passions, the form and the spirit, of the Elizabethan age. And they are all intensely and audaciously human. Taking them in the mass, they have much to offend our artistic and shock our moral sense; but still the dramatic literature of the world would be searched in vain for another instance of so broad and bold a representation of the varieties of human nature,

one in which

the conventional restraints both on depravity and excel

lence are so resolutely set aside,

one in which the

many-charactered soul of man is so vividly depicted, in

its weakness and in its strength, in its mirth and in its passion, in the appetites which sink it below the beasts that perish, in the aspirations which lift it to regions of existence of which the visible heavens are but the veil.

IN

SPENSER.

N the last chapter we closed our remarks on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. In the present we propose to treat of Spenser, with some introductory observations on the miscellaneous poets who preceded him. And it is necessary to bear in mind that, in the age of which we treat, as in all ages, the versifiers far exceeded the seers, and the poetasters the poets. It has been common to exercise a charity towards the early English poets which we refuse to extend to those of later times; but mediocrity has identical characteristics in all periods, and there was no charm in the circumstances of the Elizabethan age to convert a rhymer into a genius. Indeed, leaving out the dramatists, the poetry produced in the reigns of Elizabeth and James can hardly compare in originality, richness, and variety, with the English poetry of the nineteenth century. Spenser is a great name; but he is the only undramatic poet of his time who could be placed above, or on a level with, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, or Tennyson. There is a list, somewhere, of two hundred names of poets who belonged to the Eliza

bethan age, mostly mere nebulous appearances, which it requires a telescope of the greatest power to resolve into individual stars. Few of them can be made to shine with as steady a lustre as the ordinary versemen who contribute to our magazines. Take England's Helicon and the Paradise of Dainty Devices, - two collections of the miscellaneous poetry written during the last forty or fifty years of the sixteenth century, - and, if we except a few pieces by Raleigh, Sidney, Marlowe, Greene, Lodge, Breton, Watson, Nash, and Hunnis, these collections have little to dazzle us into admiration or afflict us with a sense of inferiority. Reading them is a task, in which an occasional elegance of thought, or quaintness of fancy, or sweetness of sentiment does not compensate for the languor induced by tiresome repetitions of moral commonplaces, varied by repetitions, as tiresome, of amatory commonplaces. In the great body of the poetry of the time there is more that is bad than tolerable, more that is tolerable than readable, and more that is readable than excellent.

One person, however, stands out from this mob of versifiers the most noticeable elevation in English poetry from Chaucer to Spenser, namely, Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, and, still later, Earl of Dorset. Born in 1536, and educated at both universities, his poetic genius was but one phase of his general