human feeling. Ponderous Chapman, smouldering into flame by flashes. Heywood, the master of homely English life, the gentlest of all poets who have swept the chords of passion. Marston, that biting satirist and tense sententious builder of blank verse. As we advance, the crowd thickens ; and a third stage in the evolution of the Drama discloses for us writers who have learned from all their predecessors. Here we meet with Beaumont and Fletcher, inventors of heroical romance, gifted with inexhaustible resources in the rhetoric of tragical and comical situations, abounding in exquisite lyrical outpourings of unpremeditated song. Webster rises to Shakespeare's shoulder by his sincerity, nobility, and unerring truth to life in its most thrilling moments. Tourneur, infected by some rankling plague-spot of the soul, approaches him in sombre force; while Ford, behind them, delves with style of steel on plates of bronze his monumental scenes of spiritual anguish. Massinger, equable student of all literary manners, brings these to a focus in his work of lucid but less pungent craftsmanship. Middleton plays with searching lambent light of talent over the broad dramatic field. Cartwright, Brome, Randolph, Marmion proclaim themselves followers of Jonson in a special kind of comedy. Day invents his own delicate domain of allegorical fancy. Shirley, with more of genial inspiration and a richer vein, follows the same track as Massinger. Sturdy journeymen, like the Rowleys, can be counted almost by the score. And thus we are led onward to a fourth stage-this time, one of decadence-in which the Crownes and Davenants and Wilsons warn us by their incoherent and exaggerated workmanship, illuminated with occasional sparkles of genuine talent, that every growth of art has its declining no less than its ascending and flourishing periods. Lastly, when we remember that these mutations were accomplished in some fifty years, that every chord in human nature had been touched, that all the resources of our language had been tried, and that the English heroic metre of blank verse had been adapted to the expression of a myriad varying thoughts and feelings, we shall pause astonished by the prodigality of mental vigour in that fruitful epoch. The object of the series to which this inadequate essay forms an introduction, will have been accomplished, if the English of the Victorian age be induced to study the best pieces of Shakespeare's fellow-workers, and to comprehend how full and how superb a picture they present of the large and noble life of our Elizabethan ancestors. Only in this way can the reading public understand the truth of what I have attempted to establish, namely, that the Drama is the chief artistic utterance of the Renaissance in England, and that in England the Renaissance was permeated with the free pure honest stalwart spirit of the Reformation. Only in this way too will they be able to appreciate the panegyric written of our drama by one of England's greatest rhetoricians, whose words shall form an apt conclusion to this essay. It is De Quincey who says: "No literature, not excepting even that of Athens, has ever presented such a multiform theatre, such a carnival display, mask and antimask, of impassioned life-breathing, moving, acting, suffering, laughing: Quicquid agunt homines : votum, timor, ira, voluptas, all this, but far more truly and more adequately than was or could be effected in that field of composition which the gloomy satirist contemplated-whatsoever in fact our medieval ancestors exhibited in the Dance of Death,' drunk with tears and laughter, may here be reviewed, scenically draped, and gorgeously coloured. What other national Drama can pretend to any competition with this?" JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. ARLY in the sixteenth century Erasmus, accompanied by Colet, visited Canterbury. Long afterwards he remembered the cathedral and its vast towers that rise into the sky "so as to strike awe even at a distant approach," the sweet music of the bells heard from afar, the spacious majesty" of the newly completed nave. Here, fifty years later, was born Christopher, sometime called Kit, Marlowe.1 Meanwhile the spirit of Erasmus, and still more the ruder spirit of Colet, had heralded a revolutionary influx of new life. At the head of the movement was set by Providence, in a mood of Rabelaisian gaiety, the figure of Henry VIII. Like another Tamburlaine, Henry VIII. had carried off the rich treasures of Canterbury, the gold and the 1 Thomas Heywood wrote in 1635 : "Marlo, renowned for his rare art and wit, |