place of the
mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau. And in the forms
which they failed to bring to perfection they did beautiful and noble
work. The splendour of _The Fairy Queen_ is in separate passages; as a
whole it is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness,
the mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of
great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather than a
great work. The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of
the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic which was in all
their minds had to wait for embodiment till _Paradise Lost_. In a way
their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They
used it well but not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus;
they had not quite mastered the convention on which it is built.

The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of its
artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to do. It
could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English sonnet, so it
hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in the Italian form of
Milton, the century can show us nothing in this mode of verse. The
literary drama was brought to perfection in the early years of it by the
surviving Elizabethans; later decades could add nothing to it but
licence, and as we saw, the licences they added hastened its
destruction. But in other forms the poets of the new time experimented
eagerly, and in the stress of experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth
had been integral and coherent split into different schools. As the
period of the Renaissance was also that of the Reformation it was only
natural a determined effort should sooner or later be made to use poetry
for religious purposes. The earliest English hymn writing, our first
devotional verse in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a Catholic
and religious school of lyricism grew and flourished beside the pagan
neo-classical writers. From the tumult of experiment three schools
disengage themselves, the school of Spenser, the school of Jonson, and
the school of Donne.

At the outset of the century Spenser's influence was triumphant and
predominant; his was the main stream with which the other poetic
influences of the time merely mingled. His popularity is referable to
qualities other than those which belonged peculiarly to his talent as a
poet. Puritans loved his religious ardour, and in those Purit