his poem to England.
He returned to Ireland to commemorate his marriage in Sonnets and the
most beautiful of bridal songs, and to complete the "Faerie Queen"
amongst love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbours. But
these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1599 Ireland broke into
revolt, and the poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England,
and to die broken-hearted in an inn at Westminster.

[Sidenote: The Drama.]

If the "Faerie Queen" expressed the higher elements of the Elizabethan
age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its higher alike, was
expressed in the English drama. We have already pointed out the
circumstances which throughout Europe were giving a poetic impulse to
the newly-aroused intelligence of men, and this impulse everywhere took
a dramatic shape. The artificial French tragedy which began about this
time with Garnier was not indeed destined to exert any influence over
English poetry till a later age; but the influence of the Italian
comedy, which had begun half a century earlier with Machiavelli and
Ariosto, was felt directly through the Novelle, or stories, which served
as plots for our dramatists. It left its stamp indeed on some of the
worst characteristics of the English stage. The features of our drama
that startled the moral temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of
the Puritans, its grossness and profanity, its tendency to scenes of
horror and crime, its profuse employment of cruelty and lust as grounds
of dramatic action, its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural
whenever they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting sides
of human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is doubtful
how much the English playwrights may have owed to the Spanish drama,
which under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that
almost rivalled their own. In the intermixture of tragedy and comedy,
in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the
colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected incidents, the
complication of their plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and
Spain are remarkably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung
from a similarity in the circumstances to which both owed their rise,
than from any direct connexion of the one with the other. The real
origin of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from
without but in the influence of England itself. The temper of