nt of a gloomy superstition,
ruthlessly stamping out all that was beautiful in art and literature.
Kingsley, an admirable hater, could perceive only the opposite aspect of
the phenomena. To him the Puritan protest appears as the voice of the
enlightened conscience; the revolution means the troubling of the turbid
waters at the descent of the angel; Prynne's 'Histriomastix' is the
blast of the trumpet at which the rotten and polluted walls of Jericho
are to crumble into dust. The stage, which represented the tone of
aristocratic society, rightfully perished with the order which it
flattered. Courtiers had learnt to indulge in a cynical mockery of
virtue, or to find an unholy attraction in the accumulation of
extravagant horrors. The English drama, in short, was one of those evil
growths which are fostered by deeply-seated social corruption, and are
killed off by the breath of a purer air. That such phenomena occur at
times is undeniable. Mr. Symonds has recently shown us, in his history
of the Renaissance, how the Italian literature to which our English
dramatists owed so many suggestions was the natural fruit of a society
poisoned at the roots. Nor, when we have shaken off that spirit of
slavish adulation in which modern antiquarians and critics have regarded
the so-called Elizabethan dramatists, can we deny that there are
symptoms of a similar mischief in their writings. Some of the most
authoritative testimonials have a suspicious element. Praise has been
lavished upon the most questionable characteristics of the old drama.
Apologists have been found, not merely for its daring portrayal of human
passion, but for its wanton delight in the grotesque and the horrible
for its own sake; and some critics have revenged themselves for the
straitlaced censures of Puritan morality by praising work in which the
author strives to atone for imaginative weakness by a choice of
revolting motives. Such adulation ought to have disappeared with the
first fervour of rehabilitation. Much that has been praised in the old
drama is rubbish, and some of it disgusting rubbish.

The question, however, remains, how far we ought to adopt either view of
the situation? Are we bound to cast aside the later dramas of the school
as simply products of corruption? It may be of interest to consider the
light thrown upon this question by the works of Massinger, nearly the
last of the writers who can really claim a permanent position in
literature. Massin