old
editions as "a night-piece," and it should, indeed, be acted by the
shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to
punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was
laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and
Fletcher's, in Italy--the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance,
which had such a fascination for the Elizabethan imagination. It was to
them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud nobles,
luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenge and ferocious cunning; subtle
poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan; parricides,
atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and
delicate varieties of sin.

But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists
who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elizabeth, James I.,
and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in 1666,
and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of Charles I.
and the Commonwealth.

In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking
the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there
are a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend
themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of thought
which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers is not without its
attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater
relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished writer
lent his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and
political controversy of the time. There were famous theologians, like
Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians and antiquaries, like
Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and writers in natural
science--which now entered upon its modern, experimental phase, under
the stimulus of Bacon's writings--among whom may be mentioned Wallis,
the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist; and Harvey, the discoverer of the
circulation of the blood. These are outside of our subject, but in the
strictly literary prose of the time, the same spirit of roused inquiry
is manifest, and the same disposition to a thorough and exhaustive
treatment of a subject, which is proper to the scientific attitude of
mind. The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been
drawn. The age was pedantic, and