cant humours which might have been
mischievous if driven in. Even the strongest of all the foreign forces, the
just admiration of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, was not in any
way hurtful; and it is curious enough that it is only in what may be called
the autumn and, comparatively speaking, the decadence of the period that
anything that can be called pedantry is observed. It is in Milton and
Browne, not in Shakespere and Hooker, that there is an appearance of undue
domination and "obsession" by the classics.

The subdivisions of the period in which these purely literary influences
worked in combination with those of the domestic and foreign policy of
England (on which it is unnecessary here to dilate), can be drawn with
tolerable precision. They are both better marked and more important in
verse than in prose. For it cannot be too often asserted that the age, in
the wide sense, was, despite many notable achievements in the _sermo
pedestris_, not an age of prose but an age of poetry. The first period
extends (taking literary dates) from the publication of Tottel's
_Miscellany_ to that of _The Shepherd's Calendar_. It is not distinguished
by much production of positive value. In poetry proper the writers pursue
and exercise themselves upon the track of Surrey, Wyatt, and the other
authors whom Grimoald, or some other, collected; acquiring, no doubt, a
certain facility in the adjustment to iambic and other measures of the
altered pronunciation since Chaucer's time; practising new combinations in
stanza, but inclining too much to the doggerel Alexandrines and
fourteeners (more doggerel still when chance or design divided them into
eights and sixes); repeating, without much variation, images and phrases
directly borrowed from foreign models; and displaying, on the whole, a
singular lack of inspiration which half excuses the mistaken attempt of the
younger of them, and of their immediate successors, to arrive at the
desired poetical medium by the use of classical metres. Among men actually
living and writing at this time Lord Buckhurst alone displays a real
poetical faculty. Nor is the case much better in respect of drama, though
here the restless variety of tentative displays even more clearly the
vigorous life which underlay incomplete performance, and which promised
better things shortly. The attempt of _Gorboduc_ and a few other plays to
naturalise the artificial tragedy, though a failure, was one of those
failur