es which, in the great literary "rule of false," help the way to
success; the example of _Ralph Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton's
Needle_ could not fail to stimulate the production of genuine native farce
which might any day become _la bonne comedie_. And even the continued
composition of Moralities showed signs of the growing desire for life and
individuality of character. Moreover, the intense and increasing liking for
the theatre in all classes of society, despite the discouragement of the
authorities, the miserable reward offered to actors and playwrights, and
the discredit which rested on the vocations of both, was certain in the
ordinary course of things to improve the supply. The third division of
literature made slower progress under less powerful stimulants. No
emulation, like that which tempted the individual graduate or templar to
rival Surrey in addressing his mistress's eyebrow, or Sackville in stately
rhyming on English history, acted on the writers of prose. No public
demand, like that which produced the few known and the hundred forgotten
playwrights of the first half of Elizabeth's reign, served as a hotbed. But
it is the great secret of prose that it can dispense with such stimulants.
Everybody who wished to make his thoughts known began, with the help of
the printing press, to make them known; and the informal use of the
vernacular, by dint of this unconscious practice and of the growing
scholarship both of writers and readers, tended insensibly to make itself
less of a mere written conversation and more of a finished prose style.
Preaching in English, the prose pamphlet, and translations into the
vernacular were, no doubt, the three great schoolmasters in the
disciplining of English prose. But by degrees all classes of subjects were
treated in the natural manner, and so the various subdivisions of prose
style--oratorical, narrative, expository, and the rest--slowly evolved and
separated themselves, though hardly, even at the close of the time, had
they attained the condition of finish.

The year 1580 may be fixed on with almost mathematical accuracy as the date
at which the great generation of Elizabethan writers first showed its hand
with Lyly's _Euphues_ in prose and Spenser's _Shepherd's Calendar_ in
verse. Drama was a little, but not more than a little, later in showing the
same signs of rejuvenescence; and from that time forward till the end of
the century not a year passed without the appeara