ittle by
Greene, Lodge, and others, of their long-winded graces, helped to
popularise the pamphlet, and the popularisation of the pamphlet led the way
to periodical writing--an introduction perhaps of doubtful value in itself,
but certainly a matter of no small importance in the history of literature.
And so by degrees professional men of letters arose--men of letters,
professional in a sense, which had not existed since the days of the
travelling Jongleurs of the early Middle Ages. These men, by working for
the actors in drama, or by working for the publishers in the prose and
verse pamphlet (for the latter form still held its ground), earned a
subsistence which would seem sometimes to have been not a mere pittance,
and which at any rate, when folly and vice did not dissipate it, kept them
alive. Much nonsense no doubt has been talked about the Fourth Estate; but
such as it is, for good or for bad, it practically came into existence in
these prolific years.

The third period, that of vigorous manhood, may be said to coincide roughly
with the reign of James I., though if literary rather than political dates
be preferred, it might be made to begin with the death of Spenser in 1599,
and to end with the damnation of Ben Jonson's _New Inn_ just thirty years
later. In the whole of this period till the very last there is no other
sign of decadence than the gradual dropping off in the course of nature of
the great men of the preceding stage, not a few of whom, however, survived
into the next, while the places of those who fell were taken in some cases
by others hardly below the greatest, such as Beaumont and Fletcher. Many of
the very greatest works of what is generally known as the Elizabethan
era--the later dramas of Shakespere, almost the whole work of Ben Jonson,
the later poems of Drayton, Daniel, and Chapman, the plays of Webster and
Middleton, and the prose of Raleigh, the best work of Bacon, the poetry of
Browne and Wither--date from this time, while the astonishingly various and
excellent work of the two great dramatists above mentioned is wholly
comprised within it. And not only is there no sign of weakening, but there
is hardly a sign of change. A slight, though only a slight, depression of
the imaginative and moral tone may be noticed or fancied in those who, like
Fletcher, are wholly of the period, and a certain improvement in general
technical execution testifies to longer practice. But Webster might as well
have