written years earlier (hardly so well years later) than he actually
did; and especially in the case of numerous anonymous or single works, the
date of which, or at least of their composition, is obscure, it is very
difficult from internal evidence of style and sentiment to assign them to
one date rather than to another, to the last part of the strictly
Elizabethan or the first part of the strictly Jacobean period. Were it not
for the occasional imitation of models, the occasional reference to dated
facts, it would be not so much difficult as impossible. If there seems to
be less audacity of experiment, less of the fire of youth, less of the
unrestrainable restlessness of genius eager to burst its way, that, as has
been already remarked of another difference, may not improbably be mainly
due to fancy, and to the knowledge that the later efforts actually were
later as to anything else. In prose more particularly there is no change
whatever. Few new experiments in style were tried, unless the _Characters_
of Overbury and Earle may be called such. The miscellaneous pamphlets of
the time were written in much the same fashion, and in some cases by the
same men, as when, forty years before Jonson summoned himself to "quit the
loathed stage," Nash had alternately laughed at Gabriel Harvey, and
savagely lashed the Martinists. The graver writers certainly had not
improved upon, and had not greatly changed the style in which Hooker broke
his lance with Travers, or descanted on the sanctity of law. The
humour-comedy of Jonson, the romantic _drame_ of Fletcher, with the
marmoreally-finished minor poems of Ben, were the nearest approaches of any
product of the time to novelty of general style, and all three were
destined to be constantly imitated, though only in the last case with much
real success, during the rest of our present period. Yet the
post-Restoration comedy is almost as much due to Jonson and Fletcher as to
foreign models, and the influence of both, after long failing to produce
anything of merit, was not imperceptible even in Congreve and Vanbrugh.

Of the fourth period, which practically covers the reign of Charles I. and
the interregnum of the Commonwealth, no one can say that it shows no signs
of decadence, when the meaning of that word is calculated according to the
cautions given above in noticing its poets. Yet the decadence is not at all
of the kind which announces a long literary dead season, but only of that
which