shows that the old order is changing to a new. Nor if regard be
merely had to the great names which adorn the time, may it seem proper to
use the word decadence at all. To this period belong not only Milton, but
Taylor, Browne, Clarendon, Hobbes (four of the greatest names in English
prose), the strange union of learning in matter and quaintness in form
which characterises Fuller and Burton, the great dramatic work of Massinger
and Ford. To it also belongs the exquisite if sometimes artificial school
of poetry which grew up under the joint inspiration of the great personal
influence and important printed work of Ben Jonson on the one hand, and the
subtler but even more penetrating stimulant of the unpublished poetry of
Donne on the other--a school which has produced lyrical work not surpassed
by that of any other school or time, and which, in some specially poetical
characteristics, may claim to stand alone.

If then, we speak of decadence, it is necessary to describe with some
precision what is meant, and to do so is not difficult, for the signs of it
are evident, not merely in the rank and file of writers (though they are
naturally most prominent here), but to some extent in the great
illustrations of the period themselves. In even the very best work of the
time there is a want of the peculiar freshness and spontaneity, as of
spring water from the rock, which characterises earlier work. The art is
constantly admirable, but it is almost obtrusively art--a proposition which
is universally true even of the greatest name of the time, of Milton, and
which applies equally to Taylor and to Browne, to Massinger and to Ford,
sometimes even to Herrick (extraordinary as is the grace which he manages
to impart), and almost always to Carew. The lamp is seldom far off, though
its odour may be the reverse of disagreeable. But in the work which is not
quite so excellent, other symptoms appear which are as decisive and less
tolerable. In the poetry of the time there appear, side by side with much
exquisite melody and much priceless thought, the strangest blotches,
already more than once noticed, of doggerel, of conceits pushed to the
verge of nonsense and over the verge of grotesque, of bad rhyme and bad
rhythm which are evidently not the result of mere haste and creative
enthusiasm but of absolutely defective ear, of a waning sense of harmony.
In the drama things are much worse. Only the two dramatists already
mentioned, with the doub