tful addition of Shirley, display anything like
great or original talent. A few clever playwrights do their journey-work
with creditable craftsmanship. But even this characteristic is wanting in
the majority. The plots relapse into a chaos almost as great as that of the
drama of fifty years earlier, but with none of its excuse of inexperience
and of redeeming purple patches. The characters are at once uninteresting
and unpleasant; the measure hobbles and staggers; the dialogue varies
between passages of dull declamation and passages of almost duller
repartee. Perhaps, though the prose names of the time are greater than
those of its dramatists, or, excluding Milton's, of its poets, the signs of
something wrong are clearest in prose. It would be difficult to find in any
good prose writer between 1580 and 1625 shameless anomalies of arrangement,
the clumsy distortions of grammar, which the very greatest Caroline writers
permit themselves in the intervals, and sometimes in the very course of
their splendid eloquence; while, as for lesser men, the famous incoherences
of Cromwell's speeches are hardly more than a caricature of the custom of
the day.

Something has yet to be said as to the general characteristics of this
time--characteristics which, scarcely discernible in the first period, yet
even there to be traced in such work as that of Surrey and Sackville,
emerge into full prominence in the next, continue with hardly any loss in
the third, and are discernible even in the "decadence" of the fourth. Even
yet they are not universally recognised, and it appears to be sometimes
thought that because critics speak with enthusiasm of periods in which,
save at rare intervals, and as it were by accident, they are not
discernible at all, such critics are insensible to them where they occur.
Never was there a grosser mistake. It is said that M. Taine, in private
conversation, once said to a literary novice who rashly asked him whether
he liked this or that, "Monsieur, en litterature j'aime tout." It was a
noble and correct sentiment, though it might be a little difficult for the
particular critic who formulated it to make good his claim to it as a
motto. The ideal critic undoubtedly does like everything in literature,
provided that it is good of its kind. He likes the unsophisticated
tentatives of the earliest minstrel poetry, and the cultivated perfection
of form of Racine and Pope; he likes the massive vigour of the French and
Eng