Might not these hands, by fortune or by fate,
Have pierc'd this breast, and life with iron reft?
Or in this palace here where I so long
Have spent my days, could not that happy hour
Once, once have happ'd in which these hugy frames
With death by fall might have oppressed me?
Or should not this most hard and cruel soil,
So oft where I have press'd my wretched steps,
Some time had ruth of mine accursed life,
To rend in twain and swallow me therein?
So had my bones possessed now in peace
Their happy grave within the closed ground,
And greedy worms had gnawn this pined heart
Without my feeling pain: so should not now
This living breast remain the ruthful tomb
Wherein my heart yielden to death is graved;
Nor dreary thoughts, with pangs of pining grief,
My doleful mind had not afflicted thus."

There is no blame due to Sackville in that he did not invent what no single
man invented, and what even in England, where only it has been originally
attained, took some thirty years of the genius of the nation working
through innumerable individual tentatives and failures to bring about. But
he did not invent it; he did not even make any attempt to invent it; and
had this first English tragedy been generally followed, we should have been
for an unknown period in the land of bondage, in the classical dungeon
which so long retained the writers of a nation, certainly not, at the time
of the appearance of _Gorboduc_, of less literary promise than our own.

In describing these tentatives and failures it will be impossible here to
enter into any lengthened criticism of particular works. We shall have to
content ourselves with a description of the general lines and groups, which
may be said to be four in number: (1) The few unimportant and failing
followers of Sackville; (2) The miscellaneous farce-and-interlude-writers,
who, incult and formless as their work was, at least maintained the
literary tradition; (3) The important and most interesting group of
"university wits" who, with Marlowe at their head, made the blank verse
line for dramatic purposes, dismissed, cultivated as they were, the
cultivation of classical models, and gave English tragedy its Magna Charta
of freedom and submission to the restrictions of actual life only, but who
failed, from this cause or that, to achieve perfect life-likeness; and (4)
The actor-playwrights who, rising from very humble beginnin