he less lawless but scarcely more suitable "fourteener" (divided or
not as usual, according to printer's exigencies) which, as was shown in the
last chapter, for a time almost monopolised the attention of English poets.
The same mixture appears to some extent, though the doggerel occupies the
main text, in the _Damon and Pythias_ of Richard Edwards, the editor of
_The Paradise of Dainty Devices_. In _Appius and Virginia_ (a decidedly
interesting play) the fourteener on the contrary is the staple verse, the
doggerel being only occasional. Something the same may be said of a very
late morality, _The Conflict of Conscience_. Both doggerel and fourteeners
appear in the quaint productions called _Three Ladies of London_, etc.; but
by this time the decasyllable began to appear with them and to edge them
out. They died hard, however, thoroughly ill-fitted as they were for
dramatic use, and, as readers of _Love's Labour Lost_ know, survived even
in the early plays of Shakespere. Nor were the characters and minor details
generally of this group less disorderly and inadequate than the general
schemes or the versification. Here we have the abstractions of the old
Morality; there the farcical gossip of the _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ class;
elsewhere the pale and dignified personages of _Gorboduc_: all three being
often jumbled together all in one play. In the lighter parts there are
sometimes fair touches of low comedy; in the graver occasionally, though
much more rarely, a touching or dignified phrase or two. But the plays as
wholes are like Ovid's first-fruits of the deluge--nondescripts incapable
of life, and good for no useful or ornamental purpose.

It is at this moment that the cleavage takes place. And when I say "this
moment," I am perfectly conscious that the exact moment in dates and years
cannot be defined. Not a little harm has been done to the history of
English literature by the confusion of times in which some of its
historians have pleased themselves. But even greater harm might be done if
one were to insist on an exact chronology for the efflorescence of the
really poetical era of Elizabethan literature, if the blossoming of the
aloe were to be tied down to hour and day. All that we can say is that in
certain publications, in certain passages even of the same publication, we
find the old respectable plodding, the old blind tentative experiment in
poetry and drama: and then without warning--without, as it seems, any
pos