y masters, that strive for
this supernatural art of wrangling, let all be husht and quiet a-God's
name." It is needless to say that the disputants did not comply with Plain
Percivall's request. Indeed they bestowed some of their choicest abuse on
him in return for his advice. Not even by the casting of the most
peacemaking of all dust, that of years and the grave, can it be said that
these jars at last _compacta quiescunt_. For it is difficult to find any
account of the transaction which does not break out sooner or later into
strong language.

CHAPTER VII

THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD

I have chosen, to fill the third division of our dramatic chapters, seven
chief writers of distinguished individuality, reserving a certain fringe of
anonymous plays and of less famous personalities for the fourth and last.
The seven exceptional persons are Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster,
Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, and Day. It would be perhaps lost labour to
attempt to make out a severe definition, shutting these off on the one hand
from their predecessors, on the other from those that followed them. We
must be satisfied in such cases with an approach to exactness, and it is
certain that while most of the men just named had made some appearance in
the latest years of Elizabeth, and while one or two of them lasted into the
earliest years of Charles, they all represent, in their period of
flourishing and in the character of their work, the Jacobean age. In some
of them, as in Middleton and Day, the Elizabethan type prevails; in others,
as in Fletcher, a distinctly new flavour--a flavour not perceptible in
Shakespere, much less in Marlowe--appears. But in none of them is that
other flavour of pronounced decadence, which appears in the work of men so
great as Massinger and Ford, at all perceptible. We are still in the
creative period, and in some of the work to be now noticed we are in a
comparatively unformed stage of it. It has been said, and not unjustly
said, that the work of Beaumont and Fletcher belongs, when looked at on
one side, not to the days of Elizabeth at all, but to the later seventeenth
century; and this is true to the extent that the post-Restoration
dramatists copied Fletcher and followed Fletcher very much more than
Shakespere. But not only dates but other characteristics refer the work of
Beaumont and Fletcher to a distinctly earlier period than the work of
their, in some sense, successors Massinger and Ford.