will be
Never till they both believe."

The dirge of _Vittoria Corombona_ and the preparation for death of _The
Duchess of Malfi_ are Webster's sole but sufficient contributions to the
list. The witch songs of Middleton's _Witch_, and the gipsy, or rather
tramp, songs of _More Dissemblers besides Women_ and _The Spanish Gipsy_,
have very high merit. The songs of _Patient Grissell_, which are pretty
certainly Dekker's, have been noticed already. The otherwise worthless play
of _The Thracian Wonder_, attributed to Webster and Rowley, contains an
unusual number of good songs. Heywood and Massinger were not great at
songs, and the superiority of those in _The Sun's Darling_ over the songs
in Ford's other plays, seems to point to the authorship of Dekker. Finally,
James Shirley has the song gift of his greater predecessors. Every one
knows "The glories of our blood and state," but this is by no means his
only good song; it worthily closes the list of the kind--a kind which, when
brought together and perused separately, exhibits, perhaps, as well as
anything else of equal compass, the extraordinary abundance of poetical
spirit in the age. For songs like these are not to be hammered out by the
most diligent ingenuity, not to be spun by the light of the most
assiduously fed lamp. The wind of such inspiration blows where, and only
where, it listeth.

CHAPTER IX

MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES

During the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, or (to
take literary rather than chronological dates) between the death of Bacon
and the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_, there existed in England a
quintet of men of letters, of such extraordinary power and individuality,
that it may be doubted whether any other period of our own literature can
show a group equal to them; while it is certain that no other literature,
except, perhaps, in the age of Pericles, can match them. They were all,
except Hobbes (who belonged by birth, though not by date and character of
writing, to an earlier generation than the rest), born, and they all died,
within a very few years of each other. All were prose writers of the very
highest merit; and though only one was a poet, yet he had poetry enough to
spare for all the five. Of the others, Clarendon, in some of the greatest
characteristics of the historian, has been equalled by no Englishman, and
surpassed by few foreigners. Jeremy Taylor has been called the most