letters is generally far inferior to their other work, and
that, with the rarest exceptions, the dramatic work of those who have
not excelled in other kinds of literature is not literature at all.

CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSION

A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have presented
itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned; it must be the
business of the following pages to justify it. In summing up on such a
great matter as this it is desirable--it is indeed necessary--to
indicate, in broader lines than at the mere outset would have seemed
appropriate or indeed possible, the general course of thought and of
speech, of literary matter and literary form, during the century and
more which is submitted to the view. We can thus place individuals in
their position to each other and to the whole more boldly and with less
reserve; we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the
movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration by virtue
of their life and work being incomplete; we can at once record
accomplishment and indicate tendency.

The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book illustrates the
differences in appeal of such periods to the merely dilettante and
"tasting" critic, and to the student of literature in the historical and
comparative fashion. To the former it is one of the most ungrateful of
all such sub-periods or sub-divisions in English literature. He finds in
it none, or at most Boswell's _Johnson_, Burns, and the _Lyrical
Ballads_ (this last at its extreme end), of the chief and principal
things on which alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better
poetry, such as that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a
forced esteem; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is
preposterous and childish; it contributes nothing even to the less
"bellettristic" departments of literature that is worth his attention;
it is a tedious dead season about which there is nothing tolerable
except the prospect of getting rid of it before very long.

To the latter--to the historical and comparative student--on the other
hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As was observed
in a former volume of this history, the other great blossoming time of
English literature--that which we call Elizabethan, and by which we mean
the last five and twenty years of the Queen's reign and the fifty or
sixty after her death--was preceded by no cert