such pure and august beauty as
enthralls us with admiration of Webster's; she has not the
gypsy-brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker's, her wild soft glances
and flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl,
but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous
eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and close together
that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin,
fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression
alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere.
No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she has a
fascination of her own which fairer and more famous singers might envy
her; and the friends she makes are as sure to be constant as she, for
all her occasional roughness and coarseness, is sure to be loyal in the
main to the nobler instincts of her kind and the loftier traditions of
her sisterhood.

THOMAS MIDDLETON

If it be true, as we are told on high authority, that the greatest glory
of England is her literature and the greatest glory of English
literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of
English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric
triumphs. The name of Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton and
Coleridge and Shelley: and the names of his comrades in art and their
immediate successors are above all but the highest names in any other
province of our song. There is such an overflowing life, such a superb
exuberance of abounding and exulting strength, in the dramatic poetry of
the half-century extending from 1590 to 1640, that all other epochs of
English literature seem as it were but half awake and half alive by
comparison with this generation of giants and of gods. There is more sap
in this than in any other branch of the national bay-tree: it has an
energy in fertility which reminds us rather of the forest than the
garden or the park. It is true that the weeds and briers of the
underwood are but too likely to embarrass and offend the feet of the
rangers and the gardeners who trim the level flower-plots or preserve
the domestic game of enclosed and ordered lowlands in the tamer demesnes
of literature. The sun is strong and the wind sharp in the climate which
reared the fellows and the followers of Shakespeare. The extreme
inequality and roughness of the ground must also be taken into account
when we are disposed, as I