Puritans, with their severe countenance, precise garb, petty scruples, and affected accent. Out of the struggle sprang into organized existence two great parties,-standing the one for political tradition, the other for political progress; the one for religious conformity, the other for religious liberty. In the drama, the noonday of Shakespeare was followed by the afternoon flush of Jonson, the delineator of humors, and a semi-classic in taste; of Beaumont and Fletcher, luxuriating in irregularity of form, and heralding the sensual excess that ended in the violent extinction of the art; of Massinger, Ford, and the rest of that bright throng, whose final and almost solitary successor was Shirley. Having reached the limit of its expansion, the poetic bloom withered. The serious temper, the blast of strife, the ascetic gloom, accelerated the decay which natural causes began. The agreeable replaced the forceful; and the pretty, the beautiful. Donne founded the fantastic or metaphysical school, marked by the love of quaint phrases, strange analogies, and ambitious efforts at antithesis. Poets lost the romantic fervor without gaining the classic grace. Yet in this exhausted soil, the old sap, lost to the eye, sent up one more of its most vigorous products. Prose was unexampled in vigor and amount; most of itin particular during the Civil War-political and theological, inspired by the rage of sects and factions, meant for the ravenous appetites of the moment, and therefore ephemeral. A few notable books-like the Areopagitica of Milton, those of Taylor, the Spenser of theology, of Bacon, the diviner in science, and of Browne, the dreamer of Norwich-glow with the colored lights and the heart of fire which give to the productions of genius enduring life. Style was copious, even to redundancy; ornate, even to intemperance; not seldom pedantic, with blemishes of vulgarity and tediously prolonged periods. We do not look for grace in Leviathans, nor for urbanity in mastodons. The scholastic dynasty, which had survived revolutions, empires, religions, and languages, was fallen. Into the ensuing anarchy Bacon introduced the principle of order, and furnished to liberated thought a chart and compass. His preeminent service was his classification of the Idola, and his constant injunction to correct theory by confronting it with facts. In him, and in Descartes of France, modern philosophy may be said to originate, inasmuch as they were the first to make the doctrine of method a principal object of consideration. Literary eras have no arbitrary or precise bounds. They are discriminated by centres and directions, by a certain set of influences affecting the public mind and character during a more or less definite time, to be succeeded by a new set producing a new phase of the nation's literature. The characteristic tendencies which stretch across them are denoted by persons scattered through them, as the mountain trend is determined by its isolated peaks. The poetic conception of the world, as distinguished from the mechanical, may be taken as the dominant mark of the socalled Elizabethan Age, first clearly defined in Spenser, rising to its zenith in Shakespeare, and passing away in Milton-last of the famed race who slaked the thirst of their souls at the springs of imagination and faith. JONSON. Then Jonson came, instructed from the school, To please in method, and invent by rule; His studious patience and laborious art By regular approach essay'd the heart.-Samuel Johnson. Many were the wit-combats betwixt Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid but slow in his performances. Shakspeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, conld turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.-Fuller. Biography.-Born in Westminster, in 1574, a few days after the death of his father, who was a clergyman; attracted the attention of Camden, who sent him to school, where he made extraordinary progress; entered Cambridge at sixteen, but was shortly recalled by his step-father, a bricklayer, who set him to the trowel; ran away, enlisted, fought in the Netherlands, killed a man in single combat in the view of both armies; returned to England at the age of nineteen, with a roistering reputation and an empty purse; turned to the stage for a livelihood, and failed; quarrelled with a fellow-performer, and slew him in a duel, was arrested for murder, imprisoned, almost brought to the gallows; was released, and immediately married a woman as poor as himself - a wife whom he afterwards described as 'a shrew yet honest'; was forced again to the stage both as an actor and a writer, beginning his dramatic career by doing job-work for the managers; sprang into fame in his twenty-second year, proclaimed himself a reformer of the drama, assumed an imperious attitude, railed at his rivals, and made bitter enemies, against whom he struggled without intermission to the end; excited the king's anger by an irreverent allusion to the Scotch, was in danger of mutilation, but was set at liberty without a trial; amid feasting and rejoicing, his mother showed him a poison which she had intended to put into his drink, to save him from the disgraceful punishment, and 'to show that she was not a coward,' says Jonson, 'she had resolved to drink first'; received the appointment of Poet Laureate, with a pension of a hundred marks, which was subsequently advanced to a hundred pounds by Charles I. His latter days were dark and painful. For twelve years he battled with want and disease. His pockets had holes, and his money failed. Still obliged to write in order to live, he wrote when his pen had lost its vigor and lacked the charm of novelty. Scurvy increased, paralysis came, and dropsy. In the epilogue to the New Inn (1630), he appeals to the audience: 'If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad. . . . All that his faint and falt'ring tongue doth crave, Is, that you not impute it to his brain, That's yet unhurt, altho' set round with pain Deprived of Court patronage, he was forced to beg, first from the Lord Treasurer, then from the Earl of Newcastle. Shattered, drivelling, and suffering, he died in August, 1637,-alone, served by an old woman; and was buried, in an upright posture, in the Poet's Corner of the Abbey. A workman, hired for eighteen pence by the charity of a passer-by, carved into the simple stone over his grave the laconic inscription: 'O RARE BEN JONSON!' Appearance.-Big and coarsely framed, of wide and long face, early marred by scurvy, square jaw, enormous cheeks, thick lips, with a 'mountain belly' and an 'ungracious gate'; a pon derous athlete, of free and boisterous habits, built up out of beef and Canary wine, for action and for endurance. His life and manners were in harmony with his person. Writings. We perceive at once the introduction of a new model,— art subjected strictly to the laws of classical composition. The understanding of the artist is solid, strong, penetrating, assertive; his mind, extensively furnished from experience and from books; his memory, retentive and exact, crowded with technical details and learned reminiscences. It is not for him to imitate, but to be imitated. He has a doctrine, which he expounds with Latin regularity. He will be loyal to culture, and therefore observes the unities. His plot shall be a diagram, the incidents rapid and natural; and you may see the dramatic effect, perceptible to every reader, rise to a climax by a continuous and uniform ascent. You have seen greater spontaneity, finer sympathy, finer fancy, a more genial spirit of enjoyment, but never such preoccupation of rule and method; above all, such power of working out an idea to a painful and oppressive issue, such persistency of thirst to unmask folly and punish vice. A character, with him, is but an incorporated idea,- a leading feature, conceit, or passion, produced on the stage in a man's dress,-which masters the whole nature, and which the personages combine to illustrate. At twenty-two, having exulted in his own exploits on the field, he writes Every Man in his Humour, to clothe in flesh and blood a colossal coward and braggart,- Bobadil, who swears 'by the body of Cæsar,' or 'by the foot of Pharaoh,' or, more terrifically still, 'by my valor!' His proposal for the pacification of Europe is famous: 'I will tell you, sir, by the way of private, and under seal, I am a gentleman, and live here obscure, and to myself; but were I known to her majesty and the lords (observe me), I would undertake, upon this poor head and life, for the public benefit of the state, not only to spare the entire lives of her subjects in general, but to save the onehalf, nay, three-parts, of her yearly charge in holding war, and against what enemy soever. And how would I do it, think you! . . . Why, thus, sir. I would select nineteen more, to myself, throughout the land; gentlemen they should be of good spirit, strong and able constitution; I would choose them by an instinct, a character that I have: and I would teach these nineteen the special rules, -as your punto, your reverso, your stoccata, your imbroccato, your passado, your montanto,- till they could all play very near, or altogether, as well as myself. This done, say the enemy were forty thousand strong, we twenty would come into the field the tenth of March, or thereabouts; and we would challenge twenty of the enemy; they could not in their honour refuse us; well, we would kill them; challenge twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them too; and thus would we kill every man his twenty a day, that's twenty score; twenty score, that's two hundred; two hundred a day, five days a thousand; forty thousand; forty times five, five times forty, two hundred days kills them all up by computation. And this will I venture my poor gentleman-like carcass to perform, provided there be no treason practiced upon us, by fair and discreet manhood; that is, civilly by the sword.' It is affectation and bluster grown to egregious excess. So in the Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon, in public and alone, expatiates continually in gigantic fancies of luxury and sensuality. Hear him unfold the vision of splendors and debauchery into which he will plunge when, by the possession of the philosopher's stone, he has learned to make gold: I assure you He that has once the flower of the Sun, I'll have of perfume, vapored 'bout the room Apiece, made in a plume to gather wind. We will be brave, Puffe, now we have the medicine Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calver'd salmons, Drest with an exquisite and poignant sauce, For which I'll say unto my cook, Go forth, and be a knight." ... "There's gold; My shirts I'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light Were he to teach the world riot anew. My gloves of fishes' and birds' skins, perfum'd |