dramatists who kept the old fire of Marlowe, though he never had the naturalness or temperance which lifted Shakespeare far beyond Marlowe. The same power which we have seen in his translation of Homer is to be found in his plays. The mingling of intellectual power with imagination, and swollen violence of words and images with tender and natural and often splendid passages, are entirely in the earlier Elizabethan manner. He, too, like Marlowe, to quote his own line, ‘hurled instinctive fire about the world.' These were the greatest names among a crowd of dramatists. We can only mention John Marston, Henry Glapthorne, Richard Brome, William Rowley, Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and Thomas Heywood. Of the crowd, all of whom,' says Lamb, spoke nearly the same language and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common,' JAMES SHIRLEY is the last. He lived till 1666. In him the fire and passion of the old time passes away, but some of the delicate poetry remains, and in him the Elizabethan drama dies.

In 1642, the theatres were closed during the calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling players managed to exist with difficulty, and against the law, till 1656, when SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT had his opera of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. It was the beginning of a new drama, in every point but impurity different from the old, and four years after, at the Restoration, it broke loose from the prison of Puritanism to indulge in a shameless license.

In this rapid sketch of the Drama in England, we have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, because it keeps the whole story together. We now return to the time that followed the accession of James I."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT, AND FLETCHER -S. A. Dunham's Lives of Lit. Men; W. Gifford's Memoir of; Taine's Hist. of Eng. Lit.; A. W. Ward's Hist. Eng. Dra. Lit.; Whipple's Lit. of the Age of Eliz.; T. H. Ward's Anthology; Littell, 1860, v. 2; Br. Quar. Rev., 1857; Ecl. Mag., Feb. and Oct., 1847; Apr., 1856; May, 1858; and Oct., 1874,

PERIOD V.

FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION,

1603-1660.

LESSON 27.

Brief Historical Sketch.-James VI. of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and of Darnley, comes to the English throne, 1603, as Jas. I., and is the first of the Stuart House. Gunpowder Plot, 1605. First permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown, Virginia, 1607. Thermometer invented, 1610. King James's Bible, a revision of Wyclif's, Tyndale's, and Coverdale's translations, issued, 1611. Harvey discovers circulation of the blood, 1616. Expedition and death of Raleigh, 1617. Settlement of New England at Plymouth, 1620, the year negro slavery was introduced into the Virginia Colony. Charles, son of James, married to Henrietta, daughter of Hen. IV. of France, became King of England, 1625. Hampden refused to pay his shipmoney tax, 1637. Covenant signed in Scotland, 1638,- -an agreement by which the people bound themselves to resist the re-introduction of Episcopacy into Scotland. Long Parliament met, 1640. Strafford executed, 1641, and Laud, 1644. Civil war broke out, 1642. Puritans separate into Presbyterians and Independents. Battle of Naseby, 1645. Long Parliament reduced by Pride's Purge to the Rump, 1648. King executed, 1649. Conquest of Ireland by Cromwell, same year. Coffeehouses established in London, 1652. Rump Parliament abolished, 1653. Cromwell made Lord Protector, same year. Civil marriage legalized, same year. Post-Office established, 1657. Watches for the pocket first made in England, 1658. Cromwell died, 1658. Richard Cromwell made Protector, 1658.

66

LESSON 28.

PROSE.- We have traced the decline of the drama of Elizabeth up to the date of the Restoration. All poetry suffered in the same way after the reign of James I. It became fantastic in style and overwrought in thought. It was diffuse, or violent, in expression. Prose literature, on the contrary, gradually grew into greater excellence, spread itself over larger fields of thought, and took up a greater variety of subjects. The grave national struggle, while it lessened poetical, increased prose, literature. The painting of short' Characters' was begun by Sir T. Overbury's book in 1614, and carried on by John Earle and Joseph Hall, afterwards made bishops. They mark the interest in individual life which now began to arise, and which soon took form in Biography.

THOMAS FULLER'S Holy and Profane State, 1642, added to sketches of characters' illustrations of them in the lives of famous persons, and in 1662 his Worthies of England still further set on foot the literature of Biography. The historical literature, which we have noticed already in the works of Raleigh and Bacon, was carried on by Fuller in his Church History of Britain, 1656. He is a quaint and delightful writer; good sense, piety, and inventive wit are woven together in his work. We may place together ROBERT BURTON's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, and SIR THOMAS BROWNE's Religio Medici, 1642, and Pseudodoxia as books which treat of miscellaneous subjects in a witty and learned fashion. This kind of writing was greatly increased by the setting up of libraries, where men dipped into every kind of literature. It was in James I.'s reign that. Sir Thomas Bodley established the Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton a library now placed in the British Museum. A number of small writers took part in the Puritan and Church controversies, among whom WILLIAM PRYNNE, a violent Puritan, deserves to be mentioned for his Histrio-Mastix, or Scourge of Players.

But there were others on each side who rose above the war of party into the calm air of spiritual religion. JEREMY TAYLOR at the close of Charles I.'s reign published his Great Exemplar and his Holy Living and Holy Dying, and shortly afterwards his Sermons. They had been preceded in 1647 by his Liberty of Prophesying, in which he claimed full freedom of Biblical interpretation as the right of all, and asked for only one standard of faith-the Apostles' Creed. His work is especially literary. Weighty with argument, his sermons and books of devotion are still read among us for their sweet and deep devotion, for their rapidly flowing and poetic eloquence. Towards the end of the Civil Wars, RICHARD BAXTER, the great Puritan writer, wrote a good book, which, as it still remains a household book in England, takes its place in literature. There are few cottages which do not possess a copy of The Saint's Everlasting Rest; and there are few parsonages in England in which ROBERT LEIGHTON'S book on the Epistle of St. Peter is not also to be found. Leighton died in 1684, Archbishop of Glasgow. In philosophic literature I have already spoken of Bacon, and of the political writers, such as Hobbes and Harrington, who wrote during the Commonwealth, I will speak hereafter in their proper place.

Miscellaneous writing is further represented in the literature of travel by GEORGE SANDYS and THOMAS CORYAT. Coryat's Crudities, 1611, describes his journey through France and Italy; Sandys' book, 1615, a journey to the East. We have also from abroad some interesting letters from Sir Henry Wotton, and he gave Milton introductions to famous men in Italy. Wotton's quaint and pleasant friend IZAAK WALTON closes the list of these pre-Restoration writers with the Compleat Angler, 1653, a book which resembles in its quaint and garrulous style the rustic scenery and prattling rivers that it celebrates, and marks the quiet interest in the country which now began to grow up in England.

The style of all these writers links them to the age of Eliza