By these tears by which I bathe them, I conjure you
With pity to look on me."

We now come to a very different dramatist, JOHN FORD, whose genius and personal appearance are shrewdly indicated in a rugged couplet from a contemporary satire:

"Deep in a dump, John Ford by himself sat,
With folded arms and melancholy hat."

In that somewhat dainty mental loneliness, and under that melancholy hat, the mind of the poet was absorbed in the intensest meditation of the ideal possibilities of grief and guilt, and the strange aberrations of the passions. Massinger has little sway over the heart; but Ford was not merely the poet of the heart, but of the broken heart, the heart bending under burdens, or torn by emotions, almost too great for mortality to bear. In reading his tragedies, as in reading Webster's, we are fretfully conscious of being shut up in the sultry atmosphere of one morbid mind, deprived of all companionship with healthy nature and genial human life, and forced into a shuddering or sickly sympathy with the extremes of crime and suffering. But the power of Webster lies in terror; the power of Ford, in tenderness. Out of his peculiar walk, Ford is the feeblest of finical fine writers. His attempts at liveliness and

humor excite, not laughter, but rather a dismal feeling of pitying contempt. His great gift is displayed in the tragedy of The Broken Heart, and in two or three thrilling scenes of the tragedy of Love's Sacrifice. In The Broken Heart, the noblest of his works, our sympathies are on the whole rightly directed; and the death of Calantha, after enduring the most soulcrushing calamities, concealed from others under a show of mirth, is exquisitely pathetic :

"O my lords,

I but deceived your eyes with antick gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another,

Of death, and death, and death, still I danced forward;
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant.

They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings;

Let me die smiling."

Of another of Ford's tragedies, which can hardly be named here, Campbell justly remarks: "Better that poetry should cease to exist than have to do with such subjects." But it is characteristic of Ford, that his power and tenderness are seldom so great as in their worst perversions. Without any austerity of soul, diseased in his sympathies, a sentimentalist rather than a man of sentiment, he brooded over guilt until all sense of its wickedness was lost in a morbid pity for its afflic

tions, and the tears he compels us to shed are rarely the tears of honest and manly feeling.

Ford died, or disappeared, about the year 1640, and with him died the last original dramatist of the Elizabethan age; for Shirley, though his plays fill six thick volumes, was but a faint echo of Fletcher. Thus, in

a short period of fifty years, from 1590 to 1640, we have the names of thirteen dramatists, varying in power and variety of power and perversion of power, but each individual in his genius, and one the greatest genius of the world, the names of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Webster, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. Though little is known of their lives, it is through them we learn the life of their time, — the manners, customs, character, ideas, habits, sentiments, and passions, the form and the spirit, of the Elizabethan age. And they are all intensely and audaciously human. Taking them in the mass, they have much to offend our artistic and shock our moral sense; but still the dramatic literature of the world would be searched in vain for another instance of so broad and bold a representation of the varieties of human nature,

one in which

many-charactered soul of man is so vividly depicted, in

its weakness and in its strength, in its mirth and in its passion, in the appetites which sink it below the beasts that perish, in the aspirations which lift it to regions of existence of which the visible heavens are but the veil.

IN

SPENSER.

N the last chapter we closed our remarks on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. In the present we propose to treat of Spenser, with some introductory observations on the miscellaneous poets who preceded him. And it is necessary to bear in mind that, in the age of which we treat, as in all ages, the versifiers far exceeded the seers, and the poetasters the poets. It has been common to exercise a charity towards the early English poets which we refuse to extend to those of later times; but mediocrity has identical characteristics in all periods, and there was no charm in the circumstances of the Elizabethan age to convert a rhymer into a genius. Indeed, leaving out the dramatists, the poetry produced in the reigns of Elizabeth and James can hardly compare in originality, richness, and variety, with the English poetry of the nineteenth century. Spenser is a great name; but he is the only undramatic poet of his time who could be placed above, or on a level with, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, or Tennyson. There is a list, somewhere, of two hundred names of poets who belonged to the Eliza