In

The same thing strikes us in his plays. Lamb says of him that "he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common." But the really great men of the race, not merely Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, but Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Ford, and Massinger, spoke the same language with a difference; and each had moral feelings and notions of his own. Shirley the distinctive individual difference was small, both in amount and in kind : he was not a great man in himself, but an essentially small man inspired by the creations of great men. Fletcher was his master and exemplar, as Shakespeare was Massinger's; but he imitated much more closely, was much more completely carried away by this model than Massinger was. And although his language and moral feelings and notions (even as regards female types and kings) are Fletcher's, and he had most ambition to emulate Fletcher's dashing and brilliant manner, yet Shirley's plays contain frequent echoes of other dramatists. One great interest in reading him is that he reminds us so often of the situations and characters of his predecessors. It is good for the critic, if for nobody else, to read Shirley, because there he finds emphasised all that told most effectively on the playgoers of the period. We read Greene and Marlowe to know what the Elizabethan drama was in its powerful but awkward youth; Shirley to know what it was in its declining but facile and still powerful old age.

There were many other able playmakers in the great dramatic period, and notably four Thomases, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Rowley, Thomas Randolph, and Thomas May, but no other that can be called great, either by originality or by imitation. None of them gave proof of the intellectual calibre even of Middleton, the least important figure whom I have attempted to characterise in this chapter.

True, Charles Lamb has called Thomas Heywood "a prose Shakespeare," and that prolific author of 250 plays doubtless has a certain sweet vein of grandmotherly tenderness in him; but if Elia had lived till now, he would, perhaps, have described good old Heywood more accurately by calling him a garrulous Longfellow.

One may hope to be excused for feeling no desire to go farther down the scale than Middleton and Shirley. In studying the literature that led to the supreme efflorescence of the Elizabethan drama, one thinks no relic too humble to be worth discussing; but when so many large and powerful minds invite our companionship, and continue always to lay before us fresh points of interest and fresh matter for thought, it is intolerably dull to turn from them to the crowd of mediocrities who hang about their doors and follow their footsteps.

481

APPENDIX.

OUR PLEASANT WILLY.

THREE stanzas are often quoted from Thalia's complaint regarding the decay of the theatres in Spenser's "Tears of the Muses,” and it has been elaborately argued that they refer to Shakespeare. The date of their publication is 1591.

“And he, the man whom Nature's self had made

To mock herself, and truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimic shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late;
With whom all joy and jolly merriment
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.

Instead thereof scoffing Scurrility,

And scornful Folly with Contempt is crept,
Rolling in rhymes of shameless ribaldry
Without regard or due decorum kept;
Each idle wit at will presumes to make,
And doth the learned's task upon him take.

But that same gentle spirit from whose pen
Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow,
Scorning the boldness of such base-born men,
Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw;
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell,

Than so himself to mockery to sell."

I have stated some reasons (p. 345) for refusing to believe that these stanzas, however appropriate to Shakespeare we may think them, can possibly have been applied to him in 1591. I believe that death is, in the first stanza, real and

not metaphorical, and that Willy is Spenser's friend Sidney. Sidney's death is lamented under that name in an eclogue in Davidson's Poetical Rhapsody-" an eclogue made long since upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney."

"Ye shepherds' boys that lead your flocks,

The whilst your sheep feed safely round about,
Break me your pipes that pleasant sound did yield,
Sing now no more the songs of Colin Clout:

Lament the end of all our joy,

Lament the source of all annoy;
Willy is dead

That wont to lead

Our flocks and us in mirth and shepherds' glee :
Well could he sing,

Well dance and spring;

Of all the shepherds was none such as he.

How often hath his skill in pleasant song,

Drawn all the water-nymphs from out their bowers?
How have they lain the tender grass along,
And made him garlands gay of smelling flowers?
Phoebus himself that conquer'd Pan,

Striving with Willy nothing wan;
Methinks I see

The time when he

Pluckt from his golden locks the laurel crown ;
And go to raise

Our Willy's praise,

Bedeckt his head and softly set him down.

The learned Muses flockt to hear his skill,

And quite forgot their water, wood, and mount;
They thought his songs were done too quickly still,
Of none but Willy's pipe they made account.

He sung; they seem'd in joy to flow:
He ceast; they seemed to weep for woe;
The rural rout

All round about

Like bees came swarming thick to hear him sing;
Ne could they think

On meat or drink

While Willy's music in their ears did ring.

But now, alas! such pleasant mirth is past;
Apollo weeps, the Muses rend their hair.

No joy on earth that any time can last.
See where his breathless corpse lies on the bier.
That self-same hand that reft his life

Hath turned shepherd's peace to strife.
Our joy is fled

Our life is dead,

Our hope, our help, our glory, all is gone :
Our poet's praise,

Our happy days,

And nothing left but grief to think thereon."

The only difficulty in the way of supposing our pleasant Willy to be Sir Philip Sidney is purely factitious. It is taken for granted that all the three of Spenser's stanzas refer to the same person as the first; and then it is argued that the death of our pleasant Willy must be only metaphorical in the first, meaning really his cessation from the composition of comedies, because in the third he is said to be producing large streams of tragedies. But any person who looks at the whole lament will see that two different persons must be intended. The sequence of thought is this: The first of the three stanzas laments that Willy is dead; the second, that scoffing scurrility and scornful folly have occupied the stage in his stead; the third approves the conduct of a living and producing writer in abstaining from co-operation with base-born play-wrights. If we suppose "that same gentle spirit" to refer back to our pleasant Willy, and not forward to the next line, we land ourselves in a contradiction whether we regard Willy's death as literal or metaphorical, because this gentle spirit is both really and poetically alive -large streams of honey and nectar are flowing from him. I believe that in the third stanza Thalia refers to Spenser himself, and that here we have his justification of himself for complaining of the withdrawal of learning from the stage, and yet sending no compositions of his own to prop it up. Some such justification was certainly required: Spenser could hardly have asked why learning had forsaken the stage, without giving a reason for withholding contributions from his own copious pen. The vanity of the excuse will not surprise any one who knows what he makes Hobinol and others say concerning Colin Clout.

1 The fact that Sidney did not write comedies, if we exclude his "Lady of the May" from that title, is immaterial. The poet only says that Nature had made him to write comedies-"to mock herself with kindly counter under mimic shade."