as a whole,
of what had been as yet produced in England as poetry, in spite of the
widespread passion for poetry. The specimens which they quote and praise
are mostly grotesque to the last degree. Webbe improves some gracefully
flowing lines of Spenser's into the most portentous Sapphics; and
Puttenham squeezes compositions into the shapes of triangles, eggs, and
pilasters. Gabriel Harvey is accused by his tormentor, Nash, of doing
the same, "of having writ verse in all kinds, as in form of a pair of
gloves, a dozen of points, a pair of spectacles, a two-hand sword, a
poynado, a colossus, a pyramid, a painter's easel, a market cross, a
trumpet, an anchor, a pair of pot-hooks." Puttenham's Art of Poetry,
with its books, one on Proportion, the other on Ornament, might be
compared to an Art of War, of which one book treated of barrack drill,
and the other of busbies, sabretasches, and different forms of
epaulettes and feathers. These writers do not want good sense or the
power to make a good remark. But the stuff and material for good
criticism, the strong and deep poetry, which makes such criticisms as
theirs seem so absurd, had not yet appeared.

A change was at hand; and the suddenness of it is one of the most
astonishing things in literary history. The ten years from 1580 to 1590
present a set of critical essays, giving a picture of English poetry of
which, though there are gleams of a better hope, and praise is specially
bestowed on a "new poet," the general character is feebleness, fantastic
absurdity, affectation and bad taste. Force, and passion, and simple
truth, and powerful thoughts of the world and man, are rare; and
poetical reformers appear maundering about miserable attempts at English
hexameters and sapphics. What was to be looked for from all that? Who
could suppose what was preparing under it all? But the dawn was come.
The next ten years, from 1590 to 1600, not only saw the _Faery Queen_,
but they were the years of the birth of the English Drama. Compare the
idea which we get of English poetry from Philip Sidney's Defense in
1581, and Puttenham's treatise in 1589, I do not say with Shakespere,
but with Lamb's selections from the Dramatic Poets, many of them unknown
names to the majority of modern readers; and we see at once what a bound
English poetry has made; we see that a new spring time of power and
purpose in poetical thought has opened; new and original forms have
sprung to life of poetical grandeu